[tomlue]

If I spend hours writing and rewriting a paragraph into something I love while using AI to iterate, did I write that paragraph?

edit: Also, I think maybe you don't appreciate the people who struggle to write well. They are not proud of the mistakes in their writing.

[kentm]

> did I write that paragraph?

No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.

[jama211]

What about when someone who can barely type (like stephen hawking used to, 3 minutes per sentence using his cheek) uses autocomplete to reduce the unbelievable effort required to type out sentences? That person could pick the auto completed sentence that is closest to what they’re trying to communicate, and such a thing can be a life saver.

[skydhash]

You may as well ask for a person that can walk to be able to compete in a marathon using a car.

I’m all for using technology for accessibility. But this kind of whataboutism is pure nonsense.

[jama211]

The intention isn’t whataboutism, it’s about where do you draw the line? And your example betrays you…

[tomlue]

Forgive a sharp example, but consider someone who is disabled and cannot write or speak well. If they send a loving letter to a family member using an LLM to help form words and sentences they otherwise could not, do you really think the recipient feels cheated by the LLM? Would you seriously accuse them of not having written that letter?

[fzeroracer]

If you buy a hallmark greetings card and send that to someone with your signature on it, did you write the whole card?

[netsharc]

Your arguments are verging on the obtuse.

Read the article again. Rob Pike got a letter from a machine saying it is "deeply grateful". There's no human there expressing anything, worse, it's a machine gaslighting the recipient.

If a family member used LLM to write a letter to another, then at least the recipient can believe the sender feels the gratefulness in his/her human soul. If they used LLM to write a message in their own language, they would've proofread it to see if they agree with the sentiment, and "take ownership" of the message. If they used LLM to write a message in a foreign language, there's a sender there with a feeling, and a trust of the technology to translate the message to a language they don't know in the hopes that the technology does it correctly.

If it turns out the sender just told a machine to send their friends each a copy-pasted message, the sender is a lazy shallow asshole, but there's still in their heart an attempt of brightening someone's day, however lazily executed...

[tomlue]

I think maybe you missed that my response was to this comment:

> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?

I already said in other comments that the OP was a different situation.

[jama211]

I think you created it the same way christian von koenigsegg makes supercars. You didn’t hand make each panel, or hand design the exact aerodynamics of the wing, an engineer with a computer algorithm did that. But you made it happen, and that’s still cool

[prmoustache]

It is not about being proud, it is about being sincere.

If you send me a photo of the moon supposedly taken with your smartphone but enhanced by the photo app to show all the details of the moon, I know you aren't sincere and sending me random slop. Same if you are sending me words you cannot articulate.