Neil Warren's Shortform

Neil

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Can we have a LessWrong official stance to LLM writing?

The last 2 posts I read contained what I'm ~95% sure is LLM writing, and both times I felt betrayed, annoyed, and desirous to skip ahead.

I would feel saner if there were a "this post was partially AI written" tag authors could add to as a warning. I think an informal standard of courteously warning people could work too, but that requires slow coordination-by-osmosis.

Unrelatedly to my call, and as a personal opinion, I don't think you're adding any value to me if you include even a single paragraph of copy-and-pasted Sonnet 3.7 or GPT 4o content. I will become the joker next time I hear a LessWrong user say "this is fascinating because it not only sheds light onto the profound metamorphosis of X, but also hints at a deeper truth".

Thanks for articulating this – it's genuinely helpful. You've pinpointed a section I found particularly difficult to write.

Specifically, the paragraph explaining the comic's punchline went through maybe ten drafts. I knew why the punchline worked, but kept fumbling the articulation. I ended up in a long back-and-forth with Claude trying to refine the phrasing to be precise and concise, and that sentence is the endpoint. I can see that the process seems to have sanded off the human feel.

As for the "hints at an important truth" line... that phrasing feels ge... (read more)

2the gears to ascension2y

Sounds interesting, I talk to LLMs quite a bit as well, I'm interested in any tricks you've picked up. I put quite a lot of effort into pushing them to be concise and grounded. eg, I think an LLM bot designed by me would only get banned for being an LLM, despite consistently having useful things to say when writing comments - which, relatedly, would probably not happen super often, despite the AI reading a lot of posts and comments - it would be mostly showing up in threads where someone said something that seemed to need a specific kind of asking them for clarification, and I'd be doing prompt design for the goal of making the AI itself be evaluating its few and very short comments against a high bar of postability. I also think a very well designed summarizer prompt would be useful to build directly into the site, mostly because otherwise it's a bunch of work to summarize each post before reading it - I often am frustrated that there isn't a built-in overview of a post, ideally one line on the homepage, a few lines at the top of each post. Posts where the author writes a title which accurately describes post contents and an overview at the top are great but rare(r than I'd prefer they be); the issue is that pasting a post and asking for an overview typically gets awful results. My favorite trick for asking for overviews is "Very heavily prefer direct quotes any time possible." also, call it compression, not summarization, for a few reasons - unsure how long those concepts will be different, but usually what I want is more like the former, in places where the concepts differ. However, given the culture on the site, I currently feel like I'm going to get disapproval for even suggesting this. Eg, [...] There are circumstances where I don't think this is accurate, in ways beyond just "that's a lot of asking, though!" - I would typically want to ask an LLM to help me enumerate a bunch of ways to put something, and then I'd pick the ones that seem promising. I woul

2No77e2y

Sorry for not replying in more detail, but in the meantime it'd be quite interesting to know whether the authors of these posts confirm that at least some parts of them are copy-pasted from LLM output. I don't want to call them out (and I wouldn't have much against it), but I feel like knowing it would be pretty important for this discussion. @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, @Nicholas Andresen you've written the posts linked in the quote. What do you say? (not sure whether the authors are going to get a notification with the tag, but I guess trying doesn't hurt)

Neil Warren's Shortform

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Neil Warren's Shortform

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