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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

> I think these kinds of studies are of limited use. I don't believe raw GPT4 is that helpful in the enterprise.

I'm not so sure about this. A lot of work in and for especially large organizations is writing text that often doesn't even get read, or is at most just glanced at. LLMs are great at writing useless text.

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That kind of text is valuable as a signaling exercise - the author is willing to claim the text as indicating their actual beliefs. Writing it with AI would actually damage the author's credibility since it's no longer their words - although this shouldn't be a problem if the author is carefully checking the text every single time to make sure it represents their position.

The effect would be even worse the first time the author missed a mistake from the AI and had to walk it back publicly. Nobody's going to trust anything they put in writing for a while after that.

There are genres of text that have little to do with the writer's beliefs and are a kind of formality with contents known by all interested parties beforehand. Sort of elaborate prose versions of "I Agree With the Terms and Conditions" textboxes.

At first I thought this was a flippant joke, but I can actually see the value in saving time writing junk without having to alter existing bureaucratic processes from which nobody gets much value.

I am using ChatGPT to write the genetic boilerplate that e.g. many funding applications require. Ethics statements or inclusivity policies etc where the contents are largely predefined and known by everybody but still have to be written in prose instead of e.g. clicking boxes.

Isn't most of science like that too?

There is a lot of boilerplate and fluff in scientific papers that everybody knows is fluff.

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