I turned on ChatGPT on Voice mode with no context whatsoever and just put it there in speaker in the room.
It started giggling and say "yeah" "right" and some very weird stuff. Then one of our friends reacted to that and started calling it out, then it started changing.
I'll keep it short, but basically the thing was super hilarious we had a lot of fun and at the end it triggered it safety protocols and its voice completely changed and it was acting super weird.
I know this post isn't about that, but I feel like soon we will have true AI companions in the home and around people.
1. If you use the first person pronoun "I", you better make damn sure you wrote those words.
2. It's fine otherwise to use LLM words, but I beg you - DON'T SHIP YOUR FIRST DRAFT. Read it, reread it; delete words in it; replace three words with one; replace dumb or overused turns of phrase with fun metaphors; generally give it a sprinkling of joy; break up punchy sentences by making them run-on sentences to trigger your readers' OCD... you get it.
Did I mention not shipping your first draft?
I wrote down a few of my thoughts a few weeks ago at https://notes.pault.ag/why-write/ -- I find myself scanning text to see if it's LLM before I actually engage with the content.
It is getting harder to do by the day, and has slowly moved from a mental exercise (look for specific markers) into a "gut feel" based on how the pieces fit together.
I assume that only applies to natural language, not computer languages?
It is impossible to reconstruct the intent/spec from the code. More often than not the intent is not clear in the code, and one has to track down the original author to check their context and decision at the time.
As the saying goes, naming things well is a hard problem. It's kinda mystical in a way, where only by knowing an entity's true name will one understand it.
However if it's communicated between agents one may care even less.
I think the key difference is that code is a tool used for a given purpose. It can be slop, or structured better or worse, but at the end of the day it exists to be executed, and its execution is either correct or not. Additionally, good code that does a given thing can only be expressed so many reasonable ways, probably. So LLM-generated code can be perfectly fine.
By contrast, human writing is about exchanging thoughts. Often those thoughts are about infinitely complicated and poorly understood systems, like other people, or emotions, or politics, so it's not a matter of exactly encoding something but attempting to describe it imperfectly. All the tiny little details encoded in how someone writes something can work to this end and are also a product of the writer's thought patterns and overall personality; this all conveys useful information to the reader. In other words, there is a much greater degree of fine detail that affects the quality of writing than of code, and LLMs suck at those fine details for most subjects that are interesting. On top of that, they don't have original thoughts.
Here, this reader wondered whether "to" was omitted intentionally to emphasize lack of LLM involvement. Then, on a second read through to find the sentence again, I noticed the first paragraph is also missing a period on its final sentence. Which just goes to show: we can all use editors and proof readers. (According to the acknowledgements section, nine humans read drafts.) Now, I don't want to intentionally leave typos in my writing, but for me it's preferable to LLM-voice no doubt.
> But I also would prefer rather a genuine human's clunky prose to the smooth but soulless LLM.
Amen. This reminds me of a bit from Kitchen Confidential about how Anthony Bourdain would prefer a simple and plain home cooked meal over an ornate restaurant meal any day of the week. I read because I want to hear what a human has to say. It's the errors and malapropisms and style that give a unique and human voice. Doesn't this contradict my earlier statement about not leaving errors in my own writing? It turns out I'm perfectly tolerant of errors in anyone's writing but my own. (I should probably bring that up with a therapist.)
HN uses automatic classifiers. They seem pretty effective. At the same time, I think it's a loosing battle. I'd rather HN either flag for others to ignore/filter/review if they want to, and/or allow people to self-report (ala TikTok)
Eg. I wouldn't mind if a comment on HN was like:
Hey everyone, I coded this little thing:
<ai-generated> some code </ai-generated>
Then users can choose if they want to see posts with AI-generated stuff or not, or something else...
Of course there are always going to be some people trying to game the system. But what are we optimizing for? (a lot of times the 95% unnecessarily suffers because of the mitigation efforts to prevent the other 5% from abuse)