Post #3261876

2024-01-14 15:45 UTC

Ok, so first, content creation. That seems positive, right? Wrong! The best way I've seen of explaining this: "Why should I take the time to read something nobody took the time to write?" I think this one is a huge net societal negative. The people out there who want instant "content" are almost entirely not readers. They're people who want something to run ads against. They're people who want the credit for writing without doing the work. They're people who want to sell you something without understanding the something or whether or not it might be good for you. In short, they're people with various levels of contempt for their readers. 4/

Replies (1)

@williampietri@sfba.social 2024-01-14 15:53

As a writer, I think the real value of writing is the thinking and care that goes into it. Even for purely factual material, writing involves a careful search for truth. LLMs, though, don't have any concept of "true". They can't. What they have is the digested correspondence between words in Wikipedia and Reddit and a zillion other sources of text. Truth can be represented in text, but it lies outside of it. In philosopher Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", he defines it as "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit Marketing content generated by LLMs is clearly bullshit. But I'd argue that by imitating human forms of writing, *everything* produced by an LLM is bullshit. (Which would make the enormous "AI" hype cycle bullshit about bullshit, a truly American accomplishment.) 5/

Open ##3261877