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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

The real question is whether it was Mythos or Opus that wrote this post.

> "Why it matters"

It doesn't, it's a corporate blog, they were rarely written in one-author's voice anyway, but it's interesting to see that even large organisations are outsourcing their blogs to LLMs.

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Sentence constructions like this definitely scream AI: "That's a reasonable bias for an exploratory tool. It's a ruinous one for a triage queue..."

I will upgrade the "why it matters" to "and now AI output is part of the training data". A day is coming when the punched-up AI verbiage will be the norm and hard to distinguish unless you're from the previous generation. Sort of in the way that I miss some aspects of Usenet.

That's a scary thought, llm's training on llm output. People trained by default of ubiquity to think and read llm output produce their own llm-esque writing.

Seems stifling. We'll need someway to reward human creativity and out-of-bounds thinking before our greatest corpus of human intellect is a bounded by whenever and whatever was trained on.

Writing and later the printing press have already considerably stifled human expressiveness. Language used to be noch more fragmented and diverse before mass media (or the Bible in every household). In my grandmother’s time you would have difficulty understanding people from three villages down the road.

I'm not sure enabling people three villages apart to communicate with each other counts as "stifling human expressiveness"

I’m not sure that having people read LLM output does that either.

Human creativity is not only not being rewarded, but people are increasingly talking like consuming too few tokens is something that's actively used against them.

So is it that humans are inherently creative, machines could never do what we do? Or is it that humans will only replicate our training data, and so we have to ensure that machines don't bound our training data? Or are you going meta and gently pointing out the absurdity? (I hope it's this one!)

I think I have an answer. Human's don't have "training data" in the same way we think of LLMs, yes you can walk outside your house and quantify every electromagnetic pulse, random pertubation etc and then "train on it". But that isn't how people process information. We have the ability to process our entire "existence" if that makes sense, which means the density is much higher.

The LLM is bounded by it's training data, and relying on it means we are as well.

I don't understand this mindset, why is it people on here think humans have some kind of magical ability machines don't or can't? Five years ago I would never have predicted this kind of human chauvinism here. It's some kind of weird romanticism almost.

Maybe because everything LLM-written is written in the same style with no creativity, diversity, or idiosyncrasies? If all humans suddenly started writing in a single, bland, corporate style, that would be a tragedy, LLMs or not.

Because right now humans do have a magical ability machines don't. LLMs are a fuzzy reflection of what they've seen hundreds of times already, they don't have originality or intelligence (yet).

As a much more immediate practical matter, LLMs trained on LLM output makes them worse overall, they degrade from doing that. So the more LLM-prodoced content fills the web, the less useful it is as a data source for future LLM training. In addition to just being increasingly boring and vapid.

Saying they don't posses any level of intelligence is wild.

The intelligence is an emergent property of their ability to predict how a statement will proceed, therefore it is inevitably a reiteration or transformation at best. Lots of intelligent things can be produced from that, but nothing truly novel.

I had a dude in a conversation non-ironically use "load-bearing."

I could only follow up with, "that is a genuine insight."

Not a single person visibly flinched in pain.

yeah? it’s not that weird of a term

It’s weird when someone starts using terminology that is heavily over-indexed by LLMs out of the blue.

Huh, I've heard this term all the time at work and used it myself since long before LLMs

Same

Then it's not weird because it's not out of the blue.

Is it weird? Pretty much everyone's writing and speech is influenced to some degree by what they've read and heard in conversation. For better or for worse, it's only getting harder to avoid exposure to LLM generated prose.

Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.

I don't think it's performative or about vibes. Everyone subconsciously adopts phrases and in general ways of talking from people around them. May it be from friends, neighbors or coworkers.

Not incompatible with my satirical post (I wrote "performant," a notorious tech neologism, not performative). Whether subconsciously or not people 100000% use language to communicate and determine others' social tribe membership.

I use load-bearing all the time, mostly in jokes about something

Careful, you might have been talking to a Real Engineer. Perhaps even a structural variant that use this phrase pretty much daily.

We weren't talking about "seeing a man about a horse barn" we were talking about software.

This highly depends on the context of the conversation. Were you by any chance talking about walls?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRVExJZKIT8

It's fascinating seeing people think that if you're snarky enough about something, the substance of that thing actually ceases to be substantive.

It's like staring down the barrel of a gun and taking the time to make quips about the type of paper the gun advertisement was printed on.

When writing is too heavily LLM-assisted, it does actually cease to be substantive, because it becomes impossible to know which parts of it represent actual claims which the author believes as stated and which are interpolations.

All of them represent claims which the author believes as stated, otherwise the author wouldn't put their name on them.

No no, it the LLM-assistance makes it hard to know what is substantive. That means it puts more work on the reader, which is a totally valid thing to complain about, but which is totally different from "the poor writing is actually the whole point"

But how can the reader do the work? They don't have access to Mythos and can't review Cloudflare's internal findings or harnesses. The only practical options are to accept the article at face value or not accept it if the expected density of LLM interpolations is too high.

Eh, I still read all of it, but it grates that everything everywhere all the time now is written by one person.

I agree with the complaint, I just disagree with this somehow obviating the need to engage with the underlying substance (where it exists)

And obviously it's a problem that it's so much cheaper to produce writing without underlying substance, but I think when one of the leading Internet security/infrastructure companies is writing about the leading cybersecurity model, it's excessively flippant to say the writing on top is "the real question"

How do you know we haven't looked for substance, found none, and then decided to be snarky?

I can agree that snark probably isn't the type of comment that we generally value or encourage here on Hacker News, but neither is posting blatant advertisements and press releases, but here we are discussing one, so shrug ?

This is not just any large organization, it's Anthropic. Their entire shtick is that AIs can do Real Work now and it'd be weird if they didn't behave accordingly themselves.

This is also why Claude Code is full of weird bugs and why their support says that it did refunds when it didn't and so on and so forth.

Cloudflare blogs have been excellent for many years, long before transformers arrived.

Oh those Decepticons…

This looks more like it was edited by AI rather than fully written by it. Or they are using a really good humaniser for the second pass.

Should that be surprising? Larger orgs are the ones more naturally associated with mediocrity and are most likely to want to reduce human labor hours.

Disappointing really.

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