Do you not use LLMs daily? I don’t currently find them out-of-the-box useful for editing, but find them useful for a huge variety of tasks related to writing things.
I think it would be more of an indictment of LessWrong if people somehow didn’t use them, they obviously increase my productivity at a wide variety of tasks, and being an early-adopter of powerful AI technologies seems like one of the things that I hope LessWrong authors excell at.
In general, I think Gwern’s suggested LLM policy seems roughly right to me. Of course people should use LLMs extensively in their writing, but if they do, they really have to read any LLM writing that makes it into their post and check what it says is true:
I am also fine with use of AI in general to make us better writers and thinkers, and I am still excited about this. (We unfortunately have not seen much benefit for the highest-quality creative nonfiction/fiction or research, like we aspire to on LW2, but this is in considerable part due to technical choices & historical contingency, which I’ve discussed many times before, and I still believe in the fundamental possibilities there.) We definitely shouldn’t be trying to ban AI use per se.
However, if someone is posting a GPT-4 (or Claude or Llama) sample which is just a response, then they had damn well better have checked it and made sure that the references existed and said what the sample says they said and that the sample makes sense and they fixed any issues in it. If they wrote something and had the LLM edit it, then they should have checked those edits and made sure the edits are in fact improvements, and improved the improvements, instead of letting their essay degrade into ChatGPTese. And so on.
Seems like a mistake! Agree it’s not uncommon to use them less, though my guess (with like 60% confidence) is that the majority of authors on LW use them daily, or very close to daily.
Prolly less than 60%. I think you’re overestimating how LLM-pilled the overall LW userbase is (even filtering for people who publish posts). But, my guess is like 25-45% tho.
I would strongly bet against majority using AI tools ~daily (off the top of my head: <40% with 80% confidence?): adoption of any new tool is just much slower than people would predict, plus the LW team is liable to vastly overpredict this since you’re from California.
That said, there are some difficulties with how to operationalize this question, e.g. I know some particularly prolific LW posters (like Zvi) use AI.
I also use them rarely, fwiw. Maybe I’m missing some more productive use, but I’ve experimented a decent amount and have yet to find a way to make regular use even neutral (much less helpful) for my thinking or writing.
I just added “LLM Frequency” and “LLM Use case” to the survey, under LessWrong Team Questions. I’ll probably tweak the options and might move it to Bonus Questions later. Suggestions welcome!
First of all, even taking what Gwern says there at face value, how many of the posts here that are written “with AI involvement” would you say actually are checked, edited, etc., in the rigorous way which Gwern describes? Realistically?
Secondly, when Gwern says that he is “fine with use of AI in general to make us better writers and thinkers” and that he is “still excited about this”, you should understand that he is talking about stuff like this and this, and not about stuff like “instead of thinking about things, refining my ideas, and writing them down, I just asked a LLM to write a post for me”.
Approximately zero percent of the people who read Gwern’s comment will think of the former sort of idea (it takes a Gwern to think of such things, and those are in very limited supply), rather than the latter.
The policy of “encourage the use of AI for writing posts/comments here, and provide tools to easily generate more AI-written crap” doesn’t lead to more of the sort of thing that Gwern describes at the above links. It leads to a deluge of un-checked crap.
First of all, even taking what Gwern says there at face value, how many of the posts here that are written “with AI involvement” would you say actually are checked, edited, etc., in the rigorous way which Gwern describes? Realistically?
My guess is very few people are using AI output directly (at least the present it’s pretty obvious as their writing is kind of atrocious). I do think most posts probably involved people talking to an LLM through their thoughts, or ask for some editing help, or ask some factual questions. My guess is basically 100% of those went through the kind of process that Gwern was describing here.
I currently wish I had a policy for knowing with confidence whether a user wrote part of their post with a language model. There’s a (small) regular stream of new-user content that I look through, where I’m above 50% that AI wrote some of it (very formulaic, unoriginal writing, imitating academic style) but I am worried about being rude when saying “I rejected your first post because I reckon you didn’t write this and it doesn’t reflect your thoughts” if I end up being wrong like 1 in 3 times[1].
Sometimes I use various online language-model checkers (1, 2, 3), but I don’t know how accurate/reliable they are. If they are actually pretty good, I may well automatically run them on all submitted posts to LW so I can be more confident.
Also one time I pushed back on this and the user explained they’re not a native English speaker, so tried to use a model to improve their English, which I thought was more reasonable than many uses.
