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jibaltoday at 12:11 AM1 replyview on HN

> The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either.

This is so obviously true to intelligent people (and is even a point made in the article) ... it's sad that you're getting downvoted.

The OP wrote

> When I talk to a person, I expect that they are telling me things out of their head — that they have developed a belief and are trying to communicate it to me.

But when I'm having a conversation about a subject (rather than with a friend, partner, or other person with whom I have a relationship and the conversation is part of the having of that relationship) I don't care what is in that person's head, I care about the truth of the matter, so I'm far more interested in their sources, their logic and the validity of same. Unless I'm a psychologist doing a survey, why should I care about some random person's beliefs? Since I'm a truth seeker, I care about their arguments, and of course the quality of their arguments is of paramount importance. I appreciate people who can back up their arguments, and LLM summaries that are chock full of facts gleaned from the massive training data that includes a vast amount of human knowledge are fully appreciated--while being aware that hallucination is possible so I often double check things regardless of the source. OTOH, the pushback to this is from people I consider worse than irrelevant--they not only are willfully ignorant but they reject knowledge seeking for irrational ideological reasons. (I myself see the LLM industry to be extremely problematic, but as long as LLMs exist and are capable of producing quality signal--which is the given here--then I will use them.)

This whole page is illustrative: so many people are telling us things out of their head ... that have nothing to do with the article because they didn't read it. So they blather about their beliefs and opinions about support--because that's how they interpreted the title. These comments are useless.

P.S.

> If all you care about is the facts, and not the other’s relationship to them, why engage with a person at all?

I already said: I'm a truth seeker. Also I sometimes seek to persuade people in public forums--and not necessarily the person I'm corresponding with. And missing is any reason why I should care about internet randos' relationships with their beliefs, other than as a psychological survey.

> You could query a LLM for whatever subject, argument or counterpoint you wish.

I can do better, and can do more, as noted.

> Besides, your hypothetical summaries chock full of facts don’t exist, at least not yet. Most LLM summaries are chock full of filler, thus the name slop, thus why us “ignorant” people hate reading it.

This is an example of a belief that is not supported by the facts--if it's even a belief, which I doubt--it's emo ideology. Putting "ignorant" in quotes doesn't falsify it, and I have never encountered a remotely intelligent person who "hates" reading LLM summaries--this is in the same category as people who reject Wikipedia citations because "anyone can edit it". This person unintelligently reduces all LLM output to "slop"--maybe he should try actually reading the head article, which has a quite different take.


Replies

WD-42today at 12:28 AM

If all you care about is the facts, and not the other’s relationship to them, why engage with a person at all? You could query a LLM for whatever subject, argument or counterpoint you wish.

Besides, your hypothetical summaries chock full of facts don’t exist, at least not yet. Most LLM summaries are chock full of filler, thus the name slop, thus why us “ignorant” people hate reading it.