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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Just like your average human journalist. If you ever read an article from not specialist journal on a topic you are familiar with - you know. This seems actually where LLM are very similar to how human brain works - if we don't know something, we come up with some bullshit.
Even medium human writers can comprehend their work as a whole, though. There is a cohesiveness even to the bullshit. The LLM is just putting words down that match the prompt. It's rng driven, readable Lorum Ipsum.
If the results were still edited afterwards, there may be some merit to the output, but any company going full LLM isn't looking for quality. They want to use it to churn out endless content that they simply can't get from even a team of humans. More than could be edited even if they kept editors on staff.
Sure, but a lot of humans are rather bad writers.
That is true for 24h news cycle of online media, regardless LLM.
Bad writing is still a step above rng junk, imo.
Yes, that was my point. Setting up your company to put out more content than can possibly be processed by humans is a glaring sign of their values - ie quantity far above quality.
I'v read writing worse than GTP. I had to help someone write an essay - and I just wrote it for him in the end, because he absolutely lacked the skills to write a long meaningful text. At at the same time - genius of a percussionist.
Do you think that person was signing up for jobs writing for blogs or content farms?
Have you read some low quality journalism? The whole yellow press can be replaced with GTP and no one would ever see a difference.
Ok, so do you wanna talk about your terrible writing partner in school? Or "yellow press"? Or maybe the topic of the article, which isn't journalism in the slightest? Or how about my point, which was, again, that even bad writers have context, as opposed to an LLM which is just filling in the arbitrary patterns it's programmed to delineate. Readability is not what I'm talking about.
That's how you get the room
That's how you get the room
Did you get the room you were looking for, since you asked for it thrice? Trivago.
Dude, what's with aggression? We just having a conversation that floats along. I'm talking about general LLMs capabilities to write text - which are in my opinion comparable to human writing, since again - a lot of people lack the same things LLMs generated texts are lacking. And I had some examples. No idea what made you so upset.
You brought up several different, unrelated topics and pretty much ignored anything I said to disprove something I never claimed. That is frustrating to deal with.
Except you are the one who responded to me. And if there is a point you made I overlooked - I will gladly answer it. I also didn't disprove anything - just voiced my opinion. I'm not interested in a debate club and winning arguments, just sharing opinions and trying to understand others.
The top comment is about how LLMs don't comprehend what they're writing, and your first comment (as I read it) was about how LLMs work how human brains do. My point was that they don't and why, not about how good or bad humans or machines are at writing, which is what you kept bringing up, hence the frustration.
My first comment is, that there are enough humans out there that don't really comprehend what they are writing and often also make shit up as they go. I was not talking about the underlying mechanism, which is rather speculative since we have little idea how complex functions of the brain - like text generation, work. Just making a humorous light hearted comparison.
Our conversation is a nice illustration how, maybe we as humans aren't as good at understanding text - as we might think. (Again - that is a light hearted comment and not some profound complex observation).
To be clear, I'm not talking about underlying mechanisms, either, but the approach to the task. A human writer, even one bad at writing and not understanding the topic, will approach the writing with a goal and write to that goal and topic. They can even research if they so choose, but even if they are just making things up, there is intent and context there.
An LLM doesn't have any of that. It literally just generates words that match certain patterns, with no actual purpose or goal. It may have been programmed with a goal in mind, but it doesn't have one of its own. It can't reason, it can't research, it can't make decisions. I think that is an important distinction that people who are just saying "Who cares? It's all bad writing anyways" are missing.
You never made an experience of having to writer for a topic you genuinely don't care about, where you just string along words, vaguely related to the topic to make specific word count? I'm not arguing that all human writing is like this - people are definitely capable of writing text with purpose and context, at least some. But that is not all human writing.
And exactly that was my point, that humans often do the same. Not all the time. But it definitely happens, especially in professional writing where you maybe have to write about a topic you don't understand or care about.
And again, there are tons of people out there that can't do this things either. It's like a very intelligent chimpanzee is smarter than a very dumb human. So are LLMs better at generating text than quite a lot of humans.
Then you're missing the distinction as well.
I think you are just in a bubble where you don't have much contact with dumb people. I would have thought the same during my university time, but chosing not academia or science for that matter opened a whole new wold of ignorance for me. By the way - maybe our brain is just a Markov Model prediction machine and consciousness ist just an illusion, would not surprise me much if we are not that different from LLMs. But that is even more speculative.
So modern journalists were redundant all along?
But yeah, the quality of what is passing as journalism now is often ridiculous. But the only way to combat this is by having editors that are knowledgable about topics. But it seemed editors were the first people laid off, when internet articles became a thing.
24 hours news cycle of online media creates junk journalism on new level. Good journalism needs time and can't spit out news articles every minute of the day. Editors won't help, because it's just not possible to do good journalism on that scale. But jeh - in general with AI, the jobs will shift more to editing. Which will be extremely soul-draining, going though tons of AI generated bullshit