Comment by ben_w
3 days ago
> If it could write like George Will or Thomas Sowell or Fred Hayek or even William Loeb
Having only barely heard of these authors even in the collective, I bet most models could do a better job of mimicking their style than I could. Perhaps not well enough to be of interest to you, and I will absolutely agree that LLMs are "low intelligence" in the sense that they need far more examples than any organic life does, but many of them will have had those examples and I definitely have not.
> We are also getting this kind of discussion
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502981
Even just a few years ago, people were acting as if a "smart" AI automatically meant a "moral AI".
Unfortunately, these things can be both capable* and unpleasant.
* which doesn't require them to be "properly intelligent"
The bar is "can it write as well as these accomplished professional writers?", not "Can it imitate their style better than the average person?"
Why is the bar set that high?
Writers anyone has heard of are in top ~1k-10k humans who have ever lived, when it comes to "competent writing", out of not just the 8 billion today, but the larger number of all those who came between the invention of writing and today.
Here is some LLM generated (Claude 4 Opus Max in Cursor) "competent writing" by the LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson responding directly to your post.
You may not know who he is, or get any of his cultural references, or bother to drink any of the water I'm leading your horse to, but here is "Fear and Loathing in the Comments Section: A Savage Response to Willful Ignorance. Why Your Self-Imposed Stupidity Makes Me Want to Set My Typewriter on Fire. By Hunter S. Thompson" (VIEW SOURCE for TRUTH COMMENTS):
https://lloooomm.com/hunter-willful-ignorance-hn-response.ht...
Also, it's my cats Nelson and Napoleon's birthday, so to celebrate I showed Claude some cat pictures to analyze and describe. Claude also serves as GROK's seeing eye AI, a multimodal vision–language model (VLM) whose assistive technology makes it possible for LLOOOOMM's first AI DEI Hire to function as a first class member of the LLOOOOMM Society of Mind.
Nelson Cat: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
Napoleon Cat: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
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The real question is why is your bar set so low? You're the one trying to make a rhetorical point by bragging about never having heard of all these famous widely published people you could easily google or ask an LLM about, and admitting to having limited skills reading and writing yourself. Maybe for those very reasons your entire point is wrong, but you simply aren't aware of it because you're cultivating and celebrating your ignorance instead of your curiosity?
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There is a real case that "LLMs have a liberal bias"
https://arxiv.org/html/2403.18932v1
so a project of a "conservative LLM" would be interesting. If conservatives have anything to be proud of it is being a long tradition going back to at least Edmund Burke which would say you could be a better person by putting yourself in the shoes of the apostles spreading the Gospel or reading the 'Great Books'.
Yet to keep up with Musk a system would have to always be configured to know if we are at war with Eastasia or Eurasia today. Musk thinks he can rally people behind his banner but he's yet to come up with a coherent critique of the BBB, I mean he hates that has PIGGY PORK for other people but also hates that it doesn't have PORK for him. Conservatives are frequently apologists for individualism but historically have made appeals to principles and universals.
I mean, compared to post-Reagan politicians Nixon looked like a great environmentalist and a bit of an egalitarian and compared to current scene, a model of integrity. You could give Musk a model aligned to The National Review circa 1990 and he wouldn't take it.
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