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Comment by CipherThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Ditto. I started out excited about LLMs and eager to use them everywhere, but have become steadily disillusioned as I have tried to apply them to daily tasks, and seen others try and fail in the same way.

Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do.

For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard.

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> For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard.

And it only took one of the most computationally expensive processes ever devised by man.

If you ignore how much energy you're burning while searching for dozens and dozens of articles that may or may not give you the answer you're looking for. I'd say the electricity that LLMs burn is nothing compared to my energy and time in that regard.

Id bet $50 the inference is more expensive

I feel worthless now :)

I mean, the brain is, if you want to consider it a computer, pretty god damn efficient. It's slow as hell but it's really powerful and runs on bread.

>> Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee.

I've had the same experience as well. I heard tons of people clamoring about the ability for LLM's to write SEO copy for you and how you can churn out web content so much faster now. I tried using it to churn out some very specific blog posts for an aborist client of mine.

The results were really bad. I had to re-write and clarify a lot of what it spit out. The grammar was not very good and it was really hard to read with very poorly structured sentences that would end aburptly and other glaring issues.

I did this right after a guy I play hockey with said he uses it all the time to write emails for him and pays the monthly subscription in order to have it write all kinds of things for me every day. After my trial, I was really wondering how obvious it was that he was doing that and how his clients thought about him knowing how poorly the stuff these LLM's were putting out.

It says a lot about SEO copy that this is one of the areas where LLMs low quality doesn't seem to have impeded adoption. There are a ton of shitty content marketers using LLMs to churn out spam content.

>After my trial, I was really wondering how obvious it was that he was doing that and how his clients thought about him knowing how poorly the stuff these LLM's were putting out.

I feel the same way about this stuff as when devs say they push out LLM code with no refactoring or review. Ah, good luck!

>GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do.

GPT's rigid "robot butler" style is not "just how LLMs write". OpenAI deliberately tuned it to sound that way. Even much weaker models that aren't tuned to write in a particular way can easily pass for human writing.

This is part of the problem with the whole discourse of comparing human writers to LLMs. Superficial things like style and tone aren't the problem, but they are overwhelmingly the focus of these discussions.

It's funny to see, because developers are so sensitive about being treated like code monkeys by their non-technical colleagues. But these same devs turn around to treat other professionals as word monkeys, or pixel monkeys, or whatever else. Not realizing that they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of someone else's profession.

Professional writers don't take prompts and shit out words. They work closely with their clients to understand the important outcomes, then work strategically towards them. The dead giveaway of LLM writing isn't the style. It's the lack of coherent intent behind the words, and low information density of the text. A professional writer works to communicate a lot with very little. LLMs work in the opposite way: you give it a prompt, then it blows it out into verbiage.

Sit down for coffee with a professional copywriter (not the SEO content marketing spammers), and see what they have to say about LLMs.

>and low information density of the text.

Personally, I group all these things under 'style'. Perhaps, i should have used, 'presentation' instead. You've latched on that specific word and gone off. Point is that the post-training of these models, especially GPT from Open ai is doing a lot to how the writing (the default at least) presents long strings of text. Like how GPT-4 is almost compelled to end bouts of fiction prematurely in sunshine and rainbows. That technically isn't style but is part of what i was talking about.

>A professional writer works to communicate a lot with very little. LLMs work in the opposite way: you give it a prompt, then it blows it out into verbiage.

There's no reason you have to work this way with an LLM.

> You've latched on that specific word and gone off.

No, I haven't. I'm not talking about style, but something deeper. What I'm talking about is something you don't even seem to realize exists in professional writing - which is why you keep thinking I'm misunderstanding you when I am not.

I've worked with professional writers, and nothing in the LLM space even comes close to them. It's not a matter of low quality vs high quality, or benchmarking, or style. It's simply an apples and oranges comparison.

The economics of LLMs for shortform copy will never make sense, because producing the words is the cheapest part of that process. They might become the best way for writers themselves to produce longform copy on the execution side, but they can't replace the writer's ability to work with the client to figure out exactly what they are trying to write, and why, and what a good result even looks like. And no, this isn't a prompting issue, or a UI issue, or a context window length issue, or anything like that.

Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned how invaluable LLMs are for producing internal business copy. I could easily see these amateur writing tasks being replaced by LLMs. But the implication there isn't that LLMs are any good at writing, but that these tasks don't require good writing to begin with.

>What I'm talking about is something you don't even seem to realize exists in professional writing

I've read hundreds of books, fiction and otherwise. This isn't a brag, it's just to say, believe me, I know what professional writing looks like and I know where LLMs currently stand because I've used them a lot. I know the quality you can squeeze out if you're willing to let go of any presumptions.

You'll notice that not once did I say current LLMs could wholesale replace professional writers anymore than they can currently replace professional software devs. I just disagree on the "not a good writer" bit.

If it's the opinion of professional writers you're looking for then you can find some who disagree too.

Rie Kudan won an award on a novel she used GPT to verbatim ghostwrite (no edits essentially) 5% of. Her words, not mine. Who knows how much more of the novel is edited GPT.

>Rie Kudan won an award on a novel she used GPT to verbatim ghostwrite (no edits essentially) 5% of. Her words, not mine. Who knows how much more of the novel is edited GPT.

That a professional human novelist was able to leverage GPT for their book isn't disproving the grandparent's post. They knew what good looks like, and if it wasn't good they wouldn't have kept it in the book.

That's my point. Good writing can come out of LLMs and nobody has to take my word for it.

When part of the OPs point seems to be that LLMs can't write good stuff then that's proof enough.

