Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all

I think this is the opposite of how most people tend to use LLMs, and I actually think my way is the "better" way. My issue has never been the act of writing well, or clearly expressing what I mean... it has been the inertia of putting words on a page at all.

(and an LLM had nothing to do with this comment :P)

The thing that worries me most is that it's going to redefine the way we write. We absorb language. To compensate for all this AiSpeak I consume, I need to read more literature.

What’s human writing going to look like in a few years if this trend doesn’t stop? I believe that the LLMs will catch up soon and introduce more variance and fewer words designed for impact in their language, delivering us from this AiVerse into one where AI writing is almost indistinguishable from human writing. But until then, we must read more.

This is not always true. Once there was an online reaction to short content that made people treat "long-form" content as desirable entirely due to its length. I rather like reading books and the New Yorker's fiction section when I still subscribed, but much of this "long-form" content was token-expansion of a formulaic nature which I did not enjoy. LLMs have mastered this kind of long-form token-expansion.

This is assuming people are using an LLM in good faith, obviously. One day, perhaps LLMs will learn to express what someone is saying in an elegant way that is enjoyable for people like me to read. But even then, I will have the difficulty of distinguishing whether this is a human speaking through an LLM in good faith or a human who has set up a machine that is set up to mimic a human.

The latter is undesirable to me because I have access to the best such machines at a remarkably low cost. Were I to desire a conversation with an LLM, it is trivial for me to find one. I'm not coming here for that[0].

A sufficiently insightful LLM which prompts my thinking in certain ways wouldn't be unwelcome to me, I suppose. I have a couple of my friends for whom I still go on Twitter to read what they say even after I have stopped using the site routinely. If I found out the posts were entirely an LLM I think I would still read them simply because I find the posts useful and with sufficiently high signal-to-token.

0: Certainly, if every place only spoke about things I was interested in and never in things I was not interested in, I wouldn't need separation of interest spaces at all. But the variation of interest vectors for different humans has made this impossible.

LLMs shouldn’t be used for communication at all if you want any form of authenticity.

It's one thing to have Claude polish a message and another thing for it to write out an entire message.

There's a huge difference between having AI clean up a text you send privately to someone you have worked closely with for years, versus a broad spectrum text sent by a VP to hundreds of people or more. The first case is reprehensible, for the reasons the author lays out. But as for the second case, corporate doublespeak has been a meme since long before the advent of AI and it would remain even in some AI-pocalypse. Just because your boss puts out sanitized language in a mass communication, doesn't inherently mean your boss won't still be present and real with you in a more private setting.

In a work context, of course, things are a bit different: I want to move the project forward and not jeopardize my future paychecks. Authenticity tends to take a back seat there. However, I’d be more concerned about inefficiency. Is it really necessary to run every piece of communication through ChatGPT to refine the wording? Are you sure nothing gets lost in the process? Doesn’t that end up wasting a lot of work time without adding any real value?

And on top of that, it leads to alienation and frustration. If you talk to me as if you were an LLM, don’t be surprised if I talk to you as if you were an LLM.

Something I have seen a lot of people talk about in the comments here, as well as do in practice within my company and friends, family, etc., is that they say something and then let Claude or GPT rephrase it to be added as a prompt that they'll then use.

In my experience, this will almost always bring about worse results than if you communicated directly with the LLM. I believe this happens because of a few reasons.

1. LLMs tend to do word inflation in that they'll create plausible-sounding prompts, but the words that they introduce have a higher propensity to create worse cookie-cutter results from other agents, coding assistants, writing assistants, or any other form that has been used.

2. By putting a layer in between what we're saying and what the LLMs interpret, we're not honing our ability to articulate and prompt better and wholly depend on the intermediary getting better or being able to interpret better, which does not translate well in practice.

3. Anecdotal, but in my case, when I was doing this myself, it was because I assumed I was harder to understand and not articulate enough to get good results. So I tried speeding up the results by trying to use an intermediary. What I learned, though, was training myself to be articulate and to not doubt myself was easier than getting results from the LLM interpreters.

of course with anything, ymmv.

Edit: And now I forgot the most important. When the knowledge the llm retrieved is insufficient to answer colleagues question or the agent skill can not execute the requested task from my colleague, it asks me just for the missing info or skill and with me (the human) in the loop work is done x times faster. Eventually it will replace me and all my colleagues one day. Looking forward to do other stuff then

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088

I guess everyone using LLMs for text is similar to that. If everyone uses the same LLM style, its hard to understand where the other person is coming from. This is not a problem for technical and precise communication though(the choice of LLMs in that context has other risks).

It is also strictly not an LLM capability problem because they can mimic or retain the original style and just "polish" with enough hints but that takes time, investment and people go through path of least resistance. So, we all end up with similar text with typical AI-isms.

There are other reasons to dislike LLM text like padding and effort asymmetry that have been discussed here enough.

The only thing is that my anecdata contradicts it. My AI cleaned up writing seems to fare much better and this seems to be true across all channels. To be clear I do not mean AI generated just AI cleaned, that is spelling, punctuation, grammar mainly, the occasional word order change.

In the end it's about getting the message across first and "get to know me" second and proper and clear expression helps a lot with the first.

I think the ideal mode for engaging with LLMs should be as interactive encyclopedias. They are excellent at rewarding curiosity when someone passionate about learning sits in the driver seat of this kind of tool. There is something to be said about the benefits of _active_ learning over _passive_ instruction.

Nonetheless, it's impossible to consistently discern fact from fiction when in the form of narrative. As such hallucinations are the key counterexample for why we can't have a world where LLMs can be effective instructors. Because it's one thing to be exposed to the structure of a narrative, and to read it as grammar, but you don't ever know how to _feel_ about these structures until you become tuned to another human being.

