Comment by inigyou

I like the term I've seen someone use for LLMs: a "thought partner." Truly it's the duck programming duck I've always wanted.

Don't just focus on the model, half the turns in a session belong to the human, it's an instrument that depends on how well the user wields it. It does not need to produce the novel insights, just to support the user to have them.

This sounds like a fully general argument against being alive and having experiences; you could equally well call love a "brain hack". I also care a lot about solving practical problems, but the reason it's important to solve them is because it leads to human flourishing, which includes participating in all these activities you're deriding. Otherwise why are we doing anything at all?

I understand where you are coming from, that brain hack is how we remember cause and effect. It's very much like the use of Jazz Hands to signal to the dullards "now is the moment you're supposed to remember and say 'oh, I liked that'" A narrative story used as a vehicle to convey moral lessons and life guidance is the Jazz Hands of our fragmented and incomplete human instruction manuals.

The "story form" is a brain hack, i.e. a way of disseminating "problem X may cause Y and be resolved by Z". Whether that's useful depends entirely on what's being communicated and how.

Art, music, humour, poetry are more basic and the commonality is more or less "I bring you surprising phenomena". If phenomena are surprising to you then your mental model of the world needs improving.

What's Riemann's last theorem?

Culture and art can teach something to its audience, unlike most of the garbage you likened it to. It's clear you don't hold it in much regard, since you compare it to outright scams (clickbait) and even imply that consuming fiction is basically done for virtue signalling.

But like it or not, humans are not computers. They are animals with messy, complex thinking and reasoning that is impossible to fully describe, and incredibly complex societal systems created from their chaotic interactions. These messy people don't learn from datasheets and reference manuals, even if you'd like it to be otherwise.

Of course, there's a place for non-fiction, I like some of it a lot. But art has subtlety to it - instead of smacking people in the face with data and lists of objective measurements, it can pry into them by using the human ability to imagine themselves in other shoes, experience emotions that aren't results of real life events, and much more. There is a reason why parents teach their children values by reading them fables or educational stories, not the legal code of their jurisdiction. And this is also why fiction actually changes the minds of people reading it, arguably doing it more effectively than nonfiction. Slop (clickbait, average tiktok content, whatever else you're imagining) doesn't make you feel new things or think of something you haven't thought of before, art does.

The aiens are also a bit of a copout. You're just assuming that there's bound to be this perfect species (that are effectively computers) that operate only on mathematics and discrete logic, who are obviously superior to us and can show us our wrong ways. What if computers aren't always superior? Or what if organic life requires some of that messiness you don't like to be viable? What if the aliens had their own weird things we could never relate to?

> No.

What's the purpose of this? You didn't disagree, you just went on a tangent. Is this another "brain hack?" If so, there is something wrong with them. They often make words appear to be something that they are not.

Like a magician would use a thing called "indirection."

We already suspect that many non-human animals have a "sense of beauty" and a sense of humor. At least one other species spontaneously dances on the "beat" to music (parrots).

I think alien intelligence would be able to appreciate art and humor, even without necessarily feeling it viscerally, as we do. We know that our particular brands of them rely on highly-developed and specific aspects of our psychology, but at a basic level, they seem to fundamentally be about congruence, incongruence, expectation, and interpretation/perspective. Any embodied intelligence that can observe physical reality is capable of grokking those concepts.

Shit engineers say

We do live in that world, but that world is also filled and conditioned by the predator and prey structure we all operate within. The higher purpose that Art serves today is aliased, hidden, and conveyed in layers of metaphor. This is somewhat of a game, as the predators playing the art game try to consume their prey, anyone that is not an art philosopher in the pursuit of stories to explain our situations and not fame or wealth. The obvious paths were long ago traveled and farmed to barren land, and all that is left is the extremes as nobody wants to admit that this, this with all of us, is it and nothing more.

I agree, any book that is liked by more than one other person is a crime against artistry and a moral failing.

It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sokal affair.

> but the content it carries, the substance it holds.

It's even more than that, I think. It's the intent to reach out and transfer to others something that you experience internally. It's a sense of purpose motivating that content and substance to be packaged up and communicated in the first place.

Sometimes LLMs will slip up and say things like, "I see this working with people all the time." And it REALLY breaks the illusion that the text they extrude means anything. Because obviously there is no "I" and no, the LLM does not have this autobiographical memory the text is simulating.

> Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.

