Comment by calf

AI for writing or research is useful like a dice roll. Terence Tao famously showed how talking to an LLM gave him an idea/approach to a proof that he hadn't immediately thought of (but probably he would have considered it eventually). The other day I wrote an unusal, four-word neologism that I'm pretty sure no one has ever seen, and the AI immediately drew the correct connection to more standard terminology and arguments used, so I did not even have to expand/explain and write it out myself.

I don't know but I am considering the possibility that even for everyday tasks, this kind of exploratory shortcut can be a simple convenience. Furthermore, it is precisely the lack of context that enables LLMs to make these non-human, non-specific connective leaps, their weakness also being their strength. In this sense, they bode as a new kind of discursive common-ground--if human conversants are saying things that an LLM can easily catch then LLMs could even serve as the lowest-common-denominator for laying out arguments, disagreements, talking past each other, etc. But that's in principle, and in practice that is too idealistic, as long as these are built and owned as capitalist IPs.