[HN Gopher] I'd rather read the prompt
___________________________________________________________________
I'd rather read the prompt
Author : claytonwramsey
Score : 315 points
Date : 2025-05-04 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (claytonwramsey.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (claytonwramsey.com)
| kookamamie wrote:
| We offloaded our memory to Google and then our writing to LLMs.
|
| There's too much information in the World for it to matter, I
| think is the underlying reason.
|
| As an example, most enterprise communication nears the levels of
| noise in its content.
|
| So, why not let a machine generate this noise, instead?
| bost-ty wrote:
| I hear you. But in this case, it seems like the author was
| mostly referencing academic uses of LLMs for either writing
| assignments or reviewing (academic) papers. Enterprise
| communications have their own carefully set requirements, but
| often they aren't meant to be instructive to the person writing
| them (assignments) or enhancing an existing corpus of knowledge
| (academic papers, optimistically).
| Tteriffic wrote:
| If you ask, just show me the prompts, you will invariable just
| get llm generated sets of prompts.
| necovek wrote:
| The request is not the one that would happen in real life, it's
| rather trying to point out where the actual _value_ is.
| bost-ty wrote:
| I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the
| individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like
| this week), it's that the thought that went into making the
| prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the
| output the LLM generates afterwards.
|
| In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the
| code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't
| know what I want, if I don't have any ideas, and I don't have a
| structure or plan, _that 's_ the sort of code I get out.
|
| I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used LLMs
| lately to get academic or creative writing done, as I haven't
| tried using any models lately for anything beyond helping me
| punch through boilerplate/scaffolding on personal programming
| projects.
| Herring wrote:
| In my experience Gemini can be really good at creative writing,
| but yes you have to prompt and edit it very carefully (feeding
| ideas, deleting ideas, setting tone, conciseness, multiple
| drafts, etc).
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1andqk8/gemini...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I use Gemini pretty much exclusively for creative writing
| largely because the long context lets you fit an entire
| manuscript plus ancillary materials, so it can serve as a
| solid beta reader, and when you ask it to outline a chapter
| it is very good at taking the events preceding and following
| into account. It's hard to overstate the value of having a
| decent beta reader that can iteratively review your entire
| work in seconds.
|
| As a side note, I find the way that you interact with a LLM
| when doing creative writing is generally more important than
| the model. I have been having great results with LLMs for
| creative writing since ChatGPT 3.5, in part because I
| approach the model with a nucleus of a chapter and a concise
| summary of relevant details, then have it ask me a long list
| of questions to flesh out details, then when the questions
| stop being relevant I have have it create a narrative outline
| or rough draft which I can finish.
| Herring wrote:
| Interesting. I think I'm a better editor so I use it as a
| writer, but it makes sense that it works the other way too
| for strong writers. Your way might even be better, since
| evaluating a text is likely easier than constructing a good
| text (Which is why your process worked even back with 3.5).
| vunderba wrote:
| This is the _CRUX_ of the issue. Even with SOTA models (Sonnet
| 3.5, etc) - the more open-ended your prompt - the more banal
| and generic the response. It 's GIGO turtles all the way down.
|
| I pointed this out a few weeks ago with respect to why the
| _current state_ of LLMs will never make great campaign creators
| in Dungeons and Dragons.
|
| We as humans don't need to be "constrained" - ask any competent
| writer to sit quietly and come up with a novel story plot and
| they can just do it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677863
|
| That being said - they can still make _AMAZING_ soundboards.
|
| And if you still need some proof, crank the temperature up to
| 1.0 and pose the following prompt to _ANY_ LLM:
| Come up with a self-contained single room of a dungeon that
| involves an unusual puzzle for use with a DND campaign.
| Be specific in terms of the puzzle, the solution, layout
| of the dungeon room, etc. It should be totally different
| from anything that already exists. Be imaginative.
|
| I guarantee 99% of the returns will return a very formulaic
| physics-based puzzle response like "The Resonant Hourglass", or
| "The Mirror of Acoustic Symmetry", etc.
| Nezteb wrote:
| Out of curiosity, I used your prompt but added "Do not make
| it a very formulaic physics-based puzzle."
|
| The output is pretty non-sensical:
| https://pastebin.com/raw/hetAvjSG
| HPsquared wrote:
| It is totally different from anything that exists. It
| fulfils the prompt, I suppose! It has to be crazy so you
| can be more certain it's unique. The prompt didn't say
| anything about it being _good_.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I liked the puzzle and I think I could DM it.
| johnfn wrote:
| > I guarantee 99% of the returns will return a very formulaic
| physics-based puzzle response like "The Resonant Hourglass"
|
| Haha, I was suspicious, so I tried this, and I indeed got an
| hourglass themed puzzle! Though it wasn't physics-based -
| characters were supposed to share memories to evoke emotions,
| and different emotions would ring different bells, and then
| you were supposed to evoke a certain type of story. Honestly,
| I don't know what the hourglass had to do with it.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Temperature 1.0 results are awful regardless of domain. 0.7
| to 0.8 is the sweet spot. No one seems to believe this till
| they see for themselves.
| echelon wrote:
| > I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used
| LLMs lately to get academic or creative writing done
|
| I commented in another thread. We're using image and video
| diffusion models for creative:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY
|
| Still not a fan of LLMs.
| buu700 wrote:
| I think the author has a fair take on the types of LLM output
| he has experience with, but may be overgeneralizing his
| conclusion. As shown by his example, he seems to be narrowly
| focusing on the use case of giving the AI some small snippet of
| text and asking it to stretch that into something less
| information-dense -- like the stereotypical "write a response
| to this email that says X", and sending that output instead of
| just directly saying X.
|
| I personally tend not to use AI this way. When it comes to
| writing, that's actually the exact inverse of how I most often
| use AI, which is to throw a ton of information at it in a large
| prompt, and/or use a preexisting chat with substantial relevant
| context, possibly have it perform some relevant searches and/or
| calculations, and then iterate on that over successive prompts
| before landing on a version that's close enough to what I want
| for me to touch up by hand. Of course the end result is clearly
| shaped by my original thoughts, with the writing being a mix of
| my own words and a reasonable approximation of what I might
| have written by hand anyway given more time allocated to the
| task, and not clearly identifiable as AI-assisted. When working
| with AI this way, asking to "read the prompt" instead of my
| final output is obviously a little ridiculous; you might as
| well also ask to read my browser history, some sort of
| transcript of my mental stream of consciousness, and whatever
| notes I might have scribbled down at any point.
| satisfice wrote:
| If you present your AI-powered work to me, and I suspect you
| employed AI to do any of the heavy lifting, I will
| automatically discount any role you claim to have had in that
| work.
|
| Fairly or unfairly, people (including you) will inexorably
| come to see anything done with AI as ONLY done with AI, and
| automatically assume that anyone could have done it.
|
| In such a world, someone could write the next Harry Potter
| and it will be lost in a sea of one million mediocre works
| that roughly similar. Hidden in plain sight forever. There
| would no point in reading it, because it is probably the same
| slop I could get by writing a one paragraph prompt. It would
| be too expensive to discover otherwise.
| buu700 wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not a student, nor do I disagree with
| academic honor codes that forbid LLM assistance. For
| anything that I apply AI assistance to, the extent to which
| I could personally "claim credit" is essentially
| immaterial; my goal is to get a task done at the highest
| quality and lowest cost possible, not to cheat on my
| homework. AI performs busywork that would cost me time or
| cost money to delegate to another human, and that makes it
| valuable.
