i thought the use of the word ‘testimony’ in the LLM-generated text is not testimony essay was very useful for conveying the concept the author wished to convey (however much i might have disagreed with the concept), but now that it’s being cited as the motivating factor for policy i suddenly find myself wishing they’d chosen a different word
for instance, if i ask claude to recite its system prompt, there is some sense in which it is giving personal testimony about its perceptions. just as sort of a proof of concept. on the other end of the spectrum, if i ask claude to describe what it ‘feels’ like for it to navigate an ethical dilemma where multiple values push against each other, there’s a sense in which its output is some kind of testimony, whether or not the testimony is true or even meaningful.
i trust the current moderation team to have sensible judgment about these kinds of things, and I think the new LLM block format is a really good strategy at solving the “torrent of LLM slop getting submitted daily” problem the moderation team alludes to, without making me worried that i’ll be in violation of the rules if i ever write a post that attempts to analyze some LLM ‘testimony’. but i do notice that i’m depending upon the moderation team’s good judgment. and i think that the second point in the quoted post, “As of 2025, LLM text does not have those [mental agency] elements behind it”, might be something about which reasonable people could differ, especially as time moves forward and more sophisticated models are released.
i guess what i’m worried about is, if LLM agents advance to the point where they might have novel contributions to make to lesswrong discourse, this policy might mutate into “lesswrong ought to be a human-only discussion platform, quarantined from the (potentially superpersuasive) effects of LLM outputs” for safety reasons, without an actual policy update being required. that perhaps the moderation team has a motive to reject LLM output of this nature whether or not LLM output ought to be considered testimony.
i don’t think this concern is all that serious and i would be very surprised if the moderation team ended up going that route. but i thought it worth pointing out regardless, just so that if that ends up happening i have a comment i can point back to.
and i think that the second point in the quoted post, “As of 2025, LLM text does not have those [mental agency] elements behind it”, might be something about which reasonable people could differ, especially as time moves forward and more sophisticated models are released.
Note that I also explicitly acknowledge this in my curation notice for that post (and that I disagree with the strength of the claim). In any case, Tsvi’s post is not the moderation policy, and the moderation policy is not taking a stance on whether LLM text meaningfully constitutes “testimony” (only that it does not constitute the testimony of the human publishing the post).
Thank you for reaffirming this. i didn’t mean to imply i was actively worried you were taking such a stance, just that i could imagine a worst-case possible future that it was worth keeping an eye on.
i thought the use of the word ‘testimony’ in the LLM-generated text is not testimony essay was very useful for conveying the concept the author wished to convey (however much i might have disagreed with the concept), but now that it’s being cited as the motivating factor for policy i suddenly find myself wishing they’d chosen a different word
for instance, if i ask claude to recite its system prompt, there is some sense in which it is giving personal testimony about its perceptions. just as sort of a proof of concept. on the other end of the spectrum, if i ask claude to describe what it ‘feels’ like for it to navigate an ethical dilemma where multiple values push against each other, there’s a sense in which its output is some kind of testimony, whether or not the testimony is true or even meaningful.
i trust the current moderation team to have sensible judgment about these kinds of things, and I think the new LLM block format is a really good strategy at solving the “torrent of LLM slop getting submitted daily” problem the moderation team alludes to, without making me worried that i’ll be in violation of the rules if i ever write a post that attempts to analyze some LLM ‘testimony’. but i do notice that i’m depending upon the moderation team’s good judgment. and i think that the second point in the quoted post, “As of 2025, LLM text does not have those [mental agency] elements behind it”, might be something about which reasonable people could differ, especially as time moves forward and more sophisticated models are released.
i guess what i’m worried about is, if LLM agents advance to the point where they might have novel contributions to make to lesswrong discourse, this policy might mutate into “lesswrong ought to be a human-only discussion platform, quarantined from the (potentially superpersuasive) effects of LLM outputs” for safety reasons, without an actual policy update being required. that perhaps the moderation team has a motive to reject LLM output of this nature whether or not LLM output ought to be considered testimony.
i don’t think this concern is all that serious and i would be very surprised if the moderation team ended up going that route. but i thought it worth pointing out regardless, just so that if that ends up happening i have a comment i can point back to.
Note that I also explicitly acknowledge this in my curation notice for that post (and that I disagree with the strength of the claim). In any case, Tsvi’s post is not the moderation policy, and the moderation policy is not taking a stance on whether LLM text meaningfully constitutes “testimony” (only that it does not constitute the testimony of the human publishing the post).
Thank you for reaffirming this. i didn’t mean to imply i was actively worried you were taking such a stance, just that i could imagine a worst-case possible future that it was worth keeping an eye on.