This is a special post for quick takes by Kaj_Sotala. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Similar to other people's shortform feeds, short stuff that people on LW might be interested in, but which doesn't feel like it's worth a separate post. (Will probably be mostly cross-posted from my Facebook wall.)
Fun use case for LLMs: ask them to edit articles that have interesting content but where the author has an annoying tone.
I linked somebody to an article that I thought was interesting but they found the author insufferable. I tried giving the first two paragraphs of the article to Claude together with the prompt "could you edit this excerpt so that it keeps the factual content, analysis and general writing style, but tones down the author's condescending attitude", it mostly just needed to tweak a few words and the whole vibe became completely different.
Personally I don't really care about writers being insufferable, my brain is like *shrug* and filters out their condescension and then I don't even notice it before I link their writing to someone and that someone points it out. But maybe this'd be helpful for anyone who's more bothered!
I'm a bit reluctant to directly link to the article and have the author see that "hey your essay is being used as an example of something insufferable that needs to have an LLM edit it" if they check their referrer logs, but here were the original two paragraphs of the article I tested this on (changed sentences bolded):
[...]
And here was Claude's rewrite:
[...]
1rsaarelm
The "All of these questions are deeply stupid" bit is what made me like the article and consider it worth reading, so mileage may vary if you smooth out all the stuff like that.
Similar to other people's shortform feeds, short stuff that people on LW might be interested in, but which doesn't feel like it's worth a separate post. (Will probably be mostly cross-posted from my Facebook wall.)