|
| I'm expanding on the author's point that the hard part is
| the input, not the output. Sure someone else could produce
| the same output as an LLM given the same input and
| sufficient time, but they don't have the same input. The
| author is saying "well then just show me the input"; my
| counterpoint is that the input can often be vastly longer
| and less organized or cohesive than the output, and thus
| less useful to share.
| palata wrote:
| > the exact inverse of how I most often use AI, which is to
| throw a ton of information at it in a large prompt
|
| It sounds to me that you don't make the effort to _absorb_
| the information. You cherry-pick stuff that pops in your head
| or that you find online, throw that into an LLM and let it
| convince you that it created something sound.
|
| To me it confirms what the article says: it's not worth
| reading what you produce this way. I am not interested in
| that eloquent text that your LLM produced (and that you
| modify just enough to feel good saying it's your work); it
| won't bring me anything I couldn't get by quickly thinking
| about it or quickly making a web search. I don't need to talk
| to you, you are not interesting.
|
| But if you spend the time to actually absorb that
| information, realise that you need to read even more,
| actually make your own opinion and get to a point where we
| could have an actual discussion about that topic, then I'm
| interested. An LLM will not get you there, and getting there
| is not done in 2 minutes. That's precisely why it is
| interesting.
| buu700 wrote:
| You're making a weirdly uncharitable assumption. I'm
| referring to information which I largely or entirely wrote
| myself, or which I otherwise have proprietary access to,
| not which I randomly cherry-picked from scattershot Google
| results.
|
| Synthesizing large amounts of information into smaller more
| focused outputs is something LLMs happen to excel at. Doing
| the exact same work more slowly by hand just to prove a
| point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to deliver
| business value.
| palata wrote:
| > Doing the exact same work more slowly by hand just to
| prove a point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to
| deliver business value.
|
| You prove my point again: it's not "just to prove a
| point". It's about internalising the information,
| improving your ability to synthesise and be critical.
|
| Sure, if your only objective is to "deliver business
| value", maybe you make more money by being uninteresting
| with an LLM. My point is that if you get good at doing
| all that without an LLM, then you become a more
| interesting person. You will be able to have an actual
| discussion with a real human and be interesting.
| buu700 wrote:
| Understanding or being interesting has nothing to do with
| it. We use calculators and computers for a reason. No one
| hires people to respond to API requests by hand; we run
| the code on servers. Using the right tool for the job is
| just doing my job well.
| palata wrote:
| > We use calculators and computers for a reason. No one
| hires people to respond to API requests by hand; we run
| the code on servers
|
| We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding. We
| don't use calculators for writing. We don't use API
| requests for writing (except when we make an LLM write
| for us).
|
| > Using the right tool for the job is just doing my job
| well.
|
| I don't know what your job is. But if your job is to
| produce text that is meant to be read by humans, then it
| feels like not being able to synthesise your ideas
| yourself doesn't make you excellent at doing your job.
|
| Again maybe it makes you productive. Many developers, for
| instance, get paid for writing bad code (either because
| those who pay don't care about quality or can't make a
| difference, or something else). Vibe coding obviously
| makes those developers more productive. But I don't
| believe it will make them learn how to produce good code.
| Good for them if they make money like this, of course.
| sigotirandolas wrote:
| For creative and professional writing, I found them useful for
| grammar and syntax review, or finding words from a fuzzy
| description.
|
| For the structure, they are barely useful: Writing is about
| having such a clear understanding, that the meaning remains
| when reduced to words, so that others may grasp it. The LLM
| won't help much with that, as you say yourself.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are
| far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a
| large language model can transform them into.
|
| Really? The example used was for a school test. Is there really
| much original thought in the answer? Do you really want to read
| the students original thought?
|
| I think the answer is no in this case. The point of the test is
| to assess whether the student has learned the topic or not. It
| isn't meant to share actual creative thoughts.
|
| Of course, using AI to write the answer is contrary to the actual
| purpose, too, but it isn't because you want to hear the students
| creativity, but because it is failing to serve its purpose as a
| demonstration of knowledge.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| > Do you really want to read the students original thought?
|
| Why else would you become a teacher, if you didn't care about
| what your students think?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Because you want to pass on knowledge? I am not saying there
| aren't ANY situations where a teacher cares about what their
| students think, but the example given isn't really one of
| those times. The question is not one that has many
| opportunities for original thought; it is a basic question
| that everyone who knows the answer will answer similarly. The
| entire purpose is to ascertain if the person understands what
| was taught, it isn't meant to engender a novel response.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| How do you know if you have passed on your knowledge
| without knowing what your students think/know?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Sure, but my contention was more with the word
| "original", because they aren't really original thoughts.
| The teacher just wants to make sure the student's
| thoughts contain the information they are teaching. The
| teacher isn't looking for actual original thought in this
| test.
| necovek wrote:
| It's not a "test", it's an "assignment". Assignment is a
| way to practice what you've learned, and a (good) teacher
| would want to get your original thoughts so they could
| adjust their instruction and teaching material to what they
| believe you missed in order to improve your mental model
| around the topic (or in other words, to _teach_ you
| something).
|
| Perhaps the problem is that they are "graded", but this is
| to motivate the student, and runs against the age-old
| problem of gamification.
| staunton wrote:
| > Because you want to pass on knowledge?
|
| Arguably, that's not what teachers mainly do (to an ever
| increasing proportion).
|
| Most knowledge is easily available. A teacher is teaching
| students to think in productive ways, communicate their
| thoughts and understand what others are trying to tell
| them. For this task, it's essential that the teacher has
| some idea what the students are thinking, especially when
| it's something original.
| andy99 wrote:
| I used to teach, years before LLMs, and got lots of copy-pasted
| crap submitted. I always marked it zero, never mentioning
| plagiarism (which would require some university administration)
| and just commenting that I asked for X and instead got some
| pasted together nonsense.
|
| As long as LLM output is what it is, there is little threat of it
| actually being competitive on assignments. If students are
| attentive enough to paraphrase it into their own voice I'd call
| it a win; if they just submit the crap that some data labeling
| outsourcer has RLHF'd into a LLM, I'd just mark it zero.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Are you just assuming that a student who you think used an LLM
| would be unwilling to escalate?
|
| I would have thought that giving 0s to correct solutions would
| lead to successful complaints/appeals.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| If it's copy pasted it's obvious, and the assignment isn't to
| turn in a correct solution, but to turn in evidence that you
| are able to determine a correct solution. Automated answers
| deserve 0 credit.
| gyomu wrote:
| Yeah, the author here is as much a part of the problem. If you
| let students get away with submitting ChatGPT nonsense, of
| course they're going to do that - they don't care about the
| 3000 words appeal to emotion on your blog, they take the path
| of least resistance.
|
| If you're not willing to cross out an entire assignment and
| return it to the student who handed it in with "ChatGPT
| nonsense, 0" written in big red letters at the top of it, you
| should ask yourself what is the point of your assignments in
| the first place.
|
| But I get it, university has become a pay-to-win-a-degree
| scheme for students, and professors have become powerless to
| enforce any standards or discipline in the face of
| administrators.
|
| So all they can do is give the ChatGPT BS the minimum passing
| grade and then philosophize about it on their blog (which the
| students will never read).
