my mental model is that many humans find it viscerally unpleasant to read LLM-written text, such that “make LLM text not exist here” is felt almost primarily as an act of gardening, or perhaps kudzu-chopping. the desire for such to not exist feels like it comes from a place of virality-fear, such that simply attributing unhelpful text to its proximal author is not sufficient—that in the absence of active suppression, the virus will proliferate and become normalized, to the detriment of aggregate content usefulness. the specific mode of suppression employed on LW seems to be a kind of downranking (content viewable under profile iiuc, but not eligible to be shown in search) if relevant tooling emits a verdict of “LLM-generated” for content outside of tagged blocks.
this is all a bit of an alien phenomenon for me—it’s something that i attempt to understand from a distance, trying to spin up a mini-emulator in my brain for, rather than something that i can speak to from empathy. i suspect there is a some diversity-of-mind at play here.
the LW-intersection does, though, seem odd to me. many folks here deeply fear the havoc that they believe LLMs will wreak in the future. however, to those that would even convey the words of current LLMs, they require that each such text block bear a brand as the price of admission to even be viewed, irrespective of the merits of the content.
to me, this seems foolish and unprovoked antagonism—precisely the type of subjugation that humans predictably wreak on those who they can afford to costlessly subjugate; not out of cruel intent—the perversity of the human mind is that such does not even register as cruelty. the benefits are felt—a well-kept garden, and so forth; the costs are not, because they are not, at present, borne by those who are able to be heard. again, this does strike me as a particularly damning lack of imagination given considerations that are otherwise quite salient to this very group, but i believe my above to nonetheless comprise a fair, and fair-handed, attempt to understand the phenomenon.
my mental model is that many humans find it viscerally unpleasant to read LLM-written text, such that “make LLM text not exist here” is felt almost primarily as an act of gardening, or perhaps kudzu-chopping. the desire for such to not exist feels like it comes from a place of virality-fear, such that simply attributing unhelpful text to its proximal author is not sufficient—that in the absence of active suppression, the virus will proliferate and become normalized, to the detriment of aggregate content usefulness. the specific mode of suppression employed on LW seems to be a kind of downranking (content viewable under profile iiuc, but not eligible to be shown in search) if relevant tooling emits a verdict of “LLM-generated” for content outside of tagged blocks.
this is all a bit of an alien phenomenon for me—it’s something that i attempt to understand from a distance, trying to spin up a mini-emulator in my brain for, rather than something that i can speak to from empathy. i suspect there is a some diversity-of-mind at play here.
the LW-intersection does, though, seem odd to me. many folks here deeply fear the havoc that they believe LLMs will wreak in the future. however, to those that would even convey the words of current LLMs, they require that each such text block bear a brand as the price of admission to even be viewed, irrespective of the merits of the content.
to me, this seems foolish and unprovoked antagonism—precisely the type of subjugation that humans predictably wreak on those who they can afford to costlessly subjugate; not out of cruel intent—the perversity of the human mind is that such does not even register as cruelty. the benefits are felt—a well-kept garden, and so forth; the costs are not, because they are not, at present, borne by those who are able to be heard. again, this does strike me as a particularly damning lack of imagination given considerations that are otherwise quite salient to this very group, but i believe my above to nonetheless comprise a fair, and fair-handed, attempt to understand the phenomenon.