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gabriel666smithyesterday at 8:59 PM1 replyview on HN

Quite! It's very easy to send a HN link to one of our new artificial friends to see what they have to say about it. Subsequently publicly posting the inference variation you receive strikes me as very self-centered. Passing it off as your own words - which the majority seem to - is doubly bizarre.

It's very funny to imagine people prompting: "Write a compelling comment, for me, to pass off as my thoughts, for this HN news thread, which will attract both upvotes and engagement.".

In good faith, per the guidelines: What losers!


Replies

xpeyesterday at 9:44 PM

I agree with much of what you say, but it isn't as simple as "post to LLM, paste on HN". There are notable effects from (1) one's initial prompt; (2) one's phrasing of the question; (3) one's follow-up conversation; (4) one's final selection of what to post.

For me, I care a lot about the quality of thinking, as measure by the output itself, because this is something I can observe*.

I also care -- but somewhat less -- about guessing as to the underlying generative mechanisms. By "generative mechanisms" I mean simply "Where did the thought come from?" One particular person? Some meme (optimized for cultural transmission)? Some marketing campaign? Some statistic from a paper that no one can find anymore? Some dogma? Some LLM? Some combination? It is a mess to disentangle, so I prefer to focus on getting to ground on the thought itself.

* Though we still have to think about the uncertainty that comes from interpretation! Great communication is hard in our universe, it would seem.

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