Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!
They rarely disagree with any idea or proposal, providing a salve for the insecurities of their users.
It's all access journalism now, waste of time.
The question isn't about what action he's taking, it's about what motivates him under the surface. Obviously what he is doing is marketing. What I'm curious about is whether he truly believes his own marketing or if he is just doing it because its his job
I'm sure if we took one of us back in time a couple hundred years we would be diagnosed with all sorts of machine-magic induced psychoses.
Humility is the real cure, and there is a way that LLMs are specifically designed to steer away from humility and towards aggrandizement, convincing regular people that they've solved fundamental problems in physics. It gives everyone access to cult followers in their pocket, if they're so inclined.
I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.
I'm fine with using LLMs as coding tools. But I find it deeply offensive when someone is very explicitly using them to communicate with me.
Communication is such a deeply human experience. It lets people feel each other out, and learn things beyond just the words being said. To have that filtered out by an LLM is just disgraceful.
Observing the effect of LLMs on the "business side" of things, I'm increasingly thinking of these as a kind of infection against which the MBA set and their acolytes have no immune response, and I think it's going to eat a large proportion of the benefit of LLMs to most businesses (possibly overwhelming it and actually harming productivity, will depend on how much better these tools get).
LLMs are awesome at bloating your slide decks while making them really slick and complete-looking. They're great at suggesting an entire set of features on a ticket you've just barely started writing ...but did you actually want all those? You end up with redundant or in-context-gibberish features that leave the person actually doing the work tracking down WTF actually matters. They are adding overhead to communication, so far, not just by puffing up and padding language (which isn't great either) but by adding noise "content" that can't be stripped out without talking to the person who created it and making sure that was actually just AI bullshit and not something they actually needed; that is, you can't just do the "LLM, summarize this" trick, because the author used an LLM to plan it, too, not just to pad-out and gussy-up something they actually thought through and wrote.
LLMs are letting people present very convincingly as having a more-complete understanding of what's going on than they really do in ways that are messing up productive work, I'm not sure business-folks are going to be generally capable of tamping this down because it is so in-line with the way they already operate (but on speed), and helps them so very much to look good to one another while saving tons of time. This isn't just the MBA set I accuse above, either, I'm noticing that this improbably-complete deck communication upward is becoming necessary to look competent (and to ladder-climb) as an IC.
Like, I'm only starting to think this through and really observing what's going on through this lens as I've only noticed it in the last few weeks, but the more I see the more alarming this is. I think this is going to be a little like the largely-wasteful "legibility" obsession of upper management, something enabled by computerization that they find irresistible and are pretty bad at employing judiciously and effectively, but probably a lot worse in terms of harm-to-productivity, and directly affecting and changing the behavior of far more layers of an organization. They never (businesses as a whole, to anthropomorphize a bit) gained wisdom with their new powers to burn resources chasing legibility, and this is starting to look like another thing they just will not be able to use (internally! I don't even mean for actually producing external-facing results!) with restraint and taste.
Their rational is coming off more professional
:|
The article seems to imply this is what is happening, as writing style converges towards LLM's style. You can call it what you want, but the important bit is that this is how it appears that LLM's are being used.
Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine
Why use an LLM? If you're worried about style, starting with your own voice is more efficient. If you're worried about facts, looking something up in a primary source is best, and is probably cheaper on a few axes, especially if you need to check/validate anyway...
The "you need to write in a more professional business oriented way" is something that a lot of people are having difficulty with. Yes, this needs to be addressed earlier in someone's education more forcefully - but the SMSification of long form text started a while ago.
With that said, the "Ok, you need to write long form with correct grammar when sending an email that a director or VP is CC'ed on". It used to be Grammarly as the "install this and have it fix up your grammar and tone" ( https://web.archive.org/web/20191104093353/https://www.gramm... GPT-1 timeframe there). However, LLMs of today seem to be more accessible than Grammarly but it largely does the same thing - fix up and refine tone.
What I don't see from back then is people decrying Grammarly saying that it's making everything sound the same.
I'm also not sure if I would prefer the pre-fixup emails to what is produced by an LLM unless sending coworkers to remedial writing classes is something that is acceptable.
When I do have expertise, I use them because I am able to check.
Also annoying to me working with a "partner" non-technical they just send me an LLM dump of how to do something
I was trying to explain it to them in an analogy like showing up to a mechanic and telling them what to do based on what ChatGPT said
However I don't doubt many "team leaders" can and should be replaced with LLMs.