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I fully support the author's point but it's hard to argue with
| the economics and hurdles around obtaining degrees. Most people
| do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent
| job, that's just the economics of it. And unfortunately the
| employers these days are encouraging this kind of copy/paste
| work. Look at how Meta and Google claim the majority of the new
| code written there is AI created?
|
| The world will be consumed by AI.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You get what you measure, and you should expect people to game
| your metric.
|
| Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to
| college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever.
|
| Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give
| everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree.
|
| And since most people are only interested in the job, not the
| learning that underpins the degree, well, you get a bunch of
| students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate
| at the end.
|
| When people are only there to play the game, then you can't
| expect them to learn.
|
| However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in
| front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow. If you are
| in college I recommend you take advantage of the chance to
| interact with the knowledge on offer. College may be offered to
| all, but only a lucky few see the gold on offer, and really
| learn.
|
| That's the thing about the game. It's not just about the final
| score. There's so much more on offer.
| squigz wrote:
| > you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass
| mark and the certificate at the end.
|
| This is because that is what companies care about. It's not a
| proxy for cleverness or intelligence - it's a box to check.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to
| getting a decent job
|
| Then fail to actually learn anything and apply for jobs and try
| to cheat the interviewers using the same AI that helped them
| graduate. I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first
| batch of developers who cannot function without it. I don't
| even mind that you use an LLM for parts of your job, but you
| need to be able to function without it. Not all data is allowed
| to go into an AI prompt, some problems aren't solvable with the
| LLMs and you're not building your own skills if you rely on
| generated code/configuration for the simpler issues.
| mezyt wrote:
| > I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of
| developers who cannot function without it.
|
| Playing the contrarian here, but I'm from a batch of
| developers that can't function without a compiler, and I'm at
| 10% of what I can do without an IDE and static analysis.
| necovek wrote:
| That's really curious: I've never felt that much empowered
| by an IDE or static analysis.
|
| Sure, there's a huge jump from a line editor like `ed` to a
| screen editor like `vi` or `emacs`, but from there on, it
| was diminishing returns really (a good debugger was usually
| the biggest benefit next) -- I've also had the "pleasure"
| of having to use `echo`, `cat` and `sed` to edit complex
| code in a restricted, embedded environment, and while it
| made iterations slower, not that much more slower than if I
| had a full IDE at my disposal.
|
| In general, if I am in a good mood (and thus not annoyed at
| having to do so many things "manually"), I am probably only
| 20% slower than with my fully configured IDE at _coding_
| things up, which translates to less than 5% of slow down on
| actually delivering the thing I am working on.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| I've seen this comparison a few times already, but IMHO
| it's totally wrong.
|
| A compiler translates _what you have already implemented_
| into another computer runnable language. There is an actual
| grammar that defines the rules. It does not generate new
| business logic or assumptions. You have already done the
| work and taken all the decisions that needed critical
| thought, it's just being translated _instruction by
| instruction_. (btw you should check how compilers work,
| it's fun)
|
| Using an LLM is more akin to copying from Stackoverflow
| than using a compiler/transpiler.
|
| In the same way, I see org charts that put developers above
| AI managers, which are above AI developers. This is just
| smoke. You can't have LLMs generating thousands of lines of
| code independently. Unless you want a dumpster fire very
| quickly...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Apples and oranges (or stochastic vs deterministic)
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Look inside a compiler, you'll find some AI.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think, rather than saying they can't do their job without
| an LLM, we should just say some can't do their jobs.
|
| That is, the job of a professional programmer includes having
| produced code that they understand the behavior of. Otherwise
| you've failed to do your due diligence.
|
| If people are using LLMs to generate code, and then actually
| doing the work of understanding how that code works... that's
| fine! Who cares!
|
| If people are just vibe coding and pushing the results to
| customers without understanding it--they are wildly unethical
| and irresponsible. (People have been doing this for decades,
| they didn't have the AI to optimize the situation, but they
| managed to do it by copy-pasting from stack overflow).
| closewith wrote:
| > That is, the job of a professional programmer includes
| having produced code that they understand the behavior of.
|
| I have met maybe two people who truly understood the
| behaviour of their code and both employed formal methods.
| Everyone else, including myself, are at varying levels of
| confusion.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| If you want to put the goalposts there, why program
| instead of building transistor networks?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Lots and _lots_ of developers can 't program at all. As in
| literally - can't write a simple function like "fizzbuzz"
| even if you let them use reference documentation. Many don't
| even know what a "function" even is.
|
| (Yes, these are people with developer jobs, often at
| "serious" companies.)
| staunton wrote:
| I've never met someone like that and don't believe the
| claim.
|
| Maybe you mean people who are bad at interviews? Or people
| whose job isn't actually programming? Or maybe "lots" means
| "at least one"? Or maybe they _can_ strictly speaking do
| fizzbuzz, but are "in any case bad programmers"? If your
| claim is true, what do these people do all day (or, let's
| say, did before LLMs were a thing...)?
| sarchertech wrote:
| Yeah I've been doing this for a while now and I've never
| met an employed developer who didn't know what a function
| is or couldn't write a basic program.
|
| I've met some really terrible programmers, and some
| programmers who freeze during interviews.
| echelon wrote:
| > I fully support the author's point
|
| I don't. I think the world is falling into two camps with these
| tools and models.
|
| > I now circle back to my main point: I have never seen any
| form of create generative model output (be that image, text,
| audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original
| prompt. The resulting output has less substance than the prompt
| and lacks any human vision in its creation. The whole point of
| making creative work is to share one's own experience
|
| Strong disagree with Clayton's conclusion.
|
| We just made this with AI, and I'm pretty sure you don't want
| to see the raw inputs unless you're a creator:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY
|
| I think the world will be segregated into two types of AI user:
|
| - Those that use the AI as a complete end-to-end tool
|
| - Those that leverage the AI as tool for their own creativity
| and workflows, that use it to enhance the work they already do
|
| The latter is absolutely a great use case for AI.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yes, depending on the model being used, endless text of this
| flavor isn't all that compelling to read:
|
| "Tall man, armor that is robotic and mechanical in
| appearance, NFL logo on chest, blue legs".,
|
| And so on, embedded in node wiring diagrams to fiddly configs
| and specialized models for bespoke purposes, "camera"
| movements, etc.
| necovek wrote:
| TBH, this video is not that compelling either, though --
| obviously -- I am aware that others might have a different
| opinion.
|
| Seeing this non-compelling prompt would tell me right off
| the bat that I wouldn't be interested in the video either.
| necovek wrote:
| > We just made this with AI, and I'm pretty sure you don't
| want to see the raw inputs unless you're a creator:
|
| I am not a creator but I am interested in generative AI
| capabilities and their limits, and I even suffered through
| the entire video which tries to be funny, but really isn't
| (and it'd be easier to skim through as a script than the full
| video).
|
| So even in this case, I would be more interested in the
| prompt than in this video.
| palata wrote:
| > Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to
| getting a decent job, that's just the economics of it.
|
| Because those who recruit based on the degree aren't worth more
| than those who get a degree by using LLMs.
|
| Maybe it will force a big change in the way students are
| graded. Maybe, after they have handed in their essay, the
| teacher should just have a discussion about it, to see how much
| they actually absorbed from the topic.
|
| Or not, and LLMs will just make everything worse. That's more
| likely IMO.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Prompts are source
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I don't know anything about the subject area, so I don't know if
| this captures enough to get a good grade. But I'm curious if
| anyone could tell whether the last answer were AI generated if I
| copied and pasted. These are the iterations I go through when
| writing long requirement documents/assessments/statements of work
| (consulting).
|
| Yes I know the subject area for which I write assessments and
| know if what is generated is factually correct. If I'm not sure,
| I ask for web references using the web search tool.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817c46d-0728-8010-a83d-609fe547c1...
| StefanBatory wrote:
| To me, this part
|
| > I didn't realize how much that could throw things off until I
| saw an example where the object started moving in a strange way
| when it hit that point.
