This brings to mind what I think is a great description of the process LLMs exert on prose: sanding.
It's an algorithmic trend towards the median, thus they are sanding down your words until they're a smooth average of their approximate neighbors.
In some very extreme cases, such as in the Red Cross or reformist organizations, your job looks very clear, direct, and “soulful”. You’re directly helping desperate people. But why have people gotten into that situation? What is the downstream effect of having you helping them. It’s profit. It’s always profit. You’re salvaging humanity for parts to be bought and sold again. It doesn’t make a dishonest work. It’s just equally soulless.
Truly feat of semantic legerdemain
As dark as it may seem to strip romantism out of which you call humanity, not only there isn’t a just salary for those who bear the weight of the machine, but also there’s isn’t even a salary per se.
If for you humanity is just doing seemingly nice guy work without question, call me a monster.
I'm not actually sure what you mean by this, so I can't really assess its truthiness
> not only there isn’t a just salary for those who bear the weight of the machine, but also there’s isn’t even a salary per se.
Or this - what do you mean?
>If for you humanity is just doing seemingly nice guy work without question, call me a monster.
Not even clear what you mean by this either.
Charity work can bring momentary fulfillment to a person. I’m not reducing humanity by situating it within the machine. You even have the right to reject the material proposition that charity work is a piece that composes the totality of the machine. But eventually all truth will be self evident, so let’s leave it to the reader.
Your original assertion was that ‘ you’re only there as long as the use values you create can be exchanged in the market for a profit.’
When I suggested that non-profit or public sector jobs could certainly have soul, your responses were pretty incomprehensible.
Can you explain your point clearly and succinctly?
It's certainly a way of thinking, I suppose
But if the NHS pays me to carry out hip replacement surgery - funded from tax revenue, but free to the patient, it's bad?
But then, the writing is also never great. I've tried a couple of times to get it to write in the style of a famous author, sometimes pasting in some example text to model the output on, but it never sounds right.
People have a distinct voice when they write, including (perhaps even especially) those without formal training in writing. That this voice is grating to the eyes of a well educated reader is a feature that says as much about the reader as it does about the writer.
Funnily enough, professional writers have long recognised this, as is shown by the never-ending list of authors who tried to capture certain linguistic styles in their work, particularly in American literature.
There are situations where you may want this class marker to be erased, because being associated with a certain social class can have negative impact on your social prospects. But it remains that something is being lost in the process, and that something is the personality and identity of the writer.
Which is the real issue, we’re flooding channels not designed for such low effort submissions. AI slop is just SPAM in a different context.
Of course I’ve had arguments where people praise AI output then I’ve literally pointed out dozens of mistakes and they just kind of shrug saying it’s not important. So I acknowledge people judge writing very differently than I do. It just feels weird when I’d give something a 15% and someone else would happily slap on a B+.
(ordered from best to worst)
1. Author using AI well
2. Author not using AI
3. Author using AI poorly
With the gap between 1 and 2 being driven by the underlying quality of the writer and how well they use AI. A really good writer sees marginal improvements and a really poor one can see vast improvements.
But the critical point is that you need to stay in control. And a lot of people just delegate the entire process to an LLM: "here's a thought I had, write a blog post about it", "write a design doc for a system that does X", "write a book about how AI changed my life". And then they ship it and then outsource the process of making sense of the output and catching errors to others.
It also results in the creation of content that, frankly, shouldn't exist because it has no reason to exist. The number of online content that doesn't say anything at all has absolutely exploded in the past 2-3 years. Including a lot of LLM-generated think pieces about LLMs that grace the hallways of HN.
It may write “objectively better”, but the very distinct feel of all AI generated prose makes it immediately recognizable as artificial and unbearable as a result.
Even poor writers write with character. My dad misspells every 4th word when he texts me, but it’s unmistakably his voice. Endearingly so.
I would push back with passion that AI writes “legitimately” better, as it has no character except the smoothed mean of all internet voices. The millennial gray of prose.
Similar thing happens when something is designed by a committee. Good for an average use, but not really great for anything specific.
I should have added "usually". On average when something is designed by a committee the effect is like this, but now always. You don't have to take my word for it [1]. Most of the time means that kind of outcome is not always guaranteed and the result can be good in some cases. In same way, an AI generated content can also sometimes sound like it has character.
In the sense that it looks coherent and incorporates a lot of lessons learned over the decades of functional programming.
Design by committee usually fails either by being boring or by becoming a Frankenstein monster made of various contradictory opinions of committee members. Neither is the case with Haskell.
And the only bad design decision that I know of, namely to not make Monad derived from Applicative, was corrected in a future release.
He lacks (or lost thru disuse) technical expertise on the subject, so he uses more and more fuzzy words, leaky analogies, buzzwords.
This maybe why AI generated content has so much success among leaders and politicians.
Be careful of this kind of thinking, it's very satisfying but doesn't help you understand the world.
The edges are where interesting stuff happens. The boring part can be made more efficient. I don’t need to type boring emails, people who can’t articulate well will be elevated.
It’s the efficient popularization of the boring stuff. Not much else.
I think that boring emails should not be written. What kind of boring emails do you NEED to be written, but not WANT to write? Those are exactly the kind of email that SHOULD NOT be passed through an LLM.
If you need to say yes/no. You don't want to take the whole email conversation and let LLM generate a story about why you said yes/no.
If you want to apply for a leave, just make it optimal "Hi <X>, I want to take leave from Y to Z. Thanks". You don't want to create 2 pages of justification for why you want to take this leave to see your family and friends.
In fact, for every LLM output, I want to see the input instead. What did they have in mind? If I have the input, I can ask LLM to generate 1 million outputs if I really want to read an elaboration. The input is what matters.
If I have the input, I can always generate an output. If I have the output, I don't know what was the input (i.e. the original intention).
But it's the jagged edges, the unorthodox and surprising prickly bits, that tear open a hole in the inattention of your reader, that actually gets your ideas into their heads.