Proof of care in the age of AI(jacobfilipp.com) |
Proof of care in the age of AI(jacobfilipp.com) |
...which reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyk5U2p-msk ("I must be a narcissist / God knows that I can’t resist / To make a song and dance about it").
I would go further and quantify how much of the message is AI in situations where humans edit it.
now more than ever can fake it
EDIT: After seeing the comments, I am realizing how little I ever rewrote my own writings, an admitted weakness of mine. It was the blindspot behind which I made my reply!
We always had to write our first couple drafts in pencil/handwritten in school. Eventually we moved to typing the final draft by the time I hit high school but exams were always handwritten still and now I feel quite "old" at 38 knowing that there are adults on this very forum that probably did not have to handwrite much beyond elementary school.
I think that was pretty common amongst "keeners" doing writing assignments.
We also don't know how many sheets went in the bin.
I've joked with friends its the "Farm to table" for thoughts, at least as much as it can be. Obviously you can just recite a LLM output, but that's more work IMO.
Maybe PRs these days need to "test" the human? "Explain how this code works, without AI, or it gets rejected."
That is consistent for both pages, but inconsistent with how they seem to be ordered within the text.
I guess the chapters were re-arranged post-script, with the "Storytellers" chapter inserted between them later?
If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.
I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.
I've long been frustrated by the lack of support, but within the last few months had a change of perspective. I realized that this is actually a blessing! This language is the only remaining text on the Internet that I read and am sure is not LLM generated. And when spoken, I believe much less infected by LLM-isms that English.
I've done some work building an OCR corpus, but actually stopped now and don't plan to complete it. Working OCR would unlock text that the AI labs would slurp up, train on, and improve their infinite slop generators. We don't need that.
Also, what’s his problem with the “Witch Priestess from the North?”
EDIT: Oh, the blue backgrounds are links. https://jacobfilipp.com/new-lord/
It isn’t?
^ at the bottom of the article
Then, the typist could simply be typing in an AI generated piece of text.
The only solution is to trust the person who handed you the work to accurately tell you the author, and then trust the author to be telling you any attribution.
I personally have earned this trust as people know anything I AI generate will have an Assisted-by: tag on it.
that seems pretty ripe for a new Geldof / Bono combo to use thinking they are doing good
I'm not sure how much actual advice one can take from this essay though beyond "use personal commitment (e.g. time or presence) to signal importance/care" and "go offline" (aka touch grass)
The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.
It's like lamented handwritten script when the printing press was invented....
I've also started noticing people annotating a whole doc "written by humans" to try to convey effort and care. That's fine for some things but do that too often and a reader will be left with two thoughts:
1. Did they actually write this by hand? No way 2. Should they have written some of this with AI? Seems like a waste of time formatting some of this when they could've been spending their time thinking critically
Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.
Typewriters?
I am sad this infected code documentation and PR descriptions. This kind of stuff used to exist in order keep managers/executives busy not to keep engineers busy...
Simple algorithm for not wasting your time:
1) By default nothing is valuable or worth your while 2) Aggressively hunt for signals indicating potential worth (ancient pedigree and/or critical acclaim being most valuable) 3) Choose maybe 10% of what survives for actual reading, scan some others and dump the rest
Oh, and let LLMs summarize near-zero information articles like this one.
It probably exists in some form, any suggestions?
The best filter is time -- the cream does eventually rise to the top. And conveniently the time filter also excludes AI slop.
The problem, at least for me, is that I don't trust AI. Subtle mistakes, outright hallucinations, or mistakes/omissions that an actual expert of the domain would immediately notice, whatever.
And as soon as I encounter anything that even looks like one of the typical AI tells or, in long content, a lack of cohesion or repetition... I can't help myself from immediately second-guessing every little thing in the content. And where there's smoke, usually there is fire... and I find myself annoyed for having wasted time to read something I had to crosscheck with other sources and found my suspicions confirmed. At least sometimes I learn something from digging into original sources, but frankly, I don't have the time for that.
Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.
> Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.
Generally speaking the ones that do care are those that also hope their own creations are/will be appreciated by people that similarly pour their heart into them, and they really don't understand that most people just see things for what they as consumers get out of them.
On some level writing on the net now is for an AI audience anyway. (Greetings fellow bots).
That's fine, but I don't think the author would suggest writing e.g. library documentation by hand. It's clearly advice for the creator side of the problem of low signal-to-noise ratio in the digital space and how to stand out/signal, rather than a general rule
The results speak for themselves. Those early printed works are beautiful to a degree few other books have managed since.
The reverse: sometimes people care if you do. "Caring" and "effort" tend to be good indicators.
But imagine there's some yet-undiscovered <something> that has big implications, and conditions exist for its discovery. Then someone stumbles across it, puts out a hasty tweet, walks off & doesn't look back. Took no effort whatsoever, didn't care much about it. Or maybe some AI does that.
Would that reduce the value of the message? Imho: no.
I'm hoping we'll find ways to separate the gems from mountains of slop they're buried in, that don't require AI-powered tools to wade through that slop & pick the gems. Or establish incentives to not produce all that slop in the 1st place. Not sure if that's doable or how.
But I don't care that much about AI-generated or not (although I'd prefer if stuff were marked as such). Useful, well-written, interesting, exactly what you needed, providing a new angle on a subject, innovative: that's where it's at.
Btw I'm all out of soapboxes. Would a potato crate do, in a pinch? Not gettin' a tattoo!
When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.
An infant scrawling the alphabet in its own excrement would have that "signal"...
We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.
E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.
If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.
I disagree and think this is an overly extreme take.
I will agree that the trust/correctness thing is kind of silly because humans can be and are often wrong just as much.
But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output. Maybe LLM output is OK at work. I honestly don't care if its used for corporate bureaucracy stuff I probably wasn't actually reading it anyway outside of skimming it or putting into an LLM to summarize for me.
But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection. We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
So I don't think its unreasonable at all to be immediately dismissive of anything that is pure LLM output. The actual content itself is only one half of the equation.
I used to use other signals to help judge: literacy, reputation of the writer or publisher, the media they used to communicate. Now even governments are distributing notice of official policy through poorly written tweets, yet the Internet is flooded with whole websites of AI slop that looks on the surface to be professionally made. We lost the signals that used to help us filter out the signal from the noise.
The alternative is not to read all content carefully because we don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to do so. This article is about other ways we can provide those signals. Even if the content is crap, the fact that someone has to sacrifice to produce it limits the amount they can produce, requiring them to prioritize what they produce, and signaling that this was important enough to them that it was worth the sacrifice.