|
| Would feel off, because why change the person? And even if it's
| intented, then I'd say it's not formal to do in an assignement.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| These are art students not English writers. If I were a
| teacher I would think this is more authentic. LLMs don't make
| this kind of mistake in its default house style.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| An exception to test the rule with: people are generating
| lifelike video based on the pixel graphics from old video games.
| I have no interest in seeing a prompt that says "Show me a
| creature from Heroes of Might and Magic 3, with influences from
| such and so", but it's incredible to see the monsters I've spent
| so much time with coming to life.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcITgZgN8nw&lc=UgxrBrdz4BdEE...
|
| Maybe the problem is that the professor doesn't want to read the
| student work anyway, since it's all stuff he already knows. If
| they managed to use their prompts to generate interesting things,
| he'd stop wanting to see the prompts.
| derefr wrote:
| > They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly
| fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style.
|
| No, this is just the de-facto "house style" of ChatGPT / GPT
| models, in much the same way that that that particular Thomas
| Kinkade-like style is the de-facto "house style" of Stable
| Diffusion models.
|
| You can very easily tell an LLM in your prompt to respond using a
| different style. (Or you can set it up to do so by telling it
| that it "is" or "is roleplaying" a specific type-of-person --
| e.g. an OP-ED writer for the New York Times, a textbook author,
| etc.)
|
| People just don't ever bother to do this.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I tried changing the house style.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817c9f4-ed48-8010-bc3e-58299140c8...
|
| In the real world I would at least remove the em dashes. It's a
| dead give away for LLM generated text.
| riwsky wrote:
| Like "dead give away" instead of "dead giveaway"?
| derefr wrote:
| That was not a good attempt at changing the style.
|
| You can't just say "don't sound like an LLM." The LLM does
| not in fact _know_ that it is "speaking like an LLM"; it
| just thinks that it's speaking the way the "average person"
| speaks, according to everything it's ever been shown. If you
| told it "just speak like a human being"... that's what it
| already thought it was doing!
|
| You have to tell the LLM a specific way to speak. Like
| directing an image generator to use a specific visual style.
|
| You _can_ say "ape the style of [some person who has a lot
| of public writing in the base model's web training corpus --
| Paul Graham, maybe?]". But that coverage will be spotty, and
| it's also questionably ethical (just like style-aping in
| image generation.)
|
| But an LLM will do even better if you tell it to speak the in
| some "common mode" of speech: e.g. "an email from HR", or "a
| shitpost rant on Reddit" or "an article in a pop-science
| magazine."
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That was the purpose of signals like "student" and "first
| month in class".
|
| And funny enough, an LLM has been trained to know what an
| LLM sounds like
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817efc0-d4c0-8010-a9ce-
| da12cdcff8...
| boredatoms wrote:
| For tests, just require everything to be written in-person, by
| hand or mechanical typewriter
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Time to go back to writing essays in exams, live, on paper.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It's challenging. Assignments (and particularly programming
| assignments) were by far the larger and more difficult part of
| my CS degree, and also the place where I learned the most. I
| cannot imagine losing that portion of my education and just
| replacing it with a few exams.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That's how it works in Germany. Usually assignments are
| either optional or you just have to get 50% of the total
| assignment marks over the semester to be admitted to the exam
| (written or often oral, in person). Then your grade is
| entirely based on the exam. Hand-holding throughout the
| semester assignment-to-assignment, checking attendance etc.
| is more an Anglo-specific thing where students are treated as
| kids instead of adults.
| person3 wrote:
| It is challenging. In my CS degree grading for programming
| questions fell into two areas
|
| 1. Take home projects where we programmed solutions to big
| problems. 2. Tests where we had to write programs in the exam
| on paper during the test.
|
| I think the take home projects are likely a lot harder to
| grade without AI being used. I'd be disappointed if schools
| have stopped doing the programming live during tests though.
| Being able to write a program in a time constrained
| environment is similar to interviewing, and requires
| knowledge of the language and being able to code algorithms.
| It also forces you to think through the program and detect if
| there will be bugs, without being able to actually run the
| program (great practice for debugging).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I wonder if you could invent a teaching language so the LLM
| wouldn't know about it. A little drastic, but still.
| helloplanets wrote:
| Pretty sure you could just give an LLM the given docs /
| course material and it would be able to write the language
| to a reasonable standard. Especially if it had sensible
| error messages.
| natebc wrote:
| Honestly I think we'll get back there. I remember ... fondly(?)
| exams from my history courses in undergrad in the mid 90s. 3-4
| questions, 3 hours, anything less than what would amount to a
| pretty decent length and moderately thorough term paper would
| fail and have to be made up with an absolutely BRUTAL multiple
| choice + fill in the blank exam at the end of the term.
|
| Those classes are what taught me how to study and really
| internalize the material. Helped me so much later in college
| too. I really can't imagine how kids these days are doing it.
| xmorse wrote:
| I am thinking about creating a proof-of-writing signature.
| Basically an editor with an "anti-cheat", you can't paste text
| into it. It signs your text with a public key.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| There is no way to design such a system that is not cheatable.
| At the very least, someone could simply type out text from
| another window or device. On any normal operating system or
| browser, the user will be able to bypass whatever mechanism you
| have in place anyway.
| hoppp wrote:
| You can still just type the Ai response. Often when I generate
| larger code I type it instead of copy paste, that helps me
| understand it and spot issues faster
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| We're going to invent kernel level anticheat for text editors
| rather than just do in person exams.
| staunton wrote:
| And what will we do next after that gets cheated?
| mopenstein wrote:
| Can't a raspberry pi (or similar) emulate a USB keyboard? Feed
| it any text and the key strokes will look real to your editor.
|
| I guess you could require a special encrypted keyboard in your
| plan.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I think people who don't like writing shouldn't be forced to
| write, just like people who don't like music shouldn't be forced
| to play music. Ditto for math.
|
| Forcing people to do these things supposedly results in a better,
| more competitive society. But does it really? Would you rather
| have someone on your team who did math because it let them solve
| problems efficiently, or did math because it's the trick to get
| the right answer?
|
| Writing is in a similar boat as math now. We'll have to decide
| whether we want to force future generations to write against
| their will.
|
| I was forced to study history against my will. The tests were
| awful trivia. I hated history for nearly a decade before
| rediscovering that I love it.
|
| History doesn't have much economical value. Math does. Writing
| does. But is forcing students to do these things the best way to
| extract that value? Or is it just the tradition we inherited and
| replicate just because our parents did?
| topkai22 wrote:
| Many of the things we teach in school aren't just for the
| direct knowledge or skill. We largely don't need to do
| arithmetic any more, but gaining the skill at doing it really
| improves our ability to deal with symbolic manipulation and
| abstraction.
|
| I remember another parent ranting about their 3rd grade kids
| "stupid homework" since it had kids learning different ways of
| summing numbers. I took a look at the homework and replied
| "wow, the basics out set theory are in here!" We then had a
| productive discussion of how that arithmetic exercise led to
| higher math and ways of framing problems.
|
| Similarly, writing produces a different form of thought than
| oral communication does.
|
| History is a bit different, but a goal of history and
| literature is (or it least should be) to socialize students and
| give them a common frame of reference in society.
|
| Finally there is the "you don't know when you'll need it
| defense." I have a friend who spent most of the last 20 years
| as a roofer, but his body is starting to hurt. He's pivoting to
| CAD drafting and he's brushing off a some of those math skills
| he hated learning in school. And now arguing with his son about
| why it's important.
