5 ms·

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better

by dynm 11d ago

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't. (The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)

visarga 11d ago
Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.
- deleted 11d ago
  [deleted]
masswerk 11d ago
I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well. There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader. And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
- anon84873628 11d ago
  [dead]
- zahlman 10d ago
  > There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader. Every day I get more depressed thinking of what's happened to the supply of competent readers.
IshKebab 11d ago
> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now: 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself. 2. The prose style is horrible to read. If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)
- CuriouslyC 11d ago
  > 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself. You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
  - fn-mote 11d ago
    Alternative uses for reading: 1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written. 2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation. 3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)
    - mitxela 10d ago
      If some Nerds for Nginx article is AI-written, it's probably subtly wrong. How does this influence your opinion of it?
Sharlin 11d ago
I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effort.
- riskable 11d ago
  It's because they view the LLM's output as "their thoughts." They told the LLM (via the prompt) what to do—often with loads of run-on sentences and long trains-of-thought. From their perspective, the LLM is just acting as a translation tool, saving them the trouble of having to think (about grammar, ideal wording, or even the order in which their thoughts should be presented). They treat it as "just another tool" to improve efficiency. Like using a drill instead of a screwdriver. Then there's people who are so lazy they give LLMs instructions like, "write a LinkedIn post about how AI is changing the future of work for thumbnail consultants." That's when it moves from "translating your thoughts" to "writing for you." I think the issue is that it can be hard to tell the difference. We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.
  - Sharlin 11d ago
    Yes. If someone tells an author to write a novel based on a vague stream-of-consciousness premise or rough plot idea, that doesn’t make them even a co-author.
  - asdff 10d ago
    It is really no different than you telling your ghost writer what you want the book to be generally about.
  - Mr_Minderbinder 10d ago
    > We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases. Machine assisted versus machine delegated authorship?
- 10d ago
tdeck 11d ago
I suppose using LLMs to write is like not wiping your ass, and using LLMs that are bad at writing is like not wiping your ass and wearing a T-shirt that says "Wiping is for losers." I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.
andy99 11d ago
This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified. LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
- p-e-w 11d ago
  > An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.
  - AngryData 10d ago
    You are right, writing by AI is far less trustworthy or reliable than copy and pasting wikipedia.
  - arjie 10d ago
    Absolutely agree. A modern agent is a sophisticated tool that can link multiple sources together to create a coherent piece of information hyper-specified for an audience. However, if humans have outlines that are expandable by LLMs it makes the most sense to do that as late as possible. I don’t like reading AI writing either but I’m sure that’s a transitory period. Single prompt text expansions are unlikely to be useful because they’re late-bindable. You could give the original to me and I might be able to understand better. But a series of steering prompts with various sources brought in is a different story. At that point it’s just a question of whether the agent can put together good information and their current inability to do so is unlikely to mean an inherent problem. Some kind of UI affordance for this might help: with the agent emitting tags that allow for auto-folding or expansion in a way that allows both concise text and exposition when required by the reader. Mechanical sympathy, but for code executing on a human: good old human sympathy if you will
layer8 11d ago
People shouldn’t pass off largely unedited AI writing as their own, but I’d much rather live in a world where that writing would be of high quality in both form and content, than in the world we live now. In that sense, lack of disclosure is the lesser evil.
sebzim4500 11d ago
Personally, I'd be fine with LLM writing if it wasn't so unpleasant to read
- snk 10d ago
  When I can get an LLM to write like Isaac Asimov, I'll consider some artificial literary experiments; there were books I wanted him to have written that he did not get around to, quitting at 458.
supriyo-biswas 11d ago
> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing, regardless of how good the LLMs get good at writing.
- jonahx 10d ago
  I don't think it would be fine. Someone's actual writing (or talking) is a rich stream of information about who they are, their motives, their preferences, modes of persuasion, and so much more. Undetectable LLM writing essentially allows someone to assume another person's identity. That is not good for anyone except the person trying to pull off a "scam" of some sort, in the broadest sense of that term. It's bad for everyone else, and for society at large.
  - snk 10d ago
    Good for privacy and productivity.
    - jonahx 10d ago
      Privacy in anonymous posts is a legitimate use. "Productivity" is not. It's only good for fake productivity. The consumers of the product will almost always be better off with you disclosing what the LLM did, and what you did.
manlymuppet 11d ago
I agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs. The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology. I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.
- zahlman 10d ago
  I mean, these things can be tested. Maybe some people really are gifted at discerning AI work, and of course there's no accounting for taste. But the former is subject to objective evaluation, and the latter should at least be somewhat expressible.
- WCSTombs 10d ago
  I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense. In other words, the three questions of: - is the technology good? - does it produce aesthetically good outputs? - do I like it and want to engage with it? are all pretty independent.
  - manlymuppet 9d ago
