It’s a weak signal. I’ve certainly never suspected your writing of being LLM, because the rest of it screams human and high quality. What Even Is this Timeline? just nails it, and no LLM to would produce that without enough prompting to make it worth reading. I guess I’m biased because I think the type of work you’re doing, taking stock of the big picture with an understanding of different perspectives, is word for word the most valuable thing right now. I’m just mentioning, not trying to distract you from the issue at hand.
For writers I don’t know, I’m afraid yeah em-dashes are a signal to pay it less attention. I’m not the LLM-discernment pro that the mods here are. I can tell when it’s obvious but not when it’s not. I don’t spend a lot of time learning that discernment. And I’d assumed that everyone with a clue made the same compromise I did and ditched them when LLMs made them their signature move.
But I didn’t say I stop reading, like Justis did. I’m not as hardline. I skim LLM-written posts for good ideas, because I think insights on alignment (and other things) can and do come out of left field, and writing ability is weakly or even anticorrelated with creativity (while correlated strongly with analytical ability).
I think it’s an unfortunately situation because LLM writing is merely correlated with lack of quality; I think the case is overstated, perhaps because we mostly hate and fear AI for good reasons, and our feelings cause some motivated reasoning. But it is what it is. For now. I hope it will be different when LLMs have better metacognitive skills and instead of skipping LLM writing we can just say “make sure you tell your LLM to think this back and forth carefully and write succinctly”
I think that might happen soon because commercial use of LLMs will reward accuracy more than sycophancy. I hope to be alive to enjoy that glorious few months when LLMs can think for us better than we can, and still want to.
But for now, yeah, there’s already too much to read, so em-dashes are a sign to start skimming.
It’s a weak signal. I’ve certainly never suspected your writing of being LLM, because the rest of it screams human and high quality. What Even Is this Timeline? just nails it, and no LLM to would produce that without enough prompting to make it worth reading. I guess I’m biased because I think the type of work you’re doing, taking stock of the big picture with an understanding of different perspectives, is word for word the most valuable thing right now. I’m just mentioning, not trying to distract you from the issue at hand.
For writers I don’t know, I’m afraid yeah em-dashes are a signal to pay it less attention. I’m not the LLM-discernment pro that the mods here are. I can tell when it’s obvious but not when it’s not. I don’t spend a lot of time learning that discernment. And I’d assumed that everyone with a clue made the same compromise I did and ditched them when LLMs made them their signature move.
But I didn’t say I stop reading, like Justis did. I’m not as hardline. I skim LLM-written posts for good ideas, because I think insights on alignment (and other things) can and do come out of left field, and writing ability is weakly or even anticorrelated with creativity (while correlated strongly with analytical ability).
I think it’s an unfortunately situation because LLM writing is merely correlated with lack of quality; I think the case is overstated, perhaps because we mostly hate and fear AI for good reasons, and our feelings cause some motivated reasoning. But it is what it is. For now. I hope it will be different when LLMs have better metacognitive skills and instead of skipping LLM writing we can just say “make sure you tell your LLM to think this back and forth carefully and write succinctly”
I think that might happen soon because commercial use of LLMs will reward accuracy more than sycophancy. I hope to be alive to enjoy that glorious few months when LLMs can think for us better than we can, and still want to.
But for now, yeah, there’s already too much to read, so em-dashes are a sign to start skimming.