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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.
Maybe this is just me, but I actually don't enjoy writing. I enjoy having written my thoughts in a way that conveys my internal dialogue in a format that is digestible to others, but that's time-consuming and often misses the target. Given the option of a super-intelligent entity that can save me the trouble... well it's difficult to deny the appeal (btw I've never used an LLM, yet). Language is limited whereas thoughts are not, and bridging that gap can be frustrating.
One thing I love about this forum is in stumbling across a post or comment that brilliantly summarizes my internal thoughts in a far more coherent and eloquent way than I could ever hope to do myself. I'm often tempted to copy and paste some of these passages to others who have shared in a relevant conversation previously. In a way, I use TheMotte as my own LLM, I suppose.
I don't buy this. There are cases of "I'll know it when I see it", sure, but a lot more of people thinking they know exactly what they think, but then finding out, the more they use language to talk and write about it, that they never knew in the first place.
As an example from my experience, clients in advertising often think they know what they want. Then they see it and realise they don't. The process goes on until they arrive at something they are happy with. Is it what was in their head originally? Basically never.
I gently suggest you introspect when this happens next. Are you really perceiving a match between what is written and what you already think? Or are you just intuitively nodding along at something without it touching the sides? Consider what is the difference between those two things. When you are on the verge of putting a smart thought into words, do you know with confidence that you already have a smart thought? Or does it sometimes feel disappointing when it is on the page?
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Until the day we use neuralink to grant ChatGPT read/write access to our brains, the final permission dialog, you have to express your thoughts in writing at least to ChatGPT. And I genuinely prefer the prose of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails to a verbose wall of slop, because at least he gets to the point.
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It's not just you, I also don't enjoy writing. But LLM outputs of my thoughts never really hit write (buh dum tss) either. They never really convey any soul to my thoughts.
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Well here's my question for you: Suppose AI advances to the point where it reliably produces content that is coherent and eloquent as you describe. Will you continue to participate in forums such as this one? Or will you just engage back and forth with the AI?
It sounds like you would choose the latter option, which is fine by me. But if you do continue to participate in this forum, it kind of shows that you prefer human interaction. Which means you understand why others would prefer not to engage with an AI but with another person acting as the middleman.
As a side note, the same kind of reasoning applies to people who use chess computers to cheat while playing online chess. The fact that they feel the need to cheat against live humans (as opposed to simply using a computer to help them play against other computers) more or less proves that they see the value in human interaction. A value which they are denying to others.
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I understand the desire because, at least for me, writing is work. Torturous work, even, when I’m trying to write creatively and draw out a specific idea properly.
However, putting aside the usual arguments about human creativity and soul and all that, I think there is genuine value in having to write things out. I find that ideas I take the time to write out become much more ‘real’ in the process; concepts that can bounce around loosely in your head suddenly need to be translated into something coherent. The process is almost always transformative, and I find myself making connections or grappling with an issue in a way I hadn’t before. With creative writing it’s very similar — there are so many times I’ve found what the scene was really about through the act of turning notes into prose.
I won’t say this is how it is for everyone, but I suspect there would be something significant lost by skipping the friction of writing it out, even in hypothetical scenario where an AI could hook up to your brain and port the contents of your thoughts into readable text.
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