I’ll probably get disagree points, but wanted to share my reaction: I honestly don’t mind the AI’s output. I read it all and think it’s just an elaboration of what you said. The only problem I noticed is it is too long.
Then again, I’m not an amazing writer, and my critical skills aren’t so great for critiquing style. I will admit I rarely use assistance, because I have a tight set of points I want to include, and explaining them all to the AI is almost the same as writing the post itself.
The instruction is to write an article arguing that AI-generated posts suffer from verbosity, hedging, and unclear trains of thought. But ChatGPT makes that complaint in a single sentence in the first paragraph and then spends 6 paragraphs adding a bunch of its own arguments:
that the “nature of conversation itself” draws value from “human experience, emotion, and authenticity” that AI content replaces with “a hollow imitation of dialogue”
that AI content creates “an artificial sense of expertise,” i.e. that a dumb take can be made to seem smarter than it is
that the option to use AI content discourages posters from “engag[ing] deeply with the topic themselves”
It wasn’t instructed to make these arguments and they aren’t really defended as important.
Then lastly ChatGPT offers a “solution”: that people just disclose when they’re using AI assistance. But it’s not explained how this actually prevents the problems above, besides I guess allowing people downvote AI content or scrutinize it more. Importantly this proposed solution wouldn’t solve the concern the model was instructed to present.
So in general instructions aren’t followed and the thinking/argumentation isn’t clear.
Thank you; I wanted to write something like this, but you made the point clearly and concisely.
Some people say they can clearly recognize the output of an LLM. I admit I can’t see that clearly. I just get an annoying feeling, something rubs me the wrong way, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. For example, while reading this article, I had a thought in mind “maybe this text was actually written by a human, and at the end the conclusion will be: haha, you failed at Turing test, now you see how biased you are”.
If I believed that the text was written by a human, I would probably be annoyed that the text is too verbose. But, you know, some real people are like that, too. I would also be like “I am not sure what point exactly are they trying to make… there seems to be a general topic they write about, but they just write their associations with the topic, instead of focusing on what is really important (for them). But again, actual people probably write like this all the time, ask any professional editor. Writing well is a skill that needs to be learned. I mean, the LLM was trained on human texts! The texts made by verbose people are probably over-represented in the corpus. So I would be like “dude, rewrite this shorter, make your points clearly, and remove the irrelevant parts”, but I could totally believe it was written by a human.
Also, the arguments introduced by the LLM are annoying, but those are arguments that actual people make. Some of them just feel out of place on LW. I care about whether a text is correct, not about whether it is authentic. If the LLM could generate a 100% reliable Theory of Everything, I wouldn’t mind that it is a product of artificial thinking; I would be happy to read it! What I hate is automatically generated human-like mistakes. I can forgive the actual humans, but why should I tolerate the same thing from a machine? If you interact with a human, the next time the human might do a better job as a result. Interacting with a text someone copied from a machine output is useless.
(WTF is even “For the sake of genuine discourse, we need to prioritize human connection over algorithmic convenience”? What does “algorithmic convenience” even mean? Generating LLM texts is convenient. Reading them, not really. Or does generating the texts feel convenient to the LLM? I don’t care.)
It’s worth making the distinction between AI assistance and AI-generation. Using Grammarly is using AI assistance and I think it wouldn’t make sense to require people to disclose Grammarly usage.
Thank you for saying this! It’s easy to have a very limited typical-mind-fallacy view of LessWrong readers, and hearing about preferences very different from my own is extremely important.
explaining them all to the AI is almost the same as writing the post itself.
Depending on your skill with writing clear, concise English, this may be true. For many, it may be that the effort level is the same between using AI well and just writing it yourself, but the effort type is different, and the quality is improved.
I think the potential value of LLM-assisted writing is very high, but it requires similar levels of clarity and attention to detail either way. Low-effort posts will be remain low-value, high-effort posts could get quite a boost.
