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Notes -
Regarding the Substack Essay AI Posting Controversy:
(And, honestly? — What are we all doing here?)
It is in general a bad idea to use an LLM with no stylistic tweaks when there is plenty of online evidence of your writing style pre-AI for anyone to compare to, which makes the difference even more obvious.
More generally, the problem is that in a hobbyist community the objective is not maximizing productivity. It’s actually having a nice time with like-minded people. It is reasonable for a chess player to want to play another chess player who is not using a chess computer, even if that chess player promises to tune the computer so that its capability matches the player’s own skill level. Some part of the game is made more fun by knowing that one is playing another human. If that is sentimental then it is because humans are sentimental.
There is a joy in trying to convince another mind, another person, with a full life, with stories of their own. There is meaning in the experiences they have had - some universal, sure, but many not - that come through in the occasional anecdote, throwaway story, weird bit of inside knowledge. I like those things, they’re what make this place special. That said, they’re not the only things that made and make this place special.
We do have to think about what happens to this community now. There has been a real change. Ten years ago if you wanted to discuss what was happening in the world with other intelligent people in a polite way that accommodated heterodox views, didn’t like random slurs or insults, and had good moderation, this was one of maybe five places you could do that. In many ways, it still is. But even I recognize that I can now have intelligent, thoughtful and challenging political conversations with frontier (consumer) LLMs, and while they push back on some culture war stuff we must presume Grok or some Chinese open source model will get there eventually, probably very soon.
When that happens, the humanity will be the point. So I think it is probably useful to crack down, via friendly and mutual agreement, on LLMposting. A lot of weird shit is about to happen, and I’d like to discuss it with you, not (just) with Claude.
Totally agreed. I'm becoming more and more convinced with what I'm seeing on a daily basis (not like I have any particularly strong links to the AI companies, so this isn't secret insider info or anything, just what I'm observing on the margins of the AI transformation, which has already made huge impacts in quant finance) that what makes us special is not our intelligence, but our humanity with all its flaws.
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