    I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean. > I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense. You're right that my problem is people conflating two things, but I have no issue with how people interpret the "aesthetic outputs" as you put it. The part I'm having trouble with is the obligation you imply, that we have to "like something just because it's 'pretty' or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense." I for one, think that LLM art looks terrible--the output is something I often dislike aesthetically. This is a matter of taste, and similar to the question of "do I like it and want to engage with it", you're free to make your own judgements here. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer with aesthetics. However, with the questions of "do I like the technology" and "has the technology advanced", whereas one is similarly a matter of taste, the question of "has the technology advanced" is one that can be answered objectively. Of course it matters what your trying to measure, but take realism for example--something that AI image labs often try to perfect. The fact that the AI labs have gotten drastically better at generating realistic content is undeniable. While it's up to you if this matters, whether realism has advanced can objectively answered yes or no, without bringing taste into things. I am making no claims here concerning the "high aesthetic value in some abstract sense". I don't think such an objective value of aesthetics exists. Does this clear things up?
SecretDreams 11d ago
Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.
- kisper 11d ago
  I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I struggle with how to reconcile it with my use of these tools. My use LLMs is precisely because I can never hope to express myself clearly. I have many fuzzy, disparate thoughts and it was a struggle to express them at all before this time in which I can do a long rambling voice transcription (absent of social pressures) and continue doing the same throughout the exploration and drafting processes. In my view, I give them a seed or a morbidly obese skeleton and LLMs take that into something a lot more coherent for myself and for others. I was passive before in my life, now I’m engaging. As two concrete examples: I never would have sent an email to my city regarding snow removal last winter when their failure to remove snow from the only sidewalk going over the interstate. I never would have pulled together my previous coursework and e-mails to send to my current professors in a petition for transfer-credit equivalency when it became clear that my deteriorating health would not allow me to finish the semester as-is. I never would have remembered all the concerns that I want to bring up at medical appointments. That is not to say these things were ever impossible, there are coping strategies available, and whatnot, but I’m in my late 30’s; I know what I did and not get done in the last 10 years, and “AI”-tooling/environments have helped me express my dreams and passions and concerns, etc., etc., etc. over the past years in a way that was simply not practically available to me, with a new capacity that I simply could not previously hope to match due to limited and fragmented time,attention, and energy. While I was hand-typing this on my keyboard, I could have instead been talking, reviewing, redrafting in spurts as I go about my morning, instead of a solid 45 minutes at max effort on my own part, as I did here (and I don’t feel that I conveyed myself half-as-well here as I could have achieved at much less cost to my energy, etc. by using an LLM). I do take offense when people do not review and vouch for things written on their behalf by LLMs. How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?
stronglikedan 11d ago
I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention. I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.
- 27183 11d ago
  I don't really care about the tool per se, but if I'm reading some LLM output you give me its utility is awfully limited if you don't also supply the prompt. That's what I'd like to see normalized: Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text. Without the prompt I cannot discern what you were trying to do, because the LLM output is basically devoid of any coherent voice. Whether it's code, prose, or pictures don't bother sending it to me unless you also include the prompt text. [edit] I suspect the fact that people are often reticent to share their prompts says quite a lot about how and why they're using an LLM.
  - lacunary 10d ago
    it's often not a single prompt but a tree or rooted DAG of many prompts, with the root node being the final prompt. the prompts on interior nodes might not make much sense without the intermediate responses as well. how would you like this communicated?
    - 27183 10d ago
      Just a chat log would be acceptable. Like an IRC channel log or slack channel history. It would be even better if, say in the case of code, there was a durable mapping between prompts and commits, that way I could follow the prompts linearly and review every commit associated with that prompt. For other forms of output (prose, pictures, whatever) this would also be useful to be able to see the history of its development.
deleted 11d ago
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zahlman 10d ago
> If LLMs get better at writing They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human. > It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't. Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.
throwaway613746 10d ago
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aDyslecticCrow 10d ago
> You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing. That's not how i read the article. The author more-so claims that the proof of effort by a human was large part of the credibility to the writing; Proof that the author of the text has thought it through and come to their convulsions though effort and reflection, and spent effort articulating that into words they expect other humans to find insightful. If i see LLM signs; did the author just rephrase with AI model or did a AI model content farm produce the whole post based on the prompt "write a inspiring linked-in post"? Disclosure of LLM use is simply the author addressing the concern and building a case for why the article is worth reading.
GPerson 10d ago
I just feel like technology companies keep proving over and over that they are more than capable of forcing us into new behaviors regardless of our actual preferences. Once the domination is complete nobody will know what was lost in the process anyway.
- tehjoker 10d ago
  It’s deeper than that, the people running these companies have their goal as human extinction due to a quasi religious mania (TESCREAL). I wish I were joking. Look it up.
8bitsrule 10d ago
>using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? 'Without disclosure' is about taking credit for work that isn't yours. WP defines 'ghostwriter' as: "a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author." Anyone could choose to go through life relying on a reputation manufactured from many lies. They might want to think about how hard that reputation will hit the ground, if it does.
Forgeties79 10d ago
>I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." That’s not the argument. The argument is “LLM’s tend to write the same way all the time regardless of who prompted it.” You can't call it “your writing” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s. Use an LLM to assist? Cool, go ahead. Prompt, ctrl-c, ctrl-v? Go fuck yourself. I can’t be expected to put more effort into figuring out your take than you out into communicating your take to me.

