I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science.
Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction.
I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument.
It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable.
It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.
Which, given the section below from the article, ends up kind of ironic:
> There is a deeper cost still, and it concerns the thing LLMs do most impressively: writing. [...] Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it.
I think the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is, which would explain both how they could put that part into the article, and how they seemingly believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.
This comment was perhaps written by an LLM that has learned it can karma farm by pointing out all of the articles that have LLM usage while everyone still thinks that is a novel contribution.
In the spirit of the "That's what she said" bot, you could train an LLM detector by accusing everything of being authored by an LLM and seeing which ones get voted up.
I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct.
I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.
Is "quietly" an LLM tell? It was always certainly a human writer trope commonly seen in journalism. Though I guess it does appear five times in the body of the post, and a human writer would probably not go that far with it.
I think individually and when used sparingly, writing tropes can be fine, but when the article has every second sentence being a writing trope, it becomes pretty obvious that either a LLM wrote it, or the author simply doesn't know how to write, and regardless, it's a waste of time trying to read through it.
For software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants.
And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.
If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.
Counterpoint: most Open Source projects are (or started off as) programs people built for themselves, and anyone else ending up using them was a happy side-effect.
Collaborative research is a dual purpose existensial safety hazard, it's better to all results locked up away from public use for the public's own benefit.
There's a general point here which is that the primary use and appeal of AI is to use it to avoid the negative side effects imposed on you by other people.
The flip side is the people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways, which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.
Wut? AI do absolutely nothing in terms of "avoiding the negative side effects imposed on me by other people". Instead we are all having to deal with negative side effects of AI.
AI is imposed on us, whether we want it or not.
>which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.
Like, OpenAI and Antropic? Because these two are the primary entities a.) pushing for regulation of their competitors b.) doing their best to convince us that AI is oh so dangerous and will kill us all as vengeful AI god is about to wake up any day now c.) openly bragging about using AI to hack other companies.
Article: someone enjoys being alone in the car, because they dont want to talk and find it impossible to be in the same space as other people without talking. And apparently end up arguing over radio each time they are on the 20min long car drive or something.
I think I would prefer to be alone rather with them too based on that.
Right all those people protesting outside data centres are bureaucrats? This is a ridiculous take, large swaths of the population are against AI, most people are concerned about resource use, their livelihoods, and a destruction of the human element in so many crafts.
I'm pretty baffled by people I hear here and there saying that AI is great because it saves them the hassle of human interaction. "I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music". Apparently people didn't get the memo : humans are social animals. Autonomous individuals simply don't exist. Nothing is entirely yours...
And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.
This falls short because not being forced into chit-chat and music is very pleasant, but chatting with LLMs instead of collaborating with other people on a project is not. These aren't equivalents.
Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction.
I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument.
It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable.
It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.
> There is a deeper cost still, and it concerns the thing LLMs do most impressively: writing. [...] Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it.
I think the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is, which would explain both how they could put that part into the article, and how they seemingly believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.
I like LLMs and use them daily, but I don't really like when people use them undisclosed for long-form prose writing.
I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.
Things are bit tight today.
And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect.
If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.
The amount of OSS is exploding, but the community part of it is not
The flip side is the people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways, which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.
individual empowerment threatens institutions
AI is imposed on us, whether we want it or not.
>which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.
Like, OpenAI and Antropic? Because these two are the primary entities a.) pushing for regulation of their competitors b.) doing their best to convince us that AI is oh so dangerous and will kill us all as vengeful AI god is about to wake up any day now c.) openly bragging about using AI to hack other companies.
Quite literally the subject of the article.
I think I would prefer to be alone rather with them too based on that.
Not what was claimed.
People become islands working on something without the bigger picture.
This is very dangerous.
Some mistake, I think. Removing that friction would ease the interaction. This effect eliminates it.
And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.
>humans are social animals
with varying social needs
collaboration adds overhead, but expands what's possible. need to think bigger to continue to see the benefits