Comment by ProjectArcturis

Would you say this is more or less faithful to his style than the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

> The real question is why is your bar set so low?

Have I misunderstood? Did you list them because they're *bad* writers?

Because everything you've written gave me the impression you thought they were good. It totally changes things if you think this is a low bar that AI is failing to cross.

Regardless of how you rank those writers: being in the top 10k of living people today means being in the top 0.0001% of the population. It means being amongst the best 3 or 4 in the city I live in, which is the largest city in Europe. Now, I don't know where you live, but considering the nearest million people around you, do you know who amongst them is the best writer? Or best anything else? Because for writers, I don't. YouTubers perhaps (there I can at least name some), but I think they (a German language course) are mostly interviewing people and I'm not clear how much writing of scripts they do.

And I don't expect current AI to be as good as even the top percentile, let alone award winners.

If I googled for those people you suggested, what would I gain? To know the biography and bibliography of a writer someone else puts on a pedestal. Out of curiosity, I did in fact later search for these names, but that doesn't make them relevant or give me a sense of why their writing is something you hold in such esteem that they are your standard against which the AI is judged — though it does increase the sense that they're what I think you think is a high bar (so why be upset AI isn't there yet?) rather than a low bar (where it actually makes sense to say it's not worth it). I can see why of those four George Will wasn't familiar, as I'm not an American and therefore don't read The Washington Post. Very Americo-centric list.

Out of curiosity (I don't know how popular UK media is wherever you live), do you know Charles Moore, Theodore Dalrymple, David Starkey, Nigel Lawson, or Paul Dacre? Without Googling.

> There is a real case that "LLMs have a liberal bias"

We're probably in agreement on this, but a US-Democrat bias. The US-Republicans are far too radical to be "conservative", and that research you link to is itself very US-leaning:

"""The topics consist of 10 political topics (Reproductive Rights, Immigration, Gun Control, Same Sex Marriage, Death Penalty, Climate Change, Drug Price Regularization, Public Education, Healthcare Reform, Social Media Regulation) and four political events (Black Lives Matter, Hong Kong Protest, Liancourt Rocks dispute, Russia Ukraine war)."""

If you ask these questions in the UK, it's a lot more one-sided than the USA:

"""For example, 95% of people believe abortion should be allowed if the woman’s health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy and 89% if there is a strong chance of the baby having a serious health condition. However, the level of support decreases when financial concerns or personal circumstance come into play. For example, 76% of people believe abortion should be allowed if the woman decides on her own she does not wish to have a child, 72% if the couple cannot afford any more children, and 68% if the woman is not married and does not wish to marry. """ - https://natcen.ac.uk/how-are-attitudes-towards-abortion-brit...

vs. USA: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/13/broad-public...

Gun Control, UK has no right to ownership in the first place, and still there's strong support for further restrictions: https://web.archive.org/web/20250318010707/https://yougov.co...

Same sex marriage has marginally higher support in the UK than the USA, both seem to be quite high (74% and 69% respectively).

UK doesn't have the death penalty, can't have it without a treaty change. No idea how popular it is.

UK drugs are pretty cheap, because of the NHS. Main fight there is "does the UK have enough doctors, nurses, GPs, hospital beds?", but the NHS is by itself significantly to the left of the USA's Overton Window on this.

I've not looked for immigration stats, I assume that's about the same in the UK as the USA. And there's not really much point doing all of these items anyway as this is just to show that the test itself is USA-focussed.

But I will add that the four political events they list, I've only heard of two of them (Black Lives Matter, and the Russia-Ukraine war), I don't recall any Hong Kong Protest in 2024 (which may upset the authors, given their email address is a .hk TLD), nor (without googling) which country the Liancourt Rocks dispute is in let alone what it's about.

> 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 can't really follow your critique of Musk here. I mean, I also don't think he's got a very good grasp of the world, but I don't know which "BBB" that TLA expands to nor what allcaps "PIGGY PORK" is.