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by flangola7
1140 days ago
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> Junk like Buzzfeed news Small complaint, Buzzfeed News was serious legitimate journalism, and made some of the most important investigative journalism achievements of the past decade. Buzzfeed (sans News) is the garbage clickbait side of the company. > At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizing Wikipedia articles. You're thinking of OpenAI's products. Raw LLMs do not sound like ChatGPT, which has been RLHF-trained into the soulless automaton you describe. LLaMA for example is less coherent, but is indistinguishable from a real person in its tone and mannerisms. If you ask ChatGPT a very ridiculous dumb question it will politely answer it fully, like an obedient untiring servant. LLaMA will tell you to stop being an idiot, just as a human on Reddit or HN would. |
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The ability to imitate someone's tone (long a staple of satirical writing), or to fool a lot of unread people, no doubt represents a true achievement for LLMs. But people easily fool themselves and believe what they want to believe, so LLMs simply play into the limitations of human models and explanations for the world rather than representing a new form of conscious being.
I think we can see an analogy in craft production versus mass production. Today machines can produce (for example) furniture of very high quality, rivaling or exceeding the output of a craft carpenter or joiner. The mass-produced goods cost less to make and have good-enough quality, and can even sometimes fool people into thinking a skilled person made their table. That doesn't mean we should call those machines carpenters or conclude the machines possess the same skills. With LLMs we see mass production at scale come to writing and some other trades (law, customer support, etc.) that we like to think of as requiring actual skill. Maybe other trades such as programming will also fall to LLM mass production. But that happens because the jobs consisted mainly of rote and repetition in the first place, and require little creativity or intelligence to imitate.