This is a special post for quick takes by Cole Wyeth. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I want an option to filter for writing with zero LLM influence.
I do not trust LLMs and I am not sure how I feel about LLM / human collaboration. As systems become more powerful, I am worried that they may become a serious epistemic hazard, up to and including actually hacking my brain. I would like to be able to protect myself from this aggressively.
For that reason, I think that the current LW policy on LLM usage is insufficient. Every post that uses an LLM in any part of its production process whatsover should be flagged as such. Personally, I am currently willing to accept some LLM usage upstream of the writing I read and I would not routinely filter such posts out of my feed, but I would like the option to do so (which I would occasionally use as a sanity check) very aggressively and with no exceptions. Basically, an off-switch.
I would also like to be able to filter out any writing of which even a single word is LLM generated (except perhaps parenthetically). I think I would use this option routinely, though perhaps I would also like to exempt specific users (e.g. authors I have followed). But this softer option should allow consultation with LLMs, experiments with LLMs, etc.
I consider it epistemic violence that I occasionally discover, after the fact, that an LLM was used extensively in the writing process of a post. EDIT: I think "epistemic violence" was not quite the right term, as discussed in comments.
Interestingly, I recently asked Opus to read through my writing on the internet to point out basic places where I was wrong. Using the "epistemic violence" description was the only example it found that I agreed with - reflecting on this conversation, I think I was indeed making the non-central fallacy.
It's not obvious. What makes physical violence bad is that it's violence, and the badness of violence is in principle separate from the mechanism by which it's delivered. What's worse:
* Beating someone up in a way that leads to a month-long recovery process and might lead to some permanent injury
* Giving them a drug that leads to a month-long state of confusion and might lead to some permanent cognitive impairments or other negative results due to confused decision-making?
* Emotionally and financially abusing them for a month in a way that might also lead to lasting psychic scars?
* Jailing them for a month for a crime they didn't commit, leaving them with a criminal record that may impact future career opportunities?
* Introducing lemons into the market, degrading the efficiency of coordination (this might be a way of describing the cultural tumult that is underway as a result of LLM outputs being presented as human writing and LLM-generated images as being real photos).
The answer really is not obvious to me.
When we're introducing a new term due to introduction of a new technology, we need to be careful about how we map old terms onto that new phenomenon.
4DirectedEvolution
Violence is a very loaded term, and calling use of LLMs for writing "epistemic violence" is a meme whose spread I resist absent explicit justification. How would you distinguish "epistemic violence" from an "epistemic pet peeve" or "epistemic risk?" Either of the latter seem to me obviously apt.