|
| Those are the fundamental defenses- that we are seeking not
| skills but ways of viewing the world + you don't know what
| you'll need. There are obviously limits and tradeoffs to be
| made, but to some degree yes, we should be forcing students
| (who are generally children or at least inexperienced in a
| domain) to things they don't like now for benefits later.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Then your friend spent 20 years not needing math skills. If
| someone spent years doing something useless to them for two
| decades, we wouldn't call them efficient. But for some
| bizarre reason, we celebrate it as a point of honor in
| academia.
|
| One counter argument to yours is that when you do need the
| skills, you can learn them later. It's arguably easier than
| it has been at any point in human history. In that context,
| why front load people with something they hate doing, just
| because their parents think it's a good idea? Let them wait
| and learn it when they need it.
| necovek wrote:
| "Forcing" is a bit strong IMHO -- I believe we've instead lost
| track of what is "passable", and everyone in higher education
| should be able to reach that and score a passing grade (D? C?).
|
| Maybe professors are too stringent with their evaluation, or
| maybe they are not good at teaching people what a passable
| writing style is, or maybe students simply don't want to accept
| that if they don't excel at writing, a D or a C is perfectly
| fine. Perhaps teachers that look for good writing should have
| separate tests which evaluate students in both scenarios: with
| and without LLM help.
|
| The same holds true for math: not everybody needs to know how
| to deduce a proof for every theorem, but in technical sciences,
| showing that ability and capability will demonstrate how much
| they are able to think and operate with precision on abstract
| concepts, very much like in programming. Even if coursework is
| a bit repetitive, practice does turn shallow knowledge into
| operational knowledge.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In most schools a D is not passing or at least doesn't count
| as credit towards graduation. I'm not really sure what the
| point of that grade is to be honest.
| ZeroSolstice wrote:
| Reading, writing and math have been the constants utilized
| throughout life and as such have been core subjects carried
| through educational systems. I'm not quite sure what subjects
| and topics we would be teaching future generations that didn't
| include reading, writing, math and science. At the very least
| writing should be included in more subjects. The hidden feature
| of including writing in all subjects, as you might have seen in
| your history endeavor's, is improvements in critical thinking,
| formulating cohesive arguments and a clearer understanding of
| topics.
|
| There are greater difficulties that people will have to do in
| their daily lives than being "forced" to learn how to read,
| write and do arithmetic. Maybe learning the lesson of
| overcoming smaller, difficult tasks will allow them to adapt to
| greater difficulties in the future.
|
| To quote Seneca: A gem can not be polished with
| friction, nor a man perfected without trials.
| doright wrote:
| People just have to want to like things. If they don't like
| something enough then a near-ubiquitous form of outsourcing is
| now available for them to get carried away with.
|
| The "wanting to like things" is a highly undervalued
| skill/trait. It comes down to building a habit through
| repetition - not necessarily having fun or getting results, but
| training your mind like a muscle to think putting in effort
| isn't that bad an activity.
|
| For those growing up I think this is not something that is
| taught - usually it is already there as a childlike sense of
| wonder that gets pruned by controlling interests. If education
| forcing you to do math removes any enthusiasm you had for math,
| that's largely determined by circumstance. You'd need someone
| else to tell you the actual joys of X to offset that (and I'd
| guess most parents/teachers don't practice math for fun), or
| just spontaneously figuring out how interesting X is totally on
| one's own which is even rarer.
|
| I didn't have either so I'm a mathophobe, but I'm alright with
| that since I have other interests to focus on.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Yes writing in lots of form is thinking, we are loosing the
| ability to think
| ZeroSolstice wrote:
| I found that the book "Writing to Learn" by William Zinsser was
| excellent in convening this process. As noted in the book the
| author advocated for more writing to be included in all
| subjects.
| <https://goodreads.com/book/show/585474.Writing_to_Learn>
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| > A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of
| hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they
| shall receive a degree as testament to their completion of these
| assignments.
|
| I agree with the broader point of the article in principle. We
| should be writing to edify ourselves and take education seriously
| because of how deep interaction with the subject matter will
| transform us.
|
| But in reality, the mindset the author cites is more common. Most
| accounting majors probably don't have a deep passion for GAAP,
| but they believe accounting degrees get good jobs.
|
| And when your degree is utilitarian like that, it just becomes a
| problem of minimizing time spent to obtain the reward.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Is bringing up Naur's paper and arguing that theory of program is
| all that matters and LLMs cannot do that, just a 2025 version of
| calling LLMs stochastic parrots and claiming they don't model or
| work in terms of concepts? Feels like it.
|
| EDIT: Not a jab at the author per se, more that it's a third or
| fourth time I see this particular argument in the last few weeks,
| and I don't recall seeing it even once before.
| Animats wrote:
| That's because the instructor is asking questions that merely
| require the student to regurgitate the instructor's text.
|
| To actually teach this, you do something like this:
|
| "Here's a little dummy robot arm made out of Tinkertoys. There
| are three angular joints, a rotating base, a shoulder, and an
| elbow. Each one has a protractor so you can see the angle.
|
| 1. Figure out where the end of the arm will be based on those
| three angles. Those are Euler angles in action. This isn't too
| hard.
|
| 2. Figure out what the angles should be to touch a specific point
| on the table. For this robot geometry, there's a simple solution,
| for which look up "two link kinematics". You don't have to derive
| it, just be able to work out how to get the arm where you want
| it. Is the solution unambiguous? (Hint: there may be more than
| one solution, but not a large number.)
|
| 3. Extra credit. Add another link to the robot, a wrist. Now
| figure out what the angles should be to touch a specific point on
| the table. Three joints are a lot harder than two joints. There
| are infinitely many solutions. Look up "N-link kinematics". Come
| up with a simple solution that works, but don't try too hard to
| make it optimal. That's for the optimal controls course.
|
| This will give some real understanding of the problems of doing
| this.
| jfengel wrote:
| A LLM can't do that? I'm a little surprised.
|
| (I know jack all about robotics but that sounds like a pretty
| common assignment, the kind an LLM would regurgitate someone
| else's homework.)
| nikanj wrote:
| The LLM is very happy to give you an answer with high
| confidence.
|
| The answer might be bogus, but the AI will sound confident
| all the way through.
|
| No wonder sales and upper management love AI
| firefoxd wrote:
| Personally, I've used LLM to help me better structure my blog
| post after I write it. Meaning I've already written it, then it
| enhances it. Most of the time, I'm happy with the results at the
| time of editing. But when I come back a week or two to re-read
| it, it looks just like the example the author shared.
|
| The goal is to make something legible, but the reality is we are
| producing slop. I'm back to writing before my brain becomes lazy.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| [Edit: I agree] I've also grown to dislike even this use case.
| I did this back in 2023 but as AI text is spreading, the style
| - yes, even with prompt adjustments it leaks through - is
| recognized by more and more people and it's a very very bad
| look. If I see AI-like text from someone, I take it as an
| insult. It means they don't feel that it's worth their time to
| brush up the text themselves. And sure, it may well be that
| they don't value our interaction enough to spend the time on
| it. But that fact is indeed by itself insulting. So I only send
| AI touched up text to orgs that are so faceless or bureaucratic
| that I don't mind "offending" them.
|
| I've grown to respect typos and slightly misconstructed
| sentences. It's an interesting dynamic that now what appeared
| lazy to 2021 eyes actually indicates effort and what appeared
| polished and effortful in 2021 now indicates laziness.
|
| An example is how the admins of my local compute cluster
| communicate about downtimes and upgrades etc and they are
| clearly using AI and it's so damn annoying, it feels like
| biting into cotton candy fluff. Just send the bullet points! I
| don't need emojis, I don't need the fake politeness. It's no
| longer polite to be polite. It doesn't signal any effort.
