← Back to context

Comment by westcoast49

3 hours ago

> we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create.

What about answers that an LLM gave to a question that we ourselves asked? Should we “labor” to understand that answer?

I think the argument, as presented in this and other similar pieces of critique, is too simplistic.

I do understand the criticism, but I think it should be framed in a different manner. The problem, when we read a long form piece by an author, is that we imagine that there’s another “mind” at the other side. We imagine that we are following the reasoning within the mind of a fellow human being, the writer. There’s an implied sort of “intimacy” to it. And the breach is when we are fooled into thinking that we are engaged in human communication, only to discover that there is a machine on the other side.

When we ask questions to an AI, this problem does not exist, because we are fully aware that the entity on the other side is not a human being.

Yet there is no doubt that the reply from an AI can contain information that is very much worthy of our time, and of our “labor” and effort to understand it.

So I think this ultimately will be about disclosure. As long as we are being made aware of the percentage of AI use in a text, explicitly or implicitly, I think we will actually grow to accept it.