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But isn't that the point of posting here?
"This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases"
If you're testing your reasoning against an LLM first then you're kind of skipping part of the entire point of this space no? We should pointing out flaws in your reasoning. You're making an arguably better individual post/point, at the expense of other readers engagement and back and forth. Every time the LLM points out flaws in your reasoning you are reducing the need for us, your poor only human interlocuters. You're replacing us with robots! You monster! Ahem.
If the LLM's at any point are able to completely correct your argument then why post it here at all? We 're supposed to argue to understand, so if the LLM gets you to understanding then literally the reason for the existence of this forum vanishes. It's just a blog post at best.
It's like turning up for sex half way to climax from a vibrating fleshlight then getting off quickly with your partner. If your goal is just having a baby (getting a perfect argument) then it's certainly more efficient. But it kind of takes away something from the whole experience of back and forth (so to speak) with your partner I would suggest.
Now it's not as bad as just ejaculating in a cup and doing it with a turkey baster, start to finish, but it's still a little less...(self_made_)human?
Not saying it should be banned (even if it could be reliably) but I'd probably want to be careful as to how much my argument is refined by AI. A perfectly argued and buttressed position would probably not get much discussion engagement because what is there to say? You may be far from that point right now, but maybe just keep it in mind.
I don't see how this implies that any user must submit the literal first draft they write.
Consider the following:
You write a comment or essay.
You do an edit pass and proof read it. Corrections happen.
You might ask your buddy to take a look. They raise some valid points, and you make corrections.
You post. Then people come up with all kinds of responses. Some thoughtful and raising valid concerns. Some of them that make you wonder what the fuck is going on. (You must be, to some degree, a rather masochistic individual to be an active Mottizen)
You either edit your essay to incorporate corrections, clarifications, or start digging into topics in sub-threads.
The place where LLMs come in is stage 2/3, at least for me. I ask them if I am genuinely steelmanning the argument I'm making, if I haven't misrepresented my sources or twisted the interpretation. If you do not objection to having a friend look at something you've written, I do not understand why you would have concerns about someone asking an LLM. The real issue, is, as far as I'm concerned, people simply using the ease of LLM issue to spam or to trivially stonewall faster than a normal person can write, or to simply not even bother to engage with the argument in the first place. I think I've framed my stance as "I don't mind if you use ChatGPT in a conversation with me, as long as your arguments are your own and you are willing to endorse anything you borrow from what it says."
As evidence I've shared suggests, all arguments are my own. I have made sure to carefully double check anything new LLMs might have to add.
Is that how it works? Nobody told me!
On a more serious note: Do you actually think that writing a well-reasoned, thoughtful and insightful essay is a guarantee that nobody here will come and argue with you?
I wish that were true. At the bare minimum, the population of the Motte is extremely heterogeneous, and someone will find a way to critique you from their own idiosyncratic perspective.
That is the point. That is why I come here, to polish my wits and engage in verbal spars with gentleman rules at play.
I genuinely think that is impossible in practice. There's a reason for that saying about every modus tollens having a modus ponens. Someone will come in and challenge your beliefs here, even if the topic is what anime you like. There is a lot of fundamental difference in both opinion and normative, epistemic and moral frameworks here!
In the limit, values are orthogonal to intelligence. If I was relying on some ASI to craft the perfect essay about how fans of Tokyo Ghoul should seppuku, then what's stopping someone from coming in and using their ASI to argue the opposite?
We do not have ASI. An LLM cannot replace me today. The day has yet to come when shooting the shit with internet strangers is made obsolete for my purposes. I would be sad if that day actually comes, but I think it's a good while off.
In the meantime, I'm here to dance.
Well because an LLM is not a person. It doesn't have ideas or thoughts. It's not an interaction with a person at all. Asking another person to proofread not only gets you another set of eyes it gets you an interaction with an actual living breathing person, and now their messiness gets injected. Having said that I'm not saying the way you are using it at this stage is wrong necessarily. My point is basically about not confusing the destination with the journey.
Imagine if you want to get from A to B and you can 1) Use a teleporter (non 40K style or its another kettle of fish) 2) Get on a train or 3) Walk. 1) Means you don't have a journey at all, you just get from A to B swiftly and efficiently. If that is your goal it is the best option. But if you want to see the countryside, and look at sheep in a field on the way it is of no use at all. It replaces the journey with the destination 100%. The train limits what you experience on your journey but doesn't remove it entirely.
I think part of the charm of TheMotte is the journey, the back and forth, the tangents, the random weirdness that gets injected from messy human thinking. Maybe I'm wrong and the LLM usage you currently have won't reduce the kind of vector space for that kind of energy bouncing off. You may well be right that my concerns are overbaked! Hopefully so, because I would anticipate AI usage is just going to increase and maybe not everyone will resist the pull of having the usage pretty heavily circumscribed as you do.
I'd like us all walking together ideally, romping up and down the hills of discussion and the dales of Red vs Blue tribal responses from our messy little human brains. If we're on a train well that's a little worse form my perspective. And the closer it gets to a bullet train whizzing past the hills at 300mph the less I like it. A meandering steam train is probably ok as well.
I'm more musing than condemning just to be clear. You're an extremely valuable contributor here and I always read your posts with interest, and you have to remember, I am old after all. Shaking my fist at the Cloud and wearing onions on my belt is a time honoured tradition!
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