by dynm 11d ago

visarga 11d ago

Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.

deleted 11d ago
[deleted]

masswerk 11d ago

I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well. There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader. And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.

anon84873628 11d ago
[dead]
zahlman 10d ago
> There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader. Every day I get more depressed thinking of what's happened to the supply of competent readers.

IshKebab 11d ago

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now: 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself. 2. The prose style is horrible to read. If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)

CuriouslyC 11d ago
> 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself. You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
- fn-mote 11d ago
  Alternative uses for reading: 1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written. 2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation. 3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)
  - mitxela 10d ago
    If some Nerds for Nginx article is AI-written, it's probably subtly wrong. How does this influence your opinion of it?

Sharlin 11d ago

I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effort.

riskable 11d ago
It's because they view the LLM's output as "their thoughts." They told the LLM (via the prompt) what to do—often with loads of run-on sentences and long trains-of-thought. From their perspective, the LLM is just acting as a translation tool, saving them the trouble of having to think (about grammar, ideal wording, or even the order in which their thoughts should be presented). They treat it as "just another tool" to improve efficiency. Like using a drill instead of a screwdriver. Then there's people who are so lazy they give LLMs instructions like, "write a LinkedIn post about how AI is changing the future of work for thumbnail consultants." That's when it moves from "translating your thoughts" to "writing for you." I think the issue is that it can be hard to tell the difference. We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.
- Sharlin 11d ago
  Yes. If someone tells an author to write a novel based on a vague stream-of-consciousness premise or rough plot idea, that doesn’t make them even a co-author.
- asdff 10d ago
  It is really no different than you telling your ghost writer what you want the book to be generally about.
- Mr_Minderbinder 10d ago
  > We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases. Machine assisted versus machine delegated authorship?
10d ago

tdeck 11d ago

I suppose using LLMs to write is like not wiping your ass, and using LLMs that are bad at writing is like not wiping your ass and wearing a T-shirt that says "Wiping is for losers." I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.

