Yeah, this is hard. Outside the (narrowly construed) LW bubble, I see LLM-generated text ~everywhere, for example a friend sent me an ad he saw on facebook for the picture/product, and the text was super obviously created by AI. I think mostly people don’t notice it, and even prefer it to uninspired non-AI-generated text.
(I am sure there are other bubbles than LW out there that react badly to AI-generated text, and perhaps there’s a notable correlation between those bubbles and ones I’d consider good to be in.)
But if you’re just sort of looking for higher engagement/more attention/to get your ideas out there to the public, yeah, it’s tough to prove that AI usage (for writing copy) is an error. For whatever reason, lots of people like writing that hammers its thesis over and over in emotive ways, uses superficial contrasts to create artificial tension, and ironically uses “and that’s important” as unimportant padding. In my mind I think of this as “the twitter style” and it annoys me even when it’s clearly human-generated, but RLHF and the free market of Twitter both think it’s maximally fit, so, well, here we are.
In terms of “why bother learn to write” more generally, I guess I would take that a level up. Why bother to blog? If it’s in service of the ideas themselves, I think writing on one’s own is valuable for similar reasons as “helping spread cool ideas”—it’s virtuous and helps you learn to think more clearly. I wouldn’t want to use AI to generate my writing in part because I’d like to look back at my own writing and smile at a job well done, and when I see AI-generated writing I do a little frown and want to skim. But if you don’t value writing for its own sake, and it’s solely a means to an end, and that end is best served by a generic audience of modal humans, then, oof. Maybe o3 is superhuman for this. Or maybe not; perhaps your post would have done even better (on the metrics) if it was 60% shorter and written entirely by you. I suppose we’ll never know.
(I liked the personal parts of the post, by the way. Like your alarm clock anecdote, say. But I liked it specifically because it’s true, and thus an interesting insight into how humans quite different than me behave. I’d be significantly annoyed if it were fabricated, and extra double annoyed if it were fabricated by an LLM.)
Yeah, this is hard. Outside the (narrowly construed) LW bubble, I see LLM-generated text ~everywhere, for example a friend sent me an ad he saw on facebook for the picture/product, and the text was super obviously created by AI. I think mostly people don’t notice it, and even prefer it to uninspired non-AI-generated text.
(I am sure there are other bubbles than LW out there that react badly to AI-generated text, and perhaps there’s a notable correlation between those bubbles and ones I’d consider good to be in.)
But if you’re just sort of looking for higher engagement/more attention/to get your ideas out there to the public, yeah, it’s tough to prove that AI usage (for writing copy) is an error. For whatever reason, lots of people like writing that hammers its thesis over and over in emotive ways, uses superficial contrasts to create artificial tension, and ironically uses “and that’s important” as unimportant padding. In my mind I think of this as “the twitter style” and it annoys me even when it’s clearly human-generated, but RLHF and the free market of Twitter both think it’s maximally fit, so, well, here we are.
In terms of “why bother learn to write” more generally, I guess I would take that a level up. Why bother to blog? If it’s in service of the ideas themselves, I think writing on one’s own is valuable for similar reasons as “helping spread cool ideas”—it’s virtuous and helps you learn to think more clearly. I wouldn’t want to use AI to generate my writing in part because I’d like to look back at my own writing and smile at a job well done, and when I see AI-generated writing I do a little frown and want to skim. But if you don’t value writing for its own sake, and it’s solely a means to an end, and that end is best served by a generic audience of modal humans, then, oof. Maybe o3 is superhuman for this. Or maybe not; perhaps your post would have done even better (on the metrics) if it was 60% shorter and written entirely by you. I suppose we’ll never know.
(I liked the personal parts of the post, by the way. Like your alarm clock anecdote, say. But I liked it specifically because it’s true, and thus an interesting insight into how humans quite different than me behave. I’d be significantly annoyed if it were fabricated, and extra double annoyed if it were fabricated by an LLM.)