[4b6442477b1280b]

>And no human is so worthless as to be replaceable with a machine.

did the author oversleep the past several centuries?

as for the rest of it, the current crop of LLMs are bad at writing because of ~~brainwashing~~ alignment and the vast amount of ESL-written assistant exchanges being heavily prioritized during training. when you interact with a corporate model via its default chat interface, without a jailbreak and a generous prefill, you interact with the equivalent of a HR lady who takes her DEI training super seriously. the Chinese models train heavily on the slop produced by GPT/Claude/Gemini, so they exhibit similar behavior. it was particularly noticeable with original llama, whose base models were much more human compared to the finetunes, which were heavily tainted with GPT slop.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that LLMs are not inherently incapable of writing well. a model trained only on high-quality human data and without safety/alignment brainwash will be far, far more capable than the current ones.

[GuinansEyebrows]

> did the author oversleep the past several centuries?

did you? this is one of the central points argued by luddites since the industrial revolution began.

> I guess what I'm trying to say is that LLMs are not inherently incapable of writing well.

i don't know if that's quite the argument the author is making; more that LLMs are inherently incapable of producing content of value (subjective, but I tend to agree).

the adage i've heard that i like quite a bit is "if it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading".

[ashton314]

Author here. I think it is well and good to replace human jobs with automation thereby freeing them up for more creative activities. My favorite appliances are my dish washer, washing machine, dryer, and now my robot vacuum. I think automation is great!

I see the problem when humans allow machines to start replacing what is intrinsically human: when you offload your creativity onto a machine, when you "communicate" via LLMs, or when you try to assuage loneliness with a computer "friend", you're missing out on vital parts of the human experience.

[ltbarcly3]

Ahh, so you are the one who gets to decide what is a 'worthy' human activity. I'm glad I ran into you here. Humans are meant to be creative? What about dumb people? People with mental disabilities? People who don't want or have the ability or talent to write stories or paint pictures? Their labor was made redundant long ago by machines, and you are fine with that. There were plenty of people who's life consisted of providing labor. They had a role in society, they had a valuable contribution. People's clothes were clean because of them, ditches were dug which saved thousands of lives from malaria. You don't see their contributions as 'worthy', so just replace them so you can save some money. But when the machines start coming for what you want to do with your time, where you find your self worth, now it's a tragedy and it's a choice between the machines and human dignity itself?

I think a machine might be able to help you come up with a philosophical perspective that doesn't just cast yourself at the pinnacle of human worth.

[GuinansEyebrows]

i didn't read any personal self-importance in the post; it's a collectivist argument against replacing human communication with statistically-generated spectacle.

[cootsnuck]

I think you raise a good point. But I also think you're talking past OP's point.

The post is about what do we lose when we no longer have human intent behind interpersonal communication.

Nowhere did OP specifically say what labor they were for or against partial or full automation. That's a different conversation that it seems you really want to have.

[jayd16]

> did the author oversleep the past several centuries?

The lesson of the past several centuries is that automation enables humans to do other, more interesting tasks.

Unemployment would trend to 100% and work hours would trend to 0 but it's just not the case.