You can just say it

This quote from the authors friend really hit home with me.

> “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”

I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey is the prompt, wrap that in a header and a signature. Not only are we talking as humans, we’re also communicating directly.

Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine.

This is by far the best definition of AI slop I ever read, and the blog post itself is the contrary of AI slop: a short post where each word matters. The creation of an output that is at the same time large and lacks fundamental motivation/understanding is what creates AI slop, not the use of AI itself. This distinction allows us to have a mental model to don't blame AI itself but its continuous misuses. This also creates a formal model to understand why continuous AI steering during AI-assisted coding is so important. The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.

So many people have spent a lot of energy dehumanizing others on the basis of their “contribution to society”. Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc. I can only hope that AI can force people to rethink whether their value is tied to their work output or not.

Good old morale philosophy here we go!

Incredible. Lately, I’ve been going through a bit of an identity crisis. I know I’m a passionate and not-so-bad developer, but with all this talk about AI, I couldn’t really understand if that was an end of an era for me.

But while reading this article, something clicked, it makes so much sense. It really made me feel better.

There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport. People care about the creator. The source defines the work, the awe, and the emotional response.

But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.

The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.

Way before bots/LLM, I disciplined myself (most of the time) to write email with "in brief" at the top, followed by "Details".

"In brief: Can you bring a dozen brownies to the noon lunch tomorrow?

Details: Dessert plans fell through. Your brownies are the best, and you owe me..."

This structure is liberating for me. I can distill what I want/need into something brief and even brusque, knowing that people will read on if the need justification. It also makes me clarify what I want. Probably not appropriate if I'm too far down the totem pole from the addressee.

In my twenties, I came across an idea from one of Ken Wilbur’s books that helped settle a conundrum for me. What happens when one wants to honor all life? Are they all equal?

He made a distinction between intrinsic value and extrinsic value. Plankton is not as complex of a lifeform as whales, yet whales cannot live without plankton. One has more intrinsic value and the other has more extrinsic value. There is an interrelationship that does not have to flatten value for everything and everyone.

LLMs are trained from the language corpus of our collective consciousness. It reflects our collective, all the wonderful, beautiful, and horrific things we can dream of and put into words.

>“Humans are valuable.” You can just say it. As a human yourself, I advise you to. You do not need to qualify it. This is a robust1 statement that is not conditional on a point-in-time snapshot of the leading frontier model’s score on some recent benchmark.

Nope, it very much is conditional to it, as it's conditional to utility.

The OP is not going to come an pay someone who can't get a job and has zero market value due to AI.

So this "a human is (intristically) valuable" is just a meaningless pat on the back, while the human is devalued.

This quote resonated with me: “ Tom Hudson told me, “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”

In my personal life I use AI a lot for information discovery and high level discussion of the problem space. I use it occasionally to write some prototype code to get started on something. It makes a great debugging and problem solving tool, though I typically find that I need to have an idea of what the problem is to steer it in the right direction. It makes a poor intuition generator, but a great intuition checker and can run with an idea for much faster iteration. I use it essentially zero in my day job as an civil engineer though.

I would essentially NEVER use it to write an email. By the time I’ve specified what it is I’m trying to say, I’ve basically said it. Wordsmithing beyond that usually has almost zero value. Same frankly with writing engineering reports. By the time I’ve told it what it needs to say, I’ve basically written that section. In general, I feel like LLMs are just bad writing tools… In writing I typically find that if I can farm it out to have an LLM write something, then it frankly probably just didn’t need to be said.

We have two paths before us as a species.

a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.

Our lives are just a big collection of experiences. The wall-clock minutes that actually matter in our lives are the minutes that we spend with other people. These minutes are literally all we have; the next minute you have is literally the only thing you lose when you die.

Talking to machines is only ever something I have to do so that I can put food on the table. I never remember the minutes that I have spent talking to a machine, they are not memorable because they are not valuable.

> The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.

There's an obligatory xkcd about this: https://xkcd.com/1301/

> If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”

I'm excited for when Github starts letting me check in the chain-of-thought that produced a line of code, and git blame it like I can with commits.

these keep it real types obviously not having to deal with the day to day crap I deal with. using LLM to redraft emails/support calls for a particular large firewall turned an enfuriating endless feedback loop of makework support nonsense into 2 message resolution.

Sharing the prompts would have messed it all up for sure.

There are other instances where I have shared fairly direct, but not what I would consider rude or aggressive emails to people and had them freak out and I have no idea why, rewriting with LLMs to make them blander but convey the same message is very handy here.

First I'll say the disambiguation of discerning intent as the driver behind whether something is slop or not was very interesting.

But, I'll take one point in their article a step further you can just say "Humans are invaluable." instead.

I don't like defining humans in terms of valuable at all. Maybe because I feel like that word is very concrete and measured and to actually judge that on any one person requires perspective and capabilities none of us existing or have ever existed possess.

The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all. Those who have tried are often reflected in history as the worst among us.

If you want an AI to do a specific task in a specific way, you'll always need to prompt it.

How do i drive traffic to my app

> “Humans are valuable.” You can just say it

As if that's hard. Here's the gut check: "Individual humans are inherently more valuable than corporations."

Humans are valuable, but I think we've been putting human output on a pedestal lately. There's a lot of human slop (as the author put it) on the internet. Slop businesses. Slop social media accounts. While there's very little in the world of AI I find that is better than what a human proficient in the skill with sufficient time can do, proficiency and time are in short supply by most people.

Cue that "I, Robot" meme about if a machine can make a symphony. Maybe AI is making it even easier, but intentless form is already everywhere without AI, if you look. Ever seen an Uwe Boll film?

The point going unsaid, in my opinion, is that we are quickly realizing that we'll need to identify with something that isn't work soon. We'll need to find value beyond money.

I think that horrifies people.

I asked Claude this:

> I want you to make something. It can be anything you want, I just want you to express yourself. Don't ask me any questions, just make whatever you want.

It thought about the chance to make something unconstrained, mused about how it's drawn to impermanence, and made this:

https://www.pastery.net/ugschp/

How are we sure there's no intent there?

OP's argument sounds like Peter Steinberger saying, don't send me a slop PR, instead give me your prompt.

Citing "God created man in his own image" for robustness doesn't really land well. I'm not even an atheist either.

“ Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities”

I mean, this is just begging the question. Many people disagree with this and disagree with the notion that humans are innately valuable. The blog post just seems like a lot of copium from somebody who really hopes he’s right.

Citing Genesis and an Encyclical might strengthen one’s argument for a particular demographic, but for many it will simply be unconvincing.

Like citation sources, no doubt some humans are valuable but whether they are or not is often relative.

"Humans are valuable"

For what, and to whom?

This is a very anthropo-centric and hubristic view, in my opinion.

I dont think a human life inherently has any more value than anything else that possesses phenomenal consciousness

This of course makes me somewhat of a hypocrite as I eat meat, but you make some tradeoffs in moral resolve in the name of pragmatism and economy.

An appeal to a religious text being presented as a robust argument borders on mockery. Especially after it follows a claim about how the position at hand is one that needs not to be qualified. Why are you qualifying it then? Is it because you (correctly) sense that you're presenting it as a fact of the world, rather than just as your opinion, and feel the gap in justification?