alt Hacker NewsSo, maybe this is not quite a fair analogy but a lot of famous modern artists don't do a lot of the actual execution of their work. If Jeff Koons relies on a team of artisans and technicians to make a balloon dog, and if Dale Chihuly depends on a workshop of glass blowers to make a chandelier, and if Paul Cummins used a team of ceramicists to make poppies, what did the headlining artist contribute? Not everything, certainly, but also not nothing. Ideas, vision, feedback, guidance?
I think we're used to the idea in math of generally every idea coming from a specific contributing human. In code, maybe less so, but still we generally we find it useful to attribute at least _lines_ to who touched them last. But maybe, if Claude were just less annoying in the prose it made, and could better imitate an actual human, we'd be able to get used to the idea of humans claiming credit for something that the human guided the software to create?
I appreciate the connection to artists guiding their teams. I think that's a good analogy.
At the same time, when Koons or Chihuly or Cummins sign their work I do have that expectation that they guided the piece in a meaningful and material way or that the people who built it did it in such a way that owes lineage and authorization to the style Koons/Chihuly/Cummins developed. If I asked one of them about their work and it was clear that they had become so disconnected from it that they couldn't be seen as the authority on it, that they'd delegated that away, then I'd also feel them signing it had a mark of dishonesty about it.
To that end, I genuinely don't know Mr. Gomila's engagement here. Worse, it, to my ear, very clearly is written in a style that's extremely reminiscent of LLMs. In that way, it directly invokes that feeling of inauthenticity when he claims authorship.
This reminds me of academic writing there there's sometimes a convention in author lists that the first author(s) did more of the work and the last author(s) were the PIs and guides. This anchors the work amidst all the authors, at least loosely. I understand that if I want to ask a question about the details of the procedure I can reach out to the first author and if I'm trying to understand the larger research objectives of the lab I can investigate the last author.
Personally, I think I'd feel more comfortable with this piece if it were attributed in that style.
Or, again, if this is genuinely work done in the majority by Mr. Gomila and the writing feels LLM-derived for some other reason then it's merely an unfortunate side-effect of this writing register.