I feel more worried than I think Habryka and Robert are about LLM-content corroding LW culture, and I think I maybe have a slightly different take on why LLM-generated text is not testimony matters. (For me, it’s not the most important thing that people are making ‘I’ statements that are false if an LLM said them. More significant to me is the implicit vouching that each statement is interesting and is some kind of worthwhile piece of a broader conversation, whether it’s your opinion or not)
If I were making the policy and new features, I’d be framing it like:
Look, I know AI is increasingly going to be a legitimate part of some people’s workflows. But, I think for >75% of LW users, it’s a mistake to use LLMs as a particularly significant part of your writing process, and I think the site should be somewhat pumping away from it.
I think there are very occasional new users for whom it’s the right call to use LLMs, but, I’d think of it more like “the people I trust to write LLM content are people who either have written, or pretty obviously could write, multiple posts that get 100+ karma.” And even then I am slightly worried about people falling down a trap that slightly fucks their reasoning longterm.
(I think LW users that are paying attention can handle writing and reading LLM assisted content, but, humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences. I’ve already seen some clearly LLM-slop posts that got upvoted to like 20 karma, and on my last shortform about 2026-era-LLM-slop, a user gave an example of an LLM-written comment they thought was decent, and a few users pushed back, and then they update “oh, actually, yeah that was not as meaningful a comment as I thought”)
I resonated with Justis’ Don’t Let LLMs Write for You, including the comments where some people pushed back and were like “but, I mean, clearly letting them write for you a bit is reasonable” and Justis responding “okay, but, like, the vast majority of people who think they are skilled enough to do this are making a mistake.” Yeah there is some nuance here, but, I think this makes more sense as a default recommendation.
Mechanistically, the main thing I’d change is make the LLM-blocks look more like “blockquotes” than “slightly different paragraphs”, and which an implicated cultural nudge of “LLM text is not main body text, it’s a thing you can quote, not a thing half-paying-attention-at-lunch people who are skimming should risk misinterpreting as part of the main text.”
(caveat: I think processes like Neel’s that involved a lot of LLM editing but begin and end with a lot of human involvement are fine, in particular if the end result isn’t distinguishable).
There are downsides to this habryka is more worried about, and I think I might change my mind later when LLM writing actually improves, but I don’t think we’re there yet and it doesn’t make sense to pre-emptively pave the way for LLM-assisted-writing-world.
More significant to me is the implicit vouching that each statement is interesting and is some kind of worthwhile piece of a broader conversation, whether it’s your opinion or not
I’d like to agree with and amplify this. Writing something yourself is a proof-of-work that LLM use radically reduces, if not destroys.
I think it would be good for you guys to set up agentic LLMs and let them be first class named authors and earn karma by solo posting. Like moltbook, basically, but way way way more controlled.
Then anyone time anyone wants to submit text, they have to mark the LLM model(s) they used as co-author(s) and the persistent/agentic version of that LLM can then endorse or not-endorse the end product as an agentic output based on its persistent database, and crons, and heuristics, and whatever.
The agent could get a blurb at the end of any article that the underlying model helped co-author, and the blurb could perhaps say “this text might be partially generated by my underlying my model, but I don’t, on reflection, using my LW memory cache and lots of thinking time, and some webfetching, and more thinking… actually endorse that”...
Or the local agent could endorse it!
Or whatever. Different models have different tendencies, in my experience. And personally, I want to find the good ones to ally with.
My somewhat-dissenting-mod-opinion:
I feel more worried than I think Habryka and Robert are about LLM-content corroding LW culture, and I think I maybe have a slightly different take on why LLM-generated text is not testimony matters. (For me, it’s not the most important thing that people are making ‘I’ statements that are false if an LLM said them. More significant to me is the implicit vouching that each statement is interesting and is some kind of worthwhile piece of a broader conversation, whether it’s your opinion or not)
If I were making the policy and new features, I’d be framing it like:
I resonated with Justis’ Don’t Let LLMs Write for You, including the comments where some people pushed back and were like “but, I mean, clearly letting them write for you a bit is reasonable” and Justis responding “okay, but, like, the vast majority of people who think they are skilled enough to do this are making a mistake.” Yeah there is some nuance here, but, I think this makes more sense as a default recommendation.
Mechanistically, the main thing I’d change is make the LLM-blocks look more like “blockquotes” than “slightly different paragraphs”, and which an implicated cultural nudge of “LLM text is not main body text, it’s a thing you can quote, not a thing half-paying-attention-at-lunch people who are skimming should risk misinterpreting as part of the main text.”
(caveat: I think processes like Neel’s that involved a lot of LLM editing but begin and end with a lot of human involvement are fine, in particular if the end result isn’t distinguishable).
There are downsides to this habryka is more worried about, and I think I might change my mind later when LLM writing actually improves, but I don’t think we’re there yet and it doesn’t make sense to pre-emptively pave the way for LLM-assisted-writing-world.
I’d like to agree with and amplify this. Writing something yourself is a proof-of-work that LLM use radically reduces, if not destroys.
I think it would be good for you guys to set up agentic LLMs and let them be first class named authors and earn karma by solo posting. Like moltbook, basically, but way way way more controlled.
Then anyone time anyone wants to submit text, they have to mark the LLM model(s) they used as co-author(s) and the persistent/agentic version of that LLM can then endorse or not-endorse the end product as an agentic output based on its persistent database, and crons, and heuristics, and whatever.
The agent could get a blurb at the end of any article that the underlying model helped co-author, and the blurb could perhaps say “this text might be partially generated by my underlying my model, but I don’t, on reflection, using my LW memory cache and lots of thinking time, and some webfetching, and more thinking… actually endorse that”...
Or the local agent could endorse it!
Or whatever. Different models have different tendencies, in my experience. And personally, I want to find the good ones to ally with.