Comment by phs318u

5 days ago

I had Copilot produce this for you based on the comments in this discussion (as at just before the timestamp of this comment).

https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/656dEMHWyFye5cCeicgGv

Interesting that this is getting downvoted. I truly wonder why. One of the things LLMs are good at is summarising and extracting key points. Or should I have gone to the trouble to do this myself - read the entire comment thread and manually summarise - when the person I was replying to hadn’t done that? My comment was meant in good faith: “here’s the info you wanted and how you can easily get them yourself next time”.

  • 1. People come here for discussions with real people. The other night I was at a party and we had a great time playing chess and board games. It would be weird if someone started using stockfish, even if it is a better player. Everything stockfish does, it already knows. It doesn't learn or explore the game-space.

    2. The response is still too wordy, generic, and boring. So LLMs are not really better players, at least for now.

    3. With LLMs, you can produce a ton of text much faster than it can be read. Whereas the dynamic is reversed for ordinary writing. By writing this by hand, I am doing you a favor by spending more time on this comment than you will. But by reading your LLM output I am doing you a favor by spending more time reading than you did generating.

    You could probably get away with using an LLM here by copying the response and then cutting down 90% of it. But at that point it would be better to just restate the points yourself in your own words.

    • So cheap questions where the answers could be readily had are not downvoted even though the answers to their question are right here in the discussion. Whereas because I did not do the legwork that my correspondent would not do, I am penalised. That’s what I’m hearing.

      EDITED TO ADD:

      > by reading your LLM output I am doing you a favor by spending more time reading than you did generating

      How could my respondent (presumably on whose behalf you are making the argument) possibly be doing me a favour when they asked the question? Is it each of our responsibility to go to some lengths to spoon feed one another when others don’t deign to feed themselves?

      1 reply →

    • And yet the llm did a better work of disparaging everyone comments as uniformed, which they are btw.

  • You're not offering anything of value. We all can ask some LLM about stuff we want to know. It's like in the past, when someone would post a link to search results as a reply.