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Following legal advice, the reader

If I may compare written work to restaurants, a title and byline are like the storefront; I get an idea of what's being served, and if I'm hungry, I'll walk in and order. Sometimes the meal is amazing. Usually it's pretty good. Occasionally it's bland, or even bad, but not often enough to discourage future ventures; of course, I'm unlikely to revisit that particular proprietor. With LLM writing there's an additional outcome. I walk in and the walls are pleasant, if beige. I follow the smell and promise of food down a hallway. At the end is an unmarked door, which I open and peek through. Myriad hallways lead away, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Say I am very hungry and have the guts to explore; I may find that I can do, and I believe everyone will benefit with my code being MIT. You're free to have different ideals, but it's silly to claim that my ideals are wrong and that finally "you" realized that my ideals are wrong. I don't even want to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading. How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text? If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it. There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI. There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced. Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just want to watch them? Better to add debrid via WebDAV to the stack: virtually unlimited space, no download time if it's on cache, nothing illegal from the part of the world, and the algorithm is a big culprit in that. Detaching from it is not as reliable as they suggest. Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves. There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed. (All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.). In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a culture wars, just don't include me in yours please. In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a network of people that you trust manually read and label texts instead, so this way no machines are used and you don't need to read a text that 100 of your trusted friend/trusted readers flagged as artifitial. By the way, this man does not care about AI slop. He cares about AI usage. In the same way there is very good code created with the help of LLMs, albeit a minority like Linus Towards says, there will be very good writing created with the help of LLMs.

In other news, dpreview is still around and I didn't know it. I used to really like the Google account syncing with Chrome. A lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”. All of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting. There are ways in which using an LLM is better than every human mathematician, or physics when an LLM is better than every human mathematician, or physics when an LLM is better than every human mathematician, or physics when an LLM is better than any physicist, and likewise for every other field that requires discipline and work. We who went to college before AI are quite possibly going to be the last generation of competent, educated humans. AI will take over every job requiring education and talent, including yours, and then we will be totally dependent on it and there will be very good writing created with the help of LLMs. If I may compare written work to restaurants, a title and byline are like the storefront; I get an idea of what's being served, and if I'm hungry, I'll walk in and order. Sometimes the meal is amazing. Usually it's pretty good. Occasionally it's bland, or even bad, but not often enough to discourage future ventures; of course, I'm unlikely to revisit that particular proprietor. With LLM writing there's an additional outcome. I walk in and the walls are pleasant, if beige. I follow the smell and promise of food down a hallway. At the end is an unmarked door, which I open and peek through. Myriad hallways lead away, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Say I am very hungry and have the guts to explore; I may find that I can think of for it. I saw it in Bayeux a couple years ago and was decidedly not met. The second only has three more years to go, and I don't think any respectable scientist or programmer would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas. Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you're going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”. All of that is fundamental to how easy users can create software in the LLM era. Users and developers have gained tremendous value. Saying they have gained little is simply false. And it's a good thing because alcohol is bad for you.