Are you sure it's the same people? I feel the opposite: it's the same people who happily read tons of LLM output themselves and send some of it to others.

my coworker presented a 93 page pdf for a project plan entirely created by $230 of Claude's deep learning. i hope i wasnt too mean while asking him variations of "what now? what do i do with this?" the answer is obvious: read it. but so much of it covers problems which are already solved and my coworker clearly hasnt considered at all

point is: maybe llm output is best not shared. maybe, like a dream, the only audience who can appreciate the content of the writing is the first party

Sometimes the medium is the message though. Especially in literature, prose matters. It's not just about what is said but also how.

This applies even in "low" art. AI generated imagery from mainstream models tends to be so ugly it detracts from effectively communicating what the prompter intended.

Most people love to drive, but hate to be stuck in traffic. Or for the countryside to be all freeways and the city to be all parking lots.

It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.

No one likes generating content. Many like generating income or status. It is a new era. The era of curation. I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax. Poetry e.g. is replicable but not redoable. I am ambitious we are to see the best writing ever soon.

It is very weird. 6 months ago I generated some documentation for a service that was largely undocumented. When it was done my only thought was "who is this for?" Is any one going to actually read this or are they just going to ask the LLM? If someone didnt write it, why would I read it? It just becomes something to pipe into the context for the next person. It seems though a lot of people don't have this experience, its like they think they are the only ones with access to this technology.

Additionally I am so, so ,so sick of reading claudes overly wordy technical writing ish bullshit. Its exhausting trying to find the fuck ups or hidden assumptions in the pages of text it produces for everything.

Every time I try and search for ways to make it stop I just find people trying to save tokens which I don't give a shit about. I just want it to communicate things to me without having to constantly read 4 paragraphs, dump the context or fork it or start a new session so it "remembers" or re-weights that is was told to be concise and terse in like 7 different places. Maybe I am using it wrong.

Im curious what you mean by this

Many people make the mistake to think LLMs are stochastic parrots, but they are more like pianos, you play the keys and they make music, if you don't bring no new spices to the soup no wonder it comes out bland.

LLMs have created more billable hours for me as an attorney because the LLMs convince the client that they need to know more about irrelevant issues, how specific statutes may apply, and other such things. They may ask about specific procedural issues that they would otherwise have no idea about that I then need to explain in greater detail. It reliably bloats things that would be a .1 into .5 or more.

I believe you are supposed to use an LLM on the receiving side to compress them again.

This is supposed to help our economic growth during the coming decade.

That is what humans are for!! Ask people!

There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context.

(not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)

Going further, all of those are currently under the umbrella of metaphysics, which is again a kind of prejudiced-against (often taken as irrelevant, when it contains some of, and in fact many of, the most important things in life) field of science/knowledge. I think metaphysics should just be seen for what it is as a more indirect kind of science. In a way all of science is varying degrees of indirect, we use all sorts of instruments and need to make all kinds of assumptions (that conceivably, but unlikely, could indeed be false) to be able to do any kind of science or assume any kind of validity to results. We need to assume (although indeed many of those assumptions we don't even need to consider, i.e. they're implicit) there aren't any "gremlins" of whatever kind interfering with our measurements. We do our best to cross-verify whatever experiments we have to increase our confidence. Likewise, metaphysics to me is simply about inferring facts and properties with more indirect methods. One of them is what I referred to above, i.e. observations from within your own mind, and proposing properties of cognition from first hand experience. A second (very close to actual physics) is conjecturing what other universes are out there of if there is some larger mechanism our own universe (or all universes) are part of. Another is judging other properties of existence, for example, are our minds completely separate or are we all ultimately part of the "same thing", somehow? How did I come about living as the person I am currently living, am I perhaps a random sample, with some particular distribution, of all living beings? How do those facts influences how we should live together? (I think they all strongly support the notion of valuing everyone, and discredit any absolute notion of primacy of yourself in ethics, i.e. egotism).

I've seen way too much humanslop to be able to reject LLM slop outright.

There are areas where the average of LLM slop already beats the average of humanslop by a sizeable margin.

[dead]

Allow me to offer a minor reframing: printing presses aren't about duplicating writing. The printing press exists to mass produce text regardless of how or where the content of the text was produced.

LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance.

LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.

> Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing.

maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)

A thinking press?

I think that is a bad argument.

You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too.

I would go as far as to say the LLM part has peaked.

To 1-shot MS Word will be possible only within some workspace designed for creating that kind of software. It will probably be saas style where you pay to export binaries or maybe some will take 30% if they become destinations for finding such software.

But I would bet other platforms are used for game dev, or for filmmaking.

Such that we still won’t have some super “model” that just does everything. The harnessing becomes architecture becomes software becomes user experience and expertise.