I’ll probably get disagree points, but wanted to share my reaction: I honestly don’t mind the AI’s output. I read it all and think it’s just an elaboration of what you said. The only problem I noticed is it is too long.
Then again, I’m not an amazing writer, and my critical skills aren’t so great for critiquing style. I will admit I rarely use assistance, because I have a tight set of points I want to include, and explaining them all to the AI is almost the same as writing the post itself.
Brief comments on what’s bad about the output:
The instruction is to write an article arguing that AI-generated posts suffer from verbosity, hedging, and unclear trains of thought. But ChatGPT makes that complaint in a single sentence in the first paragraph and then spends 6 paragraphs adding a bunch of its own arguments:
that the “nature of conversation itself” draws value from “human experience, emotion, and authenticity” that AI content replaces with “a hollow imitation of dialogue”
that AI content creates “an artificial sense of expertise,” i.e. that a dumb take can be made to seem smarter than it is
that the option to use AI content discourages posters from “engag[ing] deeply with the topic themselves”
It wasn’t instructed to make these arguments and they aren’t really defended as important.
Then lastly ChatGPT offers a “solution”: that people just disclose when they’re using AI assistance. But it’s not explained how this actually prevents the problems above, besides I guess allowing people downvote AI content or scrutinize it more. Importantly this proposed solution wouldn’t solve the concern the model was instructed to present.
So in general instructions aren’t followed and the thinking/argumentation isn’t clear.
Thank you; I wanted to write something like this, but you made the point clearly and concisely.
Some people say they can clearly recognize the output of an LLM. I admit I can’t see that clearly. I just get an annoying feeling, something rubs me the wrong way, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. For example, while reading this article, I had a thought in mind “maybe this text was actually written by a human, and at the end the conclusion will be: haha, you failed at Turing test, now you see how biased you are”.
If I believed that the text was written by a human, I would probably be annoyed that the text is too verbose. But, you know, some real people are like that, too. I would also be like “I am not sure what point exactly are they trying to make… there seems to be a general topic they write about, but they just write their associations with the topic, instead of focusing on what is really important (for them). But again, actual people probably write like this all the time, ask any professional editor. Writing well is a skill that needs to be learned. I mean, the LLM was trained on human texts! The texts made by verbose people are probably over-represented in the corpus. So I would be like “dude, rewrite this shorter, make your points clearly, and remove the irrelevant parts”, but I could totally believe it was written by a human.
Also, the arguments introduced by the LLM are annoying, but those are arguments that actual people make. Some of them just feel out of place on LW. I care about whether a text is correct, not about whether it is authentic. If the LLM could generate a 100% reliable Theory of Everything, I wouldn’t mind that it is a product of artificial thinking; I would be happy to read it! What I hate is automatically generated human-like mistakes. I can forgive the actual humans, but why should I tolerate the same thing from a machine? If you interact with a human, the next time the human might do a better job as a result. Interacting with a text someone copied from a machine output is useless.
(WTF is even “For the sake of genuine discourse, we need to prioritize human connection over algorithmic convenience”? What does “algorithmic convenience” even mean? Generating LLM texts is convenient. Reading them, not really. Or does generating the texts feel convenient to the LLM? I don’t care.)
It’s worth making the distinction between AI assistance and AI-generation. Using Grammarly is using AI assistance and I think it wouldn’t make sense to require people to disclose Grammarly usage.
Thank you for saying this! It’s easy to have a very limited typical-mind-fallacy view of LessWrong readers, and hearing about preferences very different from my own is extremely important.
Depending on your skill with writing clear, concise English, this may be true. For many, it may be that the effort level is the same between using AI well and just writing it yourself, but the effort type is different, and the quality is improved.
I think the potential value of LLM-assisted writing is very high, but it requires similar levels of clarity and attention to detail either way. Low-effort posts will be remain low-value, high-effort posts could get quite a boost.