G Wood's Shortform

G Wood

This is a special post for quick takes by G Wood. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Why is LLM use in writing even bad? You still own the words you write? Is this just a status thing?

You still own the words you write?

Writing is an exercise in developing and crafting your thoughts. Outsourcing the job is missing the point.

You don't own the LLM's words. You can put your name to them, but if you didn't write them yourself, it's all too easy to just nod along and think, yes, that's exactly what I meant!, even if they make no sense. It's like reading the answers to the questions in a textbook and thinking, yes, of course that's the answer, except that LLMs don't give any assurance that what they wrote means anything.

"In glorious future, ... (read more)

13Viliam5mo

From my perspective, LLM writing has these disadvantages: * After reading tons of text during my lifetime I have already developed fast heuristics to guess the quality of thoughts from the quality of text. LLM destroys these heuristics, because it can attach any style to any content. So even if the content is obviously stupid, it will take me more time of careful reading to realize that. And the base rates of good writing are low, so this makes reading "possibly good, but most likely bad" text much more costly. * LLM are less coherent than humans with regards to quality of thought (but more coherent at style). For example, if you read a scientific text, either it is entirely reasonable, or it is entirely written by a crackpot. An LLM can fluently switch from one to another. This again requires much more careful reading, because the fact that the 90% of text you have already checked is meaningful does not make a strong guarantee that the remaining 10% isn't utterly insane. It's as if you hired 10 different people to write 10% of the article each, and 9 of them are experts and 1 is a crackpot; and then you give me the result to review, and ask why I am mad at you for wasting my time. * LLMs seem to write much longer text than necessary to express a thought, again wasting reader's time. All these have the same thing in common: when you read texts from people you don't know, you necessarily spend some time reading text that in hindsight you with you haven't read, only to find the few texts that are worth it. The LLMs make the ratio of the time you spend reading bad vs good texts dramatically worse. It's not about making your text worse -- it's about making it difficult to distinguish from a lot of other text that is bad, so I have no way to get to your text other then going through the entire pile of crap. It's not personal; I simply reject the entire pile that your text is in. (And of top of that, there is the specific LLM style that some people find annoying. P

4cubefox5mo

Related to coherence: humans usually have an "agenda" when writing an article, they want to expess something, some intention or world-view, while LLMs, prompted to write an article, don't have an agenda. They only want to satisfy the prompt. They are usually happy to write some bullshit if that fulfills the prompt. When reading something, we automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) try to infer the agenda behind the text, but in the case of bullshit text there is no agenda. There is nobody who would defend the text when challenged, there is nobody who is intellectually responsible.