| necovek wrote:
| I think the poster you replied to said the same thing.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, ironically I was too eager to comment before finishing
| the read. Let it be a confirmation then.
| nathants wrote:
| the solution is obvious. stop grading the result, and start
| grading the process.
|
| if you can one-shot an answer to some problem, the problem is not
| interesting.
|
| the result is necessary, but not sufficient. how did you get
| there? how did you iterate? what were the twists and turns? what
| was the pacing? what was the vibe?
|
| no matter if with encyclopedia, google, or ai, the medium is the
| message. the medium is you interacting with the tools at your
| disposal.
|
| record that as a video with obs, and submit it along with the
| result.
|
| for high stakes environments, add facecam and other information
| sources.
|
| reviewers are scrubbing through video in an editor. evaluating
| the journey, not the destination.
| necovek wrote:
| Unfortunately, the video is a far cry from carrying all the
| representative information: there is no way you can capture
| your full emotions as you are working through a problem, and
| where did you get your "eureka" moments unless you are
| particularly good at verbalising your through process as you go
| through multiple dead-ends and recognize how they lead you in
| the right direction.
|
| And reviewing video would be a nightmare.
| nathants wrote:
| there are only two options: - have more information - have
| less information
|
| more is better.
|
| you can scrub video with your finger on an iphone. serious
| review is always high effort, video changes nothing.
| necovek wrote:
| Not really: I love reading fiction where I can imagine
| characters the way I want to based on their written
| depictions. When I see a book cover replaced with a recent
| movie adaptation actor, it usually reduces the creative
| space for the reader instead of enlarging it.
|
| Video in itself is _not_ more information by definition.
| Just look at those automatically generated videos when you
| try finding a review on an unusual product.
| nathants wrote:
| are you trying to evaluate the author for some
| certification or test? this is contextual to evaluation.
|
| books are great.
|
| hundreds of hours of video of the author writing that
| book, is strictly more information.
| latentsea wrote:
| > reviewers are scrubbing through video in an editor.
| evaluating the journey, not the destination.
|
| Let's be real... Multi-modal LLMs are scrubbing through the
| journey :P
| nathants wrote:
| just as there are low value students, there are low value
| reviewers. same as it ever was.
|
| not every review is important.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I wish the author had state out right that they were not using
| LLMs much, since their opinion on them and their output has no
| value (its a new technology, and different enough that you do
| have to spend some time with them in order to be able to find out
| what value they have for your particluar work[0].
|
| The is especially the case when you are about to complain about
| style, since that can easily be adjusted, by simply telling the
| model what you want.
|
| But I think there is a final point that the author is also wrong
| about, but that is far more interesting: why we write. Personally
| I write for 3 reasons: to remember, to share and to structure my
| thoughts.
|
| If an LLM is better then me at writing (and it is) then there is
| no reason for me to write to communicate - it is not only slower,
| it is counterproductive.
|
| If the AI is better at wrangling my ideas into some coherent
| thread, then there is no reason for me to do it. This one I am
| least convinced about.
|
| AI is already much better than me at strictly remembering, but
| computers have been that since forever, the issue is mostly
| convinient input/output. AIs makes this easier thanks to speech
| to text input.
|
| [0]: See eg. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-
| cyborgs-on-the....
| patrickmay wrote:
| If an LLM is better at writing than you are, you should work on
| improving your writing.
|
| This is especially true for students.
| staunton wrote:
| Quite likely, further progress will lead to LLMs writing
| "better" than at least 99% of humans.
|
| I think this will be no more of a contest than playing chess
| has been: humans don't stand a chance, but it also doesn't
| matter because being better or worse than the AI is besides
| the point.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| LLM cheating detection is an interesting case of the toupee
| fallacy.
|
| The most obvious ChatGPT cheating, like that mentioned in this
| article, is pretty easy to detect.
|
| However, a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce
| their LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect.
|
| I think if I was in the teaching profession I'd just leave, to be
| honest. The joy of reviewing student work will inevitably be
| ruined by this: there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or
| not, at which point why bother?
| Retr0id wrote:
| > a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce their
| LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect
|
| Do you have any examples of this? I've never been able to get
| direct LLM output that didn't feel distinctly LLM-ish.
| AstroBen wrote:
| this immediately comes to mind https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/04
| /29/supplied_can_ai_change_you...
|
| A study on whether LLMs can influence people on
| r/changemymind
| doright wrote:
| This only came to light after the study had already been
| running for a few months. That proves that we can no longer
| tell for certain unless it's literal GPT-speak the author
| was too lazy to edit themselves.
|
| Teachers will lament the rise of AI-generated answers, but
| they will only ever complain about the _blatantly obvious_
| responses that are 100% copy-pasted. This is only an
| emerging phenomenon, and the next wave of prompters will
| learn from the mistakes of the past. From now on, unless
| you can proctor a room full of students writing their
| answers with nothing but pencil and paper, there will be no
| way to know for certain how much was AI and how much was
| original /rewritten.
| palata wrote:
| Maybe it will get us to rethink the grading system. Do we
| need to grade them, or do we need students to learn
| things? After all, if they grow up to be incompetent,
| they will be the ones suffering from it.
|
| But I know it's easier said than done: if you get a
| student to realise that the time they spend at school is
| a unique opportunity for them to learn and grow, then
| you're job is almost done already.
| lionkor wrote:
| You assume that the teachers job is to catch when someone is
| cheating; its not. The teachers job is to teach, and if the
| kids don't learn because their parents allow them to cheat,
| don't check them at all, and let them behave like shitheads,
| then the kids will fail in life.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In many current-day school systems, the teachers job is to
| get the required percentage of students to pass the state
| assessment for their grade level.
|
| They don't get an exemption if the parents don't care.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > then the kids will fail in life.
|
| Quite the assertion. If anything the evidence is in favor of
| the other direction.
|
| It was eye opening to see that most students cheat. By the
| same token, most students end up successful. It's why
| everyone wants their kids to go to college.
| palata wrote:
| > there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or not
|
| Talk to the student, maybe?
|
| I have been an interviewer in some startups. I was not asking
| leetcode questions or anything like that. My method was this: I
| would pretend that the interviewee is a new colleague and that
| I am having coffee with them for the first time. I am generally
| interested in my colleagues: who are they, what do they like,
| where do they come from? And then more specifically, what do
| they know that relates to my work? I want to know if that
| colleague is interested in a topic that I know better, so that
| I could help them. And I want to know if that colleague is an
| expert in a topic where they could help me.
|
| I just have a natural discussion. If the candidate says "I love
| compilers", I find this interesting and ask questions about
| compilers. If the person is bullshitting me, they won't manage
| to maintain an interesting discussion about compilers for 15
| minutes, will they?
|
| It was a startup, and the "standard" process became some kind
| of cargo culting of whatever they thought the interviews at
| TooBigTech were like: leetcode, system design and whatnot.
| Multiple times, I could _obviously_ tell in advance that even
| if this person was really good at passing the test, I didn 't
| think it would be a good fit for the position (both for the
| company and for them). But our stupid interviews got them hired
| anyway and guess what? It wasn't a good match.
|
| We underestimate how much we can learn by just having a
| discussion with a person and actually being interested in
| whatever they have to say. As opposed to asking them to answer
| standard questions.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| On reviewing students' work: people exchange copies, get their
| hands on past similar assignments, get friends to do their
| homework , potentially each of them shadow the other in fields
| they're good at etc.
