5 ms·
>I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from
by Imnimo 1mo ago
>I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.
Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from Claude? Is he under the impression that T=0 produces the "best" writing?
This entire article just seems so detached from the basics of how LLMs work.
- Gigachad 1mo agoI think the author is just mad people will be able to detect and filter out their AI slop writing in the future.
- dofm 1mo agoThis is not it, no. He is not using AI and it is not I think remotely in his nature to surrender that control. He is engaging with this on principle. Again I am not sure I agree with him, but then it’s a hypothetical because I am not going to get an LLM to write for me either.
- beering 1mo agoWell, it cant be that he is super worried on behalf of people who publish AI slop. That’s not a credible motivation. In fact, he complained a lot about the new ChatGPT app so I can’t believe your claim that he is not using AI. Seems like he really likes to use LLMs and is worried that quality will be degraded. But he will never demonstrate such degradation scientifically, we don’t have anecdotes even.
- dofm 1mo agoHis complaint about the ChatGPT app is that it’s a shitty non-Mac-ish Mac app. Complaining about shitty non-Mac-ish Mac apps to people who hate shitty non-Mac-ish Mac apps is more or less how he became a full time writer.
- NitpickLawyer 1mo ago> He is not using AI That's ... even worse? So we're all here in the comments trying to figure out what the author means, and what their overall point is, while clearly they don't even use the damn thing? Oof... What a waste of time for everyone involved.
- dofm 1mo agoWhy? I really don't understand this. Why can't a tech writer take a deep but neutral intellectual interest in something? Isn't it important that some do? Do people have to be stakeholders or clearly on one given team, pro- or anti-, for their opinion to matter? Is it that tribal? It seems fully logical to me that someone who writes for a living (who, as it happens, developed the very markup language LLMs use for everything) should be invested in understanding the automatic plagiarism and word calculating machine from an intellectually honest position. I personally am pretty severely big-two-AI-firms, increasingly anti-big-tech, but I am learning and researching uses of LLMs because for myself I really need to understand how to use them in an intellectually and (as far as is possible) ethically sound way. Learning because as a boring old freelance programmer I have to; foolish to pretend otherwise. So I completely understand his position — that the AI industry is hot air and crooked and scammy and weird, and some of the people involved genuinely rather dark-sided, but the technology exists and if it hints at threatening your livelihood, you need to understand it. From reading his work for the best part of twenty years or so (and emailing him intermittently over that time) it would seem to me that he's a lot less bearish on the tech industry than me, and a lot less fond of the EU than I am; he's more optimistic than I am. But he writes because he has to write. I should think that would make him highly invested in understanding what LLMs do.
- breezybottom 1mo agoIf he writes then he should have no investment in LLMs. Humans have been able to write for thousands of years.
- dofm 1mo agoYou've somewhat mischaracterised what I have said. I suggested he as a tech writer has reason to be invested in understanding how they work. It's not really a sustainable position to not understand, is it?
- kalleboo 1mo agoGruber just hates any kind of EU regulation of US tech companies ever since they started making what he calls "product decisions" for Apple.
- jorisw 1mo agoAs an EU citizen and user of Apple products, I feel the same
- kalleboo 1mo agoWe're all entitled to our opinions, but then just say that, don't go to great lengths to misunderstand and justify technology that you don't even use yourself to justify why the regulation is bad, just say "I think regulation is fundamentally bad".
- jorisw 1mo agoI've never seen Gruber say that
- cryptonector 1mo agoPeople already are, and do.
- llm_nerd 1mo agoGruber has long been a talented, excellent writer. I hugely doubt he uses AI at all, nor does he plan to. His first take on this situation was cutely naive, thinking they were going to inject secret hidden unicode characters. But ultimately he has a massive hate on for the EU -- they were mean to Apple once -- and it comes out in any topic that overlaps.
- Marsymars 1mo ago> Gruber has long been a talented, excellent writer. I hugely doubt he uses AI at all, nor does he plan to. He notes in various other posts that he uses AI/LLMs and chatbots quite extensively. (I don't recall what for exactly, but not for writing his pieces.)
- llm_nerd 1mo agoGood point, and I should have been clearer that I don't think he uses or will use it for writing. He's far too skilled of a writer to need it, and at best it would be a handicap.
- jorisw 1mo agoI don't think you know the author very well
- dofm 1mo ago> Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from Claude? Is he under the impression that T=0 produces the "best" writing? No and no. I am not sure I agree with his point but I know he is not ill-informed on either of these points, because I mentioned them to him a couple of days ago.
- brookst 1mo agoIt didn’t take, apparently.
- dofm 1mo agoIt’s fully possible I didn’t explain it very well in the first place, but he is making a wider point. The point I made (quite briefly) is that watermarking is only feasible because for good writing it is necessary to use T>0, or the writing will never explore a more creative choice, and that at T=0 you don’t even need a watermark to spot LLM-generated text. The point he is making is consistent with this, isn’t it? Either you allow temperature to drive creativity, consistently in a way that can be influenced and analysed, or you adulterate that process for the purposes of meeting a corporate/legal directive, in a way that is proprietary and obscure. These are ethically distinct approaches, and since he disagrees with the EU objective he comes down on one side I guess. Me, I don’t care about the hypothetical enough. Not least because I think Claude writes depressingly badly and I doubt any steganographic change will enrage me less.
- inigyou 1mo agoWhat does he think of all the other adulterations of LLMs that already happen?
- beering 1mo agoNo, you are jumping to conclusions about how watermarking works. This is some audiophile thinking that because your RNG is “pure”, you get text with an expansive soundstage or whatever. Intuitively this may be true or false depending on your personal prior but you’d need to show it mathematically. The overall token distribution shouldn’t change and the frequency at which you see the word “load-bearing” will remain the same.
- kccqzy 1mo agoI think it is a common misconception for anyone who hasn’t actually tried implementing a LLM to think that there is a best choice of token at each step and that following every locally best choice will lead to a globally “best” writing. This is intuitive yet wrong and perhaps there is no better way to rid oneself of this misconception other than actually implementing a simple LLM.
- sfink 1mo agoThis is a reductionist counterargument. Sure, the passage you quoted does sound like he's being equally reductionist. But the underlying point does not depend on T=0. You could state it as saying that instead of minimizing error (maximizing "writing quality"), you're using some of that error for watermarking and minimizing the rest. Describing it in terms of a word-by-word choice is simpler, but writing quality is dependent on the interplay between words. "The weather today was cold and {grey,overcast}." If the next sentence is "I miss yesterday, when it was {bright,sunny}." then the choice between "grey" and "overcast" is no longer neutral. "grey" and "bright" pair together, as do "overcast" and "sunny". Or if you disagree with my aesthetic sensibilities, consider: The weather today was cold and {grey,gray}. The {color,colour} of the sky matched my {humorless,humourless} mood.