I’d be pretty into having typography styling settings that auto-detect LM stuff (or, specifically track when users have used any LW-specific LM tools), and flag it with some kind of style difference so it’s easy to track at a glance (esp if it could be pretty reliable).
Do you not use LLMs daily? I don’t currently find them out-of-the-box useful for editing, but find them useful for a huge variety of tasks related to writing things.
I think it would be more of an indictment of LessWrong if people somehow didn’t use them, they obviously increase my productivity at a wide variety of tasks, and being an early-adopter of powerful AI technologies seems like one of the things that I hope LessWrong authors excell at.
In general, I think Gwern’s suggested LLM policy seems roughly right to me. Of course people should use LLMs extensively in their writing, but if they do, they really have to read any LLM writing that makes it into their post and check what it says is true:
FWIW I think it’s not uncommon for people to not use LLMs daily (e.g. I don’t).
Seems like a mistake! Agree it’s not uncommon to use them less, though my guess (with like 60% confidence) is that the majority of authors on LW use them daily, or very close to daily.
Consider the reaction my comment from three months ago got.
Prolly less than 60%. I think you’re overestimating how LLM-pilled the overall LW userbase is (even filtering for people who publish posts). But, my guess is like 25-45% tho.
I would strongly bet against majority using AI tools ~daily (off the top of my head: <40% with 80% confidence?): adoption of any new tool is just much slower than people would predict, plus the LW team is liable to vastly overpredict this since you’re from California.
That said, there are some difficulties with how to operationalize this question, e.g. I know some particularly prolific LW posters (like Zvi) use AI.
I also use them rarely, fwiw. Maybe I’m missing some more productive use, but I’ve experimented a decent amount and have yet to find a way to make regular use even neutral (much less helpful) for my thinking or writing.
I enjoyed reading Nicholas Carlini and Jeff Kaufman write about how they use them, if you’re looking for inspiration.
Thanks; it makes sense that use cases like these would benefit, I just rarely have similar ones when thinking or writing.
I recommend having this question in the next lesswrong survey.
Along the lines of “How often do you use LLMs and your usecase?”
Great idea!
@Screwtape?
On it!
I just added “LLM Frequency” and “LLM Use case” to the survey, under LessWrong Team Questions. I’ll probably tweak the options and might move it to Bonus Questions later. Suggestions welcome!
Not even once.
First of all, even taking what Gwern says there at face value, how many of the posts here that are written “with AI involvement” would you say actually are checked, edited, etc., in the rigorous way which Gwern describes? Realistically?
Secondly, when Gwern says that he is “fine with use of AI in general to make us better writers and thinkers” and that he is “still excited about this”, you should understand that he is talking about stuff like this and this, and not about stuff like “instead of thinking about things, refining my ideas, and writing them down, I just asked a LLM to write a post for me”.
Approximately zero percent of the people who read Gwern’s comment will think of the former sort of idea (it takes a Gwern to think of such things, and those are in very limited supply), rather than the latter.
The policy of “encourage the use of AI for writing posts/comments here, and provide tools to easily generate more AI-written crap” doesn’t lead to more of the sort of thing that Gwern describes at the above links. It leads to a deluge of un-checked crap.
My guess is very few people are using AI output directly (at least the present it’s pretty obvious as their writing is kind of atrocious). I do think most posts probably involved people talking to an LLM through their thoughts, or ask for some editing help, or ask some factual questions. My guess is basically 100% of those went through the kind of process that Gwern was describing here.
I currently wish I had a policy for knowing with confidence whether a user wrote part of their post with a language model. There’s a (small) regular stream of new-user content that I look through, where I’m above 50% that AI wrote some of it (very formulaic, unoriginal writing, imitating academic style) but I am worried about being rude when saying “I rejected your first post because I reckon you didn’t write this and it doesn’t reflect your thoughts” if I end up being wrong like 1 in 3 times[1].
Sometimes I use various online language-model checkers (1, 2, 3), but I don’t know how accurate/reliable they are. If they are actually pretty good, I may well automatically run them on all submitted posts to LW so I can be more confident.
Also one time I pushed back on this and the user explained they’re not a native English speaker, so tried to use a model to improve their English, which I thought was more reasonable than many uses.
I’d be pretty into having typography styling settings that auto-detect LM stuff (or, specifically track when users have used any LW-specific LM tools), and flag it with some kind of style difference so it’s easy to track at a glance (esp if it could be pretty reliable).