|
| There always was a bunch of realistic options to not actually
| do your submitted work, and AI is merely makes it easier, more
| detectable and more scalable.
|
| I think it moves the needle from 40 to 75, which is not great,
| but you'd already be holding your nose at student work half of
| the time before AI, so teaching had to be about more than that
| (and TBH it was, when I was in school teachers gave no fuck
| about submitted work if they didn't validate it by some
| additional face to face or test time)
| hoppp wrote:
| If LLMs existed back in the 90s and 00s I would have generated
| all my homework too.
|
| The kids these days got everything...
| tptacek wrote:
| I have a lot of sympathy for the author's position but I may have
| missed the point in the article where he explained why clarity of
| writing and genuineness of human expression was so vital to a
| robotics class. It's one thing for an instructor to appreciate
| those things; another for them to confound their own didactic
| purpose with them. This point seems obvious enough that I feel
| like I must have missed something.
|
| As always, I reject wholeheartedly what this skeptical article
| has to say about LLMs and programming. It takes the (common)
| perspective of "vibe coders", people who literally don't care
| what code says as long as something that runs comes out the other
| side. But smart, professional programmers use LLMs in different
| ways; in particular, they review and demand alterations to the
| output, the same way you would doing code review on a team.
| necovek wrote:
| I think they summed it up well in the section "Why do we write,
| anyway?" -- they nowhere claimed it was vital for students'
| success in a robotic class. On the contrary as they title a
| subsection there with "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing
| *badly*" (emphasis mine) -- so what they are looking for is to
| peer into the author's mind and their original thoughts.
|
| The _implication_ there is that this is _acceptable_ to pass a
| robotics class, and potentially this gives them more
| information about students ' comprehension to further improve
| their instruction and teaching ("...that they have some kind of
| internal understanding to share").
|
| On that second point, I have yet to see someone demonstrate a
| "smart, professional programmer use LLMs" in a way where it
| produces high quality output in their area of expertise, while
| improving their efficiency and thus saving time for them
| (compared to them just using a good, old IDE)!
| tptacek wrote:
| Who have you asked? What has been your experience observing
| professionals using LLMs?
| necovek wrote:
| Is "what has been my experience" not implied in what I am
| still waiting for -- "someone using an LLM to produce high
| quality code in the field of their expertise in less time
| than without an LLM"?
|
| So, observing a couple of my colleagues (I am an
| engineering manager, but have switched back and forth
| between management and IC roles for the last ~20 years),
| I've seen them either produce crap, or spend so much time
| tuning the prompts that it would have been faster to do it
| without an LLM. They mostly used Github Copilot or ChatGPT
| (most recent versions as of last few months ago).
|
| I am also keeping out a keen eye for any examples of this
| (on HN in particular), but it usually turns out things like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43573755
|
| Again, I am not saying it's not being done, but I have
| struggled to find someone who would demonstrate it happen
| in a convincing enough fashion -- I am really trying to
| imagine how I would best incorporate this into my daily
| non-work programming activities, so I'd love to see a few
| examples of someone using it effectively.
| tptacek wrote:
| LLMs don't make bad programmers into good programmers. If
| your team is comfortable merging "crap", you have deeper
| problems.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Same with all these AI businesses wrapping business around a
| prompt. Just tell me the prompt.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Write a witty comment in the style of a Hacker News user who just
| read an article titled "I'd rather read the prompt"
| flysand7 wrote:
| Write a troll response in the style of Hacker News troll who
| wants to troll the Hacker news users who just read the article
| titled "I'd rather read the prompt". Make it ironic
| necovek wrote:
| I've already asked a number of colleagues at work producing
| insane amount of gibberish with LLMs to just pass me the prompt
| instead: if LLM can produce verbose text with limited input, I
| just need that concise input too (the rest is simply made up
| crap).
| jsheard wrote:
| I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are
| like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple
| idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to
| someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it
| back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody
| benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool
| $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercise.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Depends on what you are looking for. I've turned half baked
| ideas into white papers for plenty of praise. I've used them
| to make my Jira tickets seem complicated and complete. I've
| used them to get praised for writing comprehensive
| documentation.
|
| Part of my performance review is indirectly using bloat to
| seem sophisticated and thorough.
| generativenoise wrote:
| Would be nice to fix the performance reviews so we don't
| end up in a arms race of creating bloat until it becomes so
| unproductive it kills the host.
|
| Over-fitting proxy measures is one of the scourges of
| modernity.
|
| The only silver lining is if it becomes so wide spread and
| easy it loses the value of seeming sophisticated and
| thorough.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > creating bloat until it becomes so unproductive it
| kills the host
|
| Maybe we should let/encourage this to happen. Maybe
| letting bloated zombie-like organisations bloat
| themselves to death would thin the herd somewhat, to make
| space for organisations that are less "broken".
| justinclift wrote:
| "But at what price?" is probably the right question here,
| and that'd be a case by case basis thing. ;)
| necovek wrote:
| I fully believe you and I am saddened by the reality of
| your situation.
|
| At the same time, I strive really hard to influence the
| environment I am in so it does not value content bloat as a
| unit of productivity, so hopefully there are at least some
| places where people can have their sanity back!
| musicale wrote:
| > comprehensive documentation
|
| Documentation is an interesting use case. There are various
| kinds of documentation (reference, tutorial, architecture,
| etc.) and LLMs might be useful for things like
|
| - repetitive formatting and summarization of APIs for
| reference
|
| - tutorials which repeat the same information verbosely in
| an additive, logical sequence (though probably a human
| would be better)
|
| - sample code (though human-written would probably be
| better)
|
| The tasks that I expect might work well involve repetitive
| reformatting, repetitive expansion, and reduction.
|
| I think they also might be useful for systems analysis,
| boiling down a large code base into various kinds of
| summaries and diagrams to describe data flow, computational
| structure, signaling, etc.
|
| Still, there is probably no substitute for a Caroline
| Rose[1] type tech writer who carefully thinks about each
| API call and uses that understanding to identify design
| flaws.
|
| [1] https://folklore.org/Inside_Macintosh.html?sort=date
| chmod775 wrote:
| Yes, but none of the current LLMs are even remotely
| useful doing that kind of work for even something
| moderately complex. I have a 2k LOC project that no LLM
| even "understands"*. They can't grasp what it is: It's a
| mostly react-compatible implementation of "hooks" to be
| used for a non-DOM application. Every code assistant
| thinks it's a project using React.
|
| Any documentation they write at best re-states what is
| immediately obvious from the surrounding code (Useless: I
| need to explain _why_ ), or is some hallucination trying
| to pretend it's a React app.
|
| To their credit they've slowly gotten better now that a
| lot of documentation already exists, but that was me
| doing the work for them. What I needed them to do was
| understand the project from existing code, then write
| documentation _for me_.
|
| Though I guess once we're at the point AI is that good,
| we don't need to write any documentation anymore, since
| every dev can just generate it for themselves with their
| favorite AI and in the way they prefer to consume it.
|
| * They'll pretend they do by re-stating what is written
| in the README though, then proceed to produce nonsense.
| justinclift wrote:
| I've found "Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Thinking)" to be pretty
| good at moderately complex code bases, _after_ going
| through the effort to get it to be thorough.
|
| Without that effort it's a useless sycophant and is
| functionally extremely lazy (ie takes short cuts all the
| time).
|
| Don't suppose you've tried that particular model, after
| getting it to be thorough?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Delivering a library with an llm to explain the api and
| idiomatic usage seems like an interesting use case.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I'd rather be homeless in Philadelphia than work where you
| work
| cwalv wrote:
| This kind of "perf review" hacking works ~everywhere; how
| well it works correlates with how entrenched the
| organization is (i.e., how hard it is for new players to
| disrupt).