We may choose words for a reason, but sometimes we choose the wrong words. Sometimes it may be closely spelled words, and you choose the incorrect version. Sometimes it may be because our understanding of the definition of a word is wrong. Either way, it can be problematic when you say one thing when you meant to say something else.

Now I grew up in the olden days. I reach for a dictionary in such cases. On the other hand, I can certainly understand why people would reach for an LLM. LLMs can examine an entire document at once, it will catch errors that you are not familiar with, and it will catch a much larger range of errors. Is it perfect in doing so? Of course not, but it is better than nothing.

It was about how people would get a thing (a robot?) that would repeat whatever they said but in a more fancy way (or something along those lines), to make them sound smarter. Then the people would start depending on these robots to communicate at all, to the point their speech degrades and they start making unintelligible noises that the robots still translate into actual speech.

EDIT: Found it, from 2014: https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576

Maybe we'll use AI as a personal PR department. Companies want to present a unified, curated experience to their customers. People do too: we dress up sometimes; we swear differently depending on the audience; we write emails differently for work vs. friends. The only reason people don't use PR departments is because it's too expensive (you can bet that Bill Gates uses a PR department to look over his annual letters). Does that mean that people will all sound like companies? Of course not! Different companies sound different. How Monster Beverage Corporation talks is different from how Boeing talks.

Maybe we'll use AI to eliminate all boring person-to-person coordination. Instead of sending emails saying, "Where do you want to eat on Saturday?" we'll just have our AIs coordinate. It will be like having an executive assistant who makes sure everything goes smoothly.

Maybe we'll use AI to expand or deepen our relationships. There are many friends that I wish I were more in touch with. I don't need to have a heart-to-heart with them every week, but I would love to know how they're doing this week. If they emailed me every week just to tell me things like, "Gargoyle's in David Square closed down and I'm bummed." or "My kid saw a sunrise for the first time and he thought it was lame." I would read that. Imagine that once a week, an AI prompted me with what to send and I said things like, "Tell everyone about us going to beach and the new restaurant we went to. Tell close family/friends about how John is struggling in school and ask for advice." Or maybe, throughout the week, I tell the AI things like, "Send the best pictures of our beach trip to friends and family on the next update."

Okay, maybe you think all three of these ideas are stupid. You're probably right. But I thought Twitch (watching people play video games) was a stupid idea too. The bottom line is that we don't know how people will end up using AI and prematurely dismissing any specific use case smacks of unwarranted confidence, IMHO.

There are good arguments to get to know someone "mistakes and all", I just don't think this is a particularly good one. No matter how much you (think) you know someone, they probably know them(selves) better.

And I use it for myself and what I send to others is 99% written by me.

For people who treat writing, especially business writing as a craft to communicate ideas, seeing AI slop is just like nails on chalk board.

I've copies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style and https://workingbackwards.com/ and I've been trying to shift us from a slides-first culture or a quick-email-first culture to a serious writing-first culture.

I genuinely care about this stuff. Thoughtlessly blurting out pages and pages of vanilla unedited LLM output seems disrespectful to the reader.

As writer you're saying: I didn't care enough to craft my message personally, here read this generated content I haven't even seriously edited.

And for the reader it's saying the same: This guy sent me a document to read, I need to sift through it to figure out if there's any actual merit or novel ideas or actional information here.

The asymmetry of effort is disrespectful IMO.

Often, in formal communication, I find it makes a lot of sense to make it as robotic and to the point as possible because informing my boss about the progress of a project shouldn’t leak any emotions. This is not a romantic or social relationship where emotions need to be expressed.

And I like the idea of setting goals for what I want to convert and having these llms go through the message and let me strip out the fat and ensure there is little room for misinformation and digression.

So yeah, what the author wants probably works more in an informal social setting than in a formal.

When in the middle of a group text-chat, someone replied with AI-generated blather. It was dead-clear with the usual sterile vocab, structured buzzphrases, and other LLM "tells".

I politely called him out and asked to use his own voice. In public he insisted that it was his voice and that he used AI only for "formatting". But in private he admits that he created a "gem to assist with multicultural comms", which generated the text. He claims he did it because "not everyone can take the native American English well". A load of bovine manure. I nicely told him to cut this crap and just write as it comes to him. (Basic spell- and grammar-check is fine.)

But this was the first year I saw it in performance review write-ups which frankly was jarring. Here is feedback supposedly 1:1 that massively affects this person's life and their perception of "worth" so to speak...and it's just AI.

Notably it was split by geography. EU countries closest to organic, india slop trainwreck, US in the middle

Sorta made me conclude "ok i guess that's the end of performance reviews that vaguely mean anything & actually get read"

“Powered by AI” is a trendy marketing term on every website today. In a couple years it’ll be considered blasé, and while AI features will still exist, they’ll be called something like automation or workflows.

Ugh, you are not entitled to get to know me. There is a threshold between all that I share with the world and the rest of me. Hell, not every person gets the same picture, and that's deliberate and healthy--my customers don't get to know what my proctologist knows. My mother doesn't get to know what my wife knows.

You don't get to know all of me, because I don't trust you.

This post comes across as sweet, and innocent. It also comes across as absurdly self-entitled, and it's not an OK posture to take towards the world. It's not OK when the police take this posture, it's not OK when private companies take this posture, and it's not OK when strangers on the internet take this posture.

You are entitled to withdraw from relationships that don't fulfill your emotional needs. A reasonable audience for this missive is your girlfriend, your child (who relies on you), or your employer (to whom you are vulnerable).