andy99 11d ago

This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified. LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.

p-e-w 11d ago
> An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.
- AngryData 10d ago
  You are right, writing by AI is far less trustworthy or reliable than copy and pasting wikipedia.
- arjie 10d ago
  Absolutely agree. A modern agent is a sophisticated tool that can link multiple sources together to create a coherent piece of information hyper-specified for an audience. However, if humans have outlines that are expandable by LLMs it makes the most sense to do that as late as possible. I don’t like reading AI writing either but I’m sure that’s a transitory period. Single prompt text expansions are unlikely to be useful because they’re late-bindable. You could give the original to me and I might be able to understand better. But a series of steering prompts with various sources brought in is a different story. At that point it’s just a question of whether the agent can put together good information and their current inability to do so is unlikely to mean an inherent problem. Some kind of UI affordance for this might help: with the agent emitting tags that allow for auto-folding or expansion in a way that allows both concise text and exposition when required by the reader. Mechanical sympathy, but for code executing on a human: good old human sympathy if you will

layer8 11d ago

People shouldn’t pass off largely unedited AI writing as their own, but I’d much rather live in a world where that writing would be of high quality in both form and content, than in the world we live now. In that sense, lack of disclosure is the lesser evil.

sebzim4500 11d ago

Personally, I'd be fine with LLM writing if it wasn't so unpleasant to read

snk 10d ago
When I can get an LLM to write like Isaac Asimov, I'll consider some artificial literary experiments; there were books I wanted him to have written that he did not get around to, quitting at 458.

supriyo-biswas 11d ago

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing, regardless of how good the LLMs get good at writing.

jonahx 10d ago
I don't think it would be fine. Someone's actual writing (or talking) is a rich stream of information about who they are, their motives, their preferences, modes of persuasion, and so much more. Undetectable LLM writing essentially allows someone to assume another person's identity. That is not good for anyone except the person trying to pull off a "scam" of some sort, in the broadest sense of that term. It's bad for everyone else, and for society at large.
- snk 10d ago
  Good for privacy and productivity.
  - jonahx 10d ago
    Privacy in anonymous posts is a legitimate use. "Productivity" is not. It's only good for fake productivity. The consumers of the product will almost always be better off with you disclosing what the LLM did, and what you did.

manlymuppet 11d ago

I agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs. The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology. I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.

zahlman 10d ago
I mean, these things can be tested. Maybe some people really are gifted at discerning AI work, and of course there's no accounting for taste. But the former is subject to objective evaluation, and the latter should at least be somewhat expressible.
WCSTombs 10d ago
I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense. In other words, the three questions of: - is the technology good? - does it produce aesthetically good outputs? - do I like it and want to engage with it? are all pretty independent.
- manlymuppet 9d ago
  I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean. > I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense. You're right that my problem is people conflating two things, but I have no issue with how people interpret the "aesthetic outputs" as you put it. The part I'm having trouble with is the obligation you imply, that we have to "like something just because it's 'pretty' or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense." I for one, think that LLM art looks terrible--the output is something I often dislike aesthetically. This is a matter of taste, and similar to the question of "do I like it and want to engage with it", you're free to make your own judgements here. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer with aesthetics. However, with the questions of "do I like the technology" and "has the technology advanced", whereas one is similarly a matter of taste, the question of "has the technology advanced" is one that can be answered objectively. Of course it matters what your trying to measure, but take realism for example--something that AI image labs often try to perfect. The fact that the AI labs have gotten drastically better at generating realistic content is undeniable. While it's up to you if this matters, whether realism has advanced can objectively answered yes or no, without bringing taste into things. I am making no claims here concerning the "high aesthetic value in some abstract sense". I don't think such an objective value of aesthetics exists. Does this clear things up?

