Humans just need to adapt their pattern recognition skills. It's a continuous and changing effort. For some, not detecting it is the sign that they need to update their own systems not that the sign is wrong.
For many it's not worth the effort to even try anymore. Particularly when the content of a submission is about LLMs: why worry?
I've picked up Hyperion from the library last week and have been enjoying it so much - reading it and Dan Simmons for the first time and wondering why I waited so long. It reads like literature, food for the brain and soul - like what good science fiction should be.
My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.
I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.
I think it is very fair to say that in the same way that LLM's have given english majors access to programming, LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication.
I'm not shy to admit that LLMs even from 2 years ago could communicate ideas much better than me, especially for a general audience.
It’s not “clear communication” though. The prose that comes out of LLMs is awful - long, vapid paragraphs with distracting tropes. You can ask them to be concise but then they file down all the wrong bits of the sentence and lose meaning. There’s a reason people bother clocking it and complaining about it, it’s *bad*
It’s like everything else that AI can do - looks fine at a glance, or to the inexperienced, but collapses under scrutiny. (By your own admission you’re not a great communicator… how can you tell then?)
> LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication.
A lot of the time, the inability to express an idea clearly hints at some problem with the underlying idea, or in one's conceptualisation of that idea. Writing is a fantastic way to grapple with those issues, and iron out better and clearer iterations of ideas (or one's understanding thereof).
An LLM, on the other hand, will happily spit out a coherent piece of writing defending any nonsense idea you throw at it. Nothing is learnt, nothing is gained from such "writing" (for either the author or the audience).
Recently read a tweet suggesting to ask an llm to defend a position you know to be false. It's quite eye opening. I mean, it shouldn't be, if you did debate club etc. Or know how lawyers and politicians work. But it's quite revealing how it can piece together a good defense, selectively quoting real facts, embuing them with undue weight etc to make the thesis stand quite well.
It's often warping the message or "snapping it to grid", taking off the edge, the unique insight. A lack of clear communication is much more a symptom of unclarity about the intended message, audience, prioritization etc. I don't doubt that you internally have a clear idea but sharing it requires thinking about the intended audience and the diff of their current state of knowledge and doubt and where you want to move their thinking. This is a much bigger part than knowing eloquent vocab and grammar tricks.
It doesn't come naturally to the more introverted type of person who cares about the object level problem and not whatever anyone else may know or doubt, I'll admit this. But slapping LLMs on it is not a great solution.
It had a little text label next to names so you could manually add whatever you want. Recently I've thought about this extension and using it to tag the LLM users, or the humans who tend to pop up to fan the flames or who regularly post thought terminating comments - little tags to remind me to ignore the bots and trolls.
If any AI image generation companies are reading this, I want the image to be in layers which can also be exported, so I can 1) do post processing of my own or 2) arrange for an AI image generation model to process just the layers i specify.
I remember reading about some desert monks who do that and that they had a set routine for every day including a large amount of manual physical work and cooking and cleaning. They were not just isolated in a cave doing nothing but living and working and praying. I seem to recall they were also advised to ignore any visions they had (even if they were good) which seems counter intuitive if one is thinking about stories about spirit quests. But I guess it's very wise.
I imagine the translation to lighthouses would be to ensure that your time there is spent in a good routine of keeping yourself active and to have some training on how to maintain psychological health. Over wintering Antarctic research scientists and astronauts probably also have rigorous routines although they would be in a small community which can regulate mental health.
I'm also reminded of the requirements of people being asked to move to small communities on isolated harsh islands. One would imagine that they would be attractive to people who do well alone, introverts, who work alone and are happy quietly, but they actually want and favour people who like others, need to work with others, who work well in a community and are socially outgoing.
There are a bunch of good documentaries about "Desert Fathers/Christians/Monks/etc." on Youtube about monks from the Coptic Christian Church in the Egyptian Desert.
The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion.
(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)
Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).
The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.
> In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.
> Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
There's a subtle irony of this rule, which is that in order to stay in compliance with this law a savvy Priest tends to weave more sophisticated moral teachings into their Homilies that make it very obvious what or who they are advocating for or against without explicitly naming them.
The phone is a kind of shield for the person holding it above their head. It safely removes them from having to fully engage with what's in front of them.
The camera both removes the person from the scene and also by recording enables the event to be captured in a format to be reviewed again. The videos are never actually intended to be watched again or shared with friends though but they are proof that the person was physically there (if not wholly present).
There was a video I recently saw about how birthday parties should be filmed. Instead of a video of just the birthday girl in front of a cake reacting to her friends singing happy birthday, she takes the camera, flips it so we don't see her anymore but we see her friends singing facing her with faces full of love.
For many it's not worth the effort to even try anymore. Particularly when the content of a submission is about LLMs: why worry?
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