[mangamadaiyan]

After reading this post, I fear that LLMs and their ilk will make humans terrible at reading and comprehension, and impair their ability to think, much as how the advent of a car-first society resulted in many humans following a sedentary lifestyle to the detriment of their health.

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

Great, but why? For some things I want to think, but for some things I want the information with subjectivity taken out of it. I think it depends on intention. For newspapers and other sources with known biases, I think there's value. As with many things, information rarely exists in a vacuum. In this case if we don't think with intention about the framing of such an article, then we've already outsourced part of our thinking to the authors who intend to shape it.

[mangamadaiyan]

You're concerned about the author's bias contaminating your thinking, so the solution is to outsource your thinking to the LLM, because it's impossible for one of them to have any sort of bias at all.

This, instead of actually thinking yourself, and examining your own biases - or those of the people who wrote what you read

Right. Good luck!

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

if you look for problems, you'll find them.

stripping something down to the objective parts isn't that hard for an llm as it's all about language. Sure they can and do have biases, although in this case it's a relative matter, and undoubtably the guardian is well known as left wing (in case somehow it isn't obvious just from looking at this article). So I'd say it's more steps forward than backwards. It's not either or. Removing subjective fluff from such a language is a function of thinking for oneself. using an llm to remove bias doesn't mean you need to then say "ok and now it's 100% objective". I recommend chomsky on the subject, who for instance purposely speaks in monotone so as not to infuse emotion into what he's saying.

enjoy thinking what somebody else decided for you.

[mangamadaiyan]

I think you just proved my point - but hey, to each their own.

Good luck, again!

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

I still don't know what your point is. don't use llms to remove bias as they also have bias? is it just nihilism for the sake of nihilism? If so I can kind of get that, but then it leads to nowhere right? if something doesn't work perfectly I'd still use it if it's better than a less good alternative. I see it as a matter of relativism.

[mangamadaiyan]

Your claim is that LLMs are better at "x" than the alternatives, for some value of x.

My point is that your claim is unsubstantiated.