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by orbital-decay 3 days ago
>I don’t care whether you wrote every word with your bare hands. I care whether the thought is yours, whether you exercised judgment, whether the result deserves my attention and whether you’ll stand behind it once it leaves your screen.

Alright, compare the following degrees of autonomy:

- I wrote it, made sure everything's correct, let the LLM proofread it/translate it to English, and checked it afterwards

- I had brief scattered notes with no coherent idea, then threw it at an LLM to make it an article in whatever way it feels best because I don't care

- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a deep research agent spent ungodly amount of tokens and search and scraping requests, and put up an article (at least some grounding and it can depend on the harness quality)

- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a model did it in a single call with no real-life grounding at all

You're looking at my clearly generated article. Can you tell what is mine, what is collected from the web or another source by the agent, and what is sourced from the model's own knowledge? Sourcing is exactly what the generated text obfuscates.

3 comments

The difference between the first and the rest is usually blindingly obvious: LLMs are really terrible at crafting their own coherent narrative.
I hate LLM-generated writing, because it reads like corporate-speak. There's no voice there. I hate the experience of reading it.

Completely apart from that, I also hate posts that look like a 15-year-old on /r/thisisdeep, whether or not they used an LLM to wrap a lot of words around their absence-of-much-of-an-idea.

So I can hate posts on more than one axis. I hate the lack of decent writing, and I hate the lack of decent thinking.

I can make an exception for LLM translation, if the thinking is good. Even if the writing isn't perfect, it's better than LLM-generated-from-a-prompt text, because it has something with a real voice to start from.

Those issues existed well before LLMs. Everyone who reads needs a BS detector. It's unfortunate, though, that many such detectors have been replaced with AI detectors.
Part of the problem is that there’s far more BS now.
That's true. I don't know how to solve it, other than booking a long vacation until https://xkcd.com/810/.