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by mrob 12 days ago
Even if you can reject the aesthetic argument for non-fiction works (although read some of Dijkstra's papers for a good counterargument), it is still a problem because it breaks an important quality signalling mechanism.

Pre-LLMs, a paper with no spelling or grammar errors showed that somebody had put effort into writing and editing it. If they cared about the presentation, they probably also cared about the content. LLMs routinely produce nonsense that looks superficially like high-quality work.

There are far too many papers to read all of them. LLM slop is evidence that something is probably low quality. As the saying goes, "if you can't be bothered writing it, I can't be bothered reading." The rare outliers will get enough citations and recommendations to overcome this filter.

1 comments

This is fallacious. The fact that someone used LLM to write their paper does not negate its findings.
It certainly casts suspicion on the ‘findings’ which may well be hallucinated or subtly wrong.
Because humans totally don't get things wrong or fabricate lies. Even the term "hallucination" is a clumsy way to describe what is happening when an LLM spits out an unsound statement. What you are doing is more akin to a hallucination than what the LLM is doing. Even in the process of criticizing this technology, you cannot help but to anthropomorphize it.
* Because humans totally don't get things wrong or fabricate lies.*

Not in the same way no. Why so trenchant in defending a word generator?

If you prefer for hallucinate substitute ‘generate plausible but incorrect text’. I don’t think of LLMs as anything approaching human, sorry to disappoint.

I'm not "defending a word generator." The tool does not have agency. I'm saying that just because the author of a study uses an LLM, that doesn't mean the study is incorrect. Even in your weird attempts to form a retort, you are still unwittingly assigning agency to a tool. If a tool is used incorrectly, if the author does not check their own work, that's on them. And do you think an author who makes such mistakes would be more competent without an LLM at their disposal? Please. People make careless mistakes, they fabricate data, etc.

>If you prefer for hallucinate substitute ‘generate plausible but incorrect text’.

Yes I prefer accurate statements as opposed to anthropomorphizing a tool, which is what you were doing before.

That's not the point being made.
That's not the point though, the point being made ist that an LLM written paper very likely doesn't actually find something despite looking like it does on the surface
I would like some sort of proof of this claim. I genuinely don't know, but I would suspect that the gap between "things found" in LLM v. Human papers is not as great as we would like it to be.
They don't have any proof, because the claim is wrong.