If you're talking about replacing professionals wholesale then I never made that argument.

Good writing can also come out of Markov chains. Or even RNGs - if your novelist has enough time to filter the output.

LLMs can't write good stuff. Human writers can write good stuff. When a good writer uses an LLM in their writing process, that writer can certainly produce good writing.

When an AI hypebro who is otherwise a bad writer uses an LLM in their writing process, they still produce bad writing.

>Good writing can also come out of Markov chains.

Waiting for the Author who has used a Markov Chain to ghost write.

>LLMs can't write good stuff. Human writers can write good stuff. When a good writer uses an LLM in their writing process, that writer can certainly produce good writing.

Give it a rest. The author was quite clear she copy pasted sections of writing in.

I actually agree with you that professional writers _can_ write/communicate much better than LLMs. However, I’ve read way too many articles or chapters in books that are so full of needless fluff before they get to the point. It’s almost as if they wanted to show off that they can write all that and somehow connect it to the main part of the article. I’m not reading the essay to appreciate the writer’s ability to narrate things, instead I care about what they have to say on that topic that brought me to the essay.

Perhaps the pointless fluff you're describing is actually chaff: countermeasures strategically deployed ahead of time by IQ 180 writers in order to preemptively water down any future LLM's trained on their work.

Then the humans can make a heroic return, write surgical prose like Hemingway to slice through the AI drivel, and keep collecting their paychecks.

Bonus points if you can translate this analogy to software development...

lmfao :¬)

> They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee.

In some circles, that's actually a wonderful achievement. :p

Are you saying LLMs are officially mid?

Dario Amodei (Anthropic) pretty much acknowledged exactly that - "mid" - on his Dwarkesh interview, while still all excited that they'd be up to killing people in a couple of years.

> They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee.

If you were only using GPT 3.5 (free ChatGPT) then your opinion is irrelevant.

With GPT-4 you could directly ask it: "rewrite your previous response so that it sounds less generic, less amateurish, and not written by a committee". I'm not even joking. Just provide enough information and tell it what to do. If you don't like the output then tell it what needs to be improved. It's not a mind reader.

Also GPT-4 is a year old now. Claude 3 is already superior and GPT-5 will be next level.

Yes, I've used GPT-4. The writing sounds better, but it still sucks at writing. Most importantly, it feels like it sucks just as much as GPT-3.5 in some deeply important ways.

If you use GPT-4 day-to-day, you've probably encountered this sense of a capability wall before. The point where additional prompting, tweaking, re-prompting simply doesn't seem to be yielding better results on the task, or it feels like the issue is just being shifted around. Over time, you develop a bit of a mental map of where the strengths and weaknesses are, and factor that into your workflows. That's what writing with LLMs feels like, compared to working with a professional writer.

Most writers have already realized that LLMs can't write in any meaningful way.

I think it is a tooling issue. It is in no way obvious how use LLM's effectively, especially for really good writing results. Tweaking and tinkering can be time consuming indeed, but i use lately the chatgpt-shell [1] and it lends well to an iterative approach. One needs to cycle through some styles first, and then decide how to most effectively prompt for better results.

[1]https://github.com/xenodium/chatgpt-shell/blob/bf2d12ed2ed60...

> Most writers have already realized that LLMs can't write in any meaningful way.

I know a professional writer who is amazed by what LLMs are capable of already and, given the rate of progress, speculates they will take over many writing jobs eventually.

> If you use GPT-4 day-to-day, you've probably encountered this sense of a capability wall before.

Of course there is a wall with the current models. But almost every time I hit a wall, I have found a way to break past that limit. Interacting with the LLM as I would interact with a person. LLM's perform best with chain of thought reasoning. List out any issues you identified in the original output, ask the LLM to review these issues and list out any other issues that it can identify based on the original requirements, then rewrite it all. And do that several times until it's good enough.

At work I have found GPT-4 to exceed the linguistic capabilities of my colleagues when it comes to summarizing complicated boring business text.

> And do that several times until it's good enough

Or just write the damn thing yourself.

What if this is a boring business text summary task that takes additional hours of my time at work? Why should I waste my time? I have better things to do. I can leave early while you sit there at work typing like a fool.

If you haven't actually used GPT-5 yet, your assessment is irrelevant.

But the real game changer will be GPT-6.

What really annoys me in all these discussions is how no one's tested what happens if they wait until 2050 and try GPT-19.

That's well after the AI meta consciousness understood that it was necessary to destroy all humans to save the planet. GPT-6 was the last of the GPT series.

Perhaps the strangest element of the AI alignment conversation is that what is most aligned with human civilization (at least the most powerful elements of it) and alignment with sustainable life on the planet are at odds, and "destroy humans to save planet" is a concern mostly because it seems to be a somewhat rational conclusion.

We already have Claude 3 Opus and it is clear for anyone who has used it that it is way better than GPT-4, especially for coding.

The model names, version numbers or who makes them are irrelevant.

Chat GPT4 is a technological miracle, but it can only produce trite, formulaic text and it's _relentlessly_ polly-anna-ish. Everything reads like ad copy and it's easily identifiable.

Fix your prompt. Just accepting the default style is a rookie mistake.

Ask it to "rewrite that in the tone of an English professor" or "rewrite that in the style of a redneck rapper" or "make that sound less like generic ad copy". Get into an argument back and forth with the LLM and tell it the previous response is crap because of XYZ.

Or, you know, spend the half hour that would take writing your stuff yourself.

These models can do something in a second that would take many hours for a human writer.

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