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Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

> It shocks me that I can hear my voice when reading the translation.

For me, this phenomenon with Copilot and a decade old codebase where I was the only contributor was unlike anything I'd experienced.

It's one thing to see other people's thoughts reshaped by AI, but when it's your own thinking it's a very eerie feeling.

Maybe only happens 10-15% of the time, but when it does it's uncanny.

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For me the freakish thing was having GPT-4 complete the prefix of a script, which was mostly a doc-comment and the inputs, written in my style. The completed body of the script was also in my style, even though I had not given GPT any actual "code" in the prompt. It somehow had learned that people that write the preamble "just so" also write script logic in a certain specific way, and it could emulate that.

One of the bigger difficulties with coming to terms with LLMs is that we are either far simpler and easy to model than we once thought, or LLMs are vastly more complex than we comprehend. I am not sure I like either.

The most probable answer is that it's not a binary either/or but a little of both.

(And escaping binary thinking is something humans need to do a better job with in general.)

The ease with which LLMs mimic mundane human behavior has, in some small ways, helped me prioritize my own thoughts and actions. I'll be doing something and realize an LLM could easily perform this action, complete this thought, have this conversation as well as I can. So why am I doing this when my time would probably be better served in pursuit of something else. I don't want to go overboard with this since many mundane things have merit but it does help pull me out of a rut occasionally.

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