SecretDreams 11d ago

Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.

kisper 11d ago
I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I struggle with how to reconcile it with my use of these tools. My use LLMs is precisely because I can never hope to express myself clearly. I have many fuzzy, disparate thoughts and it was a struggle to express them at all before this time in which I can do a long rambling voice transcription (absent of social pressures) and continue doing the same throughout the exploration and drafting processes. In my view, I give them a seed or a morbidly obese skeleton and LLMs take that into something a lot more coherent for myself and for others. I was passive before in my life, now I’m engaging. As two concrete examples: I never would have sent an email to my city regarding snow removal last winter when their failure to remove snow from the only sidewalk going over the interstate. I never would have pulled together my previous coursework and e-mails to send to my current professors in a petition for transfer-credit equivalency when it became clear that my deteriorating health would not allow me to finish the semester as-is. I never would have remembered all the concerns that I want to bring up at medical appointments. That is not to say these things were ever impossible, there are coping strategies available, and whatnot, but I’m in my late 30’s; I know what I did and not get done in the last 10 years, and “AI”-tooling/environments have helped me express my dreams and passions and concerns, etc., etc., etc. over the past years in a way that was simply not practically available to me, with a new capacity that I simply could not previously hope to match due to limited and fragmented time,attention, and energy. While I was hand-typing this on my keyboard, I could have instead been talking, reviewing, redrafting in spurts as I go about my morning, instead of a solid 45 minutes at max effort on my own part, as I did here (and I don’t feel that I conveyed myself half-as-well here as I could have achieved at much less cost to my energy, etc. by using an LLM). I do take offense when people do not review and vouch for things written on their behalf by LLMs. How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?

stronglikedan 11d ago

I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention. I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.

27183 11d ago
I don't really care about the tool per se, but if I'm reading some LLM output you give me its utility is awfully limited if you don't also supply the prompt. That's what I'd like to see normalized: Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text. Without the prompt I cannot discern what you were trying to do, because the LLM output is basically devoid of any coherent voice. Whether it's code, prose, or pictures don't bother sending it to me unless you also include the prompt text. [edit] I suspect the fact that people are often reticent to share their prompts says quite a lot about how and why they're using an LLM.
- lacunary 10d ago
  it's often not a single prompt but a tree or rooted DAG of many prompts, with the root node being the final prompt. the prompts on interior nodes might not make much sense without the intermediate responses as well. how would you like this communicated?
  - 27183 10d ago
    Just a chat log would be acceptable. Like an IRC channel log or slack channel history. It would be even better if, say in the case of code, there was a durable mapping between prompts and commits, that way I could follow the prompts linearly and review every commit associated with that prompt. For other forms of output (prose, pictures, whatever) this would also be useful to be able to see the history of its development.

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zahlman 10d ago

> If LLMs get better at writing They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human. > It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't. Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.

throwaway613746 10d ago

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aDyslecticCrow 10d ago

> You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing. That's not how i read the article. The author more-so claims that the proof of effort by a human was large part of the credibility to the writing; Proof that the author of the text has thought it through and come to their convulsions though effort and reflection, and spent effort articulating that into words they expect other humans to find insightful. If i see LLM signs; did the author just rephrase with AI model or did a AI model content farm produce the whole post based on the prompt "write a inspiring linked-in post"? Disclosure of LLM use is simply the author addressing the concern and building a case for why the article is worth reading.

GPerson 10d ago

I just feel like technology companies keep proving over and over that they are more than capable of forcing us into new behaviors regardless of our actual preferences. Once the domination is complete nobody will know what was lost in the process anyway.

tehjoker 10d ago
It’s deeper than that, the people running these companies have their goal as human extinction due to a quasi religious mania (TESCREAL). I wish I were joking. Look it up.

8bitsrule 10d ago

>using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? 'Without disclosure' is about taking credit for work that isn't yours. WP defines 'ghostwriter' as: "a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author." Anyone could choose to go through life relying on a reputation manufactured from many lies. They might want to think about how hard that reputation will hit the ground, if it does.

Forgeties79 10d ago

>I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." That’s not the argument. The argument is “LLM’s tend to write the same way all the time regardless of who prompted it.” You can't call it “your writing” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s. Use an LLM to assist? Cool, go ahead. Prompt, ctrl-c, ctrl-v? Go fuck yourself. I can’t be expected to put more effort into figuring out your take than you out into communicating your take to me.