Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
I'm kind of halfway on this. I'm not against the usage of LLMs as a brainstorming tool that helps one come up with alternative wordings for passages already written (in fact I have done this myself at times for specific awkward sentences I've written that frustrate me, though with massive renovations to the wording and structure of the passage to make it fit within the overall style of writing I'm prone to), writer's block is a very big problem and sometimes usage of LLMs to brainstorm various different grammatical structures can get the creative juices flowing again. There's a legitimate use for LLMs in writing and I don't inherently object to the usage of it in posts on TheMotte. It’s utilising LLM as a tool and not as a wholesale replacement for effort.
As such I do find there's an admittedly ill-defined threshold where something becomes too LLM for me to ignore and the sort of overly sanitised prose that LLMs are prone to shows through to the extent that the writing loses all personality and originality; it's the feeling that someone has just taken huge chunks of text from an LLM without giving any thought to tone or style. This post certainly exceeds that threshold for me.
It's also intellectually sanitized.
Does this reflect the author's actual views on the modern use of the word "simp", or just RLHF giving the Generic California Ideology interpretation of the terms he's prompted it with? Impossible to know.
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We can all converse with LLMs. There they are, we need only ask them a question (worded properly.) And they can, I agree, give reasonable, even "insightful" answers, if that is the word to use. I myself have gotten good advice from LLMs on issues as diverse as how to word an email in Japanese to what kind of fertilizer to use on the verbena (though ChatGPT abetted my murder of my olive tree.) The blossoming use of LLMs everywhere outside of mathematical or computational applications (in things like cooking, cleaning, shopping, stain removal, gardening, etc.) suggests considerable utility in their use. They are not evil.
My point is simply that when I open the Motte I prefer the warts-and-all version of humanity. (And often get it.) I should say, since I'm spouting off my druthers, that for my part I do not mind if people use LLMs for direct translation, though the non-English-native-speakers here tend to have far better written prose than most native speakers. My reasoning is that LLM direct translation is often very good, especially if calibrated for tone, and in such cases the original writing was, well, written originally by the writer.
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