|
| You don't have to play the game the same way to work
| there. But it helps to accept that others will play it,
| and manage your own expectations accordingly.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...thinking about it, there are probably situations where
| making something more verbose makes it take less effort to
| read. I can see how an LLM might be useful in that
| situation.
| musicale wrote:
| > LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like
| that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an
| LLM,
|
| I think that's the answer:
|
| LLMs are primarily useful for data and text translation and
| reduction, not for expansion.
|
| An exception is repetitive or boilerplate text or code where
| a verbose format is required to express a small amount of
| information.
| derefr wrote:
| There is one other very useful form of "expansion" that
| LLMs do.
|
| If you aren't aware: (high-parameter-count) LLMs can be
| used pretty reliably to teach yourself things.
|
| LLM base models "know things" to about the same degree that
| the Internet itself "knows" those things. For well-
| understood topics -- i.e. subjects where the Internet
| contains all sorts of open-source textbooks and treatments
| of the subject -- LLMs really do "know their shit": they
| won't hallucinate, they will correct you when you're
| misunderstanding the subject, they will calibrate to your
| own degree of expertise on the subject, they will make
| valid analogies between domains, etc.
|
| Because of this, you can use an LLM as an infinitely-
| patient tutor, to learn-through-conversation any (again,
| well-understood) topic you want -- and especially, to shore
| up any holes in your understanding.
|
| (I wouldn't recommend relying _solely_ on the LLM -- but I
| 've found "ChatGPT in one tab, Wikipedia open in another,
| switching back and forth" to be a very useful learning
| mode.)
|
| See this much-longer rambling
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797121 for details
| on why exactly this can be _better_ (sometimes) than just
| reading one of those open-source textbooks.
| jcul wrote:
| Yeah you're totally right with this use case.
|
| It feels like the information is there strewn across the
| internet, in forums, Reddit posts, stack overflow, specs,
| books. But to trawl though it all was so time consuming.
| With an LLM you can quickly distill it down to just the
| information you need.
|
| Saying that, I do feel like reading the full spec for
| something is a valuable exercise. There may be unknown
| unknowns that you can't even ask the LLM about. I was
| able to become a subject expert in different fields just
| but sitting down and reading through the specs / RFCs,
| while other colleagues continued to struggle and guess.
| valenterry wrote:
| They are also useful for association. Imagine an LLM
| trained on documentation. Then you can retrieve info
| associated with your question.
|
| This can go beyond just specific documentation but also
| include things like "common knowledge" which is what the
| other poster meant when they talked about "teaching you
| things".
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I blame humans. I never understand why unnecessarily long
| writing is required in a lot of places.
| kace91 wrote:
| "Someone sent me this ai generated message. Please give me your
| best shot at guessing the brief prompt that originated the
| text".
|
| Done, now ai is just lossy prettyprinting.
| agentultra wrote:
| An incredible use of such advanced technology and gobs of
| energy.
| roarcher wrote:
| Recently I wasted half a day trying to make sense of story
| requirements given to me by a BA that were contradictory and
| far more elaborate than we had previously discussed. When I
| finally got ahold of him he confessed that he had run the
| actual requirements through ChatGPT and "didn't have time to
| proofread the results". Absolutely infuriating.
| ortusdux wrote:
| https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
| ponector wrote:
| Chatgpt very useful for adding softness and politeness to my
| sentences. Would you like more straight forward text which
| probably will be rude for regular american?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Something I've found very helpful is when I have a murky idea
| in my head that would take a long time for me to articulate
| concisely, and I use an LLM to compress what I'm trying to say.
| So I type (or even dictate) a stream of consciousness with lots
| of parentheticals and semi-structured thoughts and ask it to
| summarize. I find it often does a great job at saying what I
| want to say, but better.
|
| (See also the famous Pascal quote "This would have been a
| shorter letter if I had the time").
|
| P.s. for reference I've asked an LLM to compress what I wrote
| above. Here is the output:
|
| _When I have a murky idea that's hard to articulate, I find it
| helpful to ramble--typing or dictating a stream of semi-
| structured thoughts--and then ask an LLM to summarize. It often
| captures what I mean, but more clearly and effectively._
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Even more interesting is why the students think that is the reply
| the teacher is expecting
| revskill wrote:
| It is designed that way intentionally because provider charges
| token for money.
| programjames wrote:
| You _can_ train an LLM to maximize the information content
| bitrate. I just think most companies want to maximize "customer
| satisfaction" or w/e, which is why we get the verbose, bold,
| bullet points.
| afavour wrote:
| ChatGPT English is set to be the a ubiquitous, remarkably
| inefficient data transmission format that sits on top of email.
|
| I wish to communicate four points of information to you. I'll ask
| ChatGPT to fluff those up into multiple paragraphs of text for me
| to email.
|
| You will receive that email, recognize its length and immediately
| copy and paste it into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the points
| provided.
|
| Somewhere off in the distance a lake evaporates.
| Swizec wrote:
| Just send the damn bullet points! Everyone will thank you
| afavour wrote:
| Well of course. But well thought out and well written
| communication (which admittedly is rare) is an opportunity to
| actually think through what you're telling people. How does
| point A relate to point B? As you read through what you've
| written do you realize there should be a point A.1 to bridge
| a gap?
|
| It's like math homework, you always had to show your working
| not just give the answer. AI gives us an answer without the
| journey of arriving at one, which removes the purpose of
| doing it in the first place.
| iddan wrote:
| Jokes aside, I'm building a product for this for sales. If this
| is relevant to you: https://closer.so
| seb1204 wrote:
| Exactly what I thought as well, just better worded.
| teekert wrote:
| Except I have never met anyone that likes fluffed up emails,
| nor considers them better in any way than your 4 points. Take
| that from a long-email writer (people beg me for a few bullets,
| somehow I always feel that it does not accurately convey my
| message, I am aware that this is a shortcoming) ;)
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Me either. Which makes it extra perplexing that the
| developers of email clients seem _absolutely convinced_ that
| people do who like them abound!
| perdomon wrote:
| Is the lake evaporation line/idea from literature/film, or is
| it from you personally? I haven't heard it before is why I'm
| asking.
| bertil wrote:
| I found it ironic that the author said having bullet points with
| the key topic in bold was a sign to use that format immediately.
| ctkhn wrote:
| > The model produces better work. Some of my peers believe that
| large language models produce strictly better writing than they
| could produce on their own. Anecdotally, this phenomenon seems
| more common among English-as-a-second-language speakers. I also
| see it a lot with first-time programmers, for whom programming is
| a set of mysterious incantations to be memorized and recited.
|
| AI usage is a lot higher in my work experience among people who
| no longer code and are now in business/management roles or
| engineers who are very new and didn't study engineering. My
| manager and skip level both use it for all sorts of things that
| seem pointless and the bootcamp/nontraditional engineers use it
| heavily. Our college hires we have who went through a CS program
| don't use it because they are better and faster than it for most
| tasks. I haven't found it to be useful without an enormous prompt
| at which point I'd rather just implement the feature myself.
| amclennon wrote:
| The "aha" moment for me came when I started writing a ticket
| for a junior engineer to work on. However, to satisfy my own
| curiosity, I gave the ticket to Cursor, and was able to get 90%
| of the way there (implementing a small feature based on a Figma
| design).
|
| As it turns out, a well written ticket makes a pretty good
| input into an LLM. However, it has the added benefit of having
| my original thought process well documented, so sometimes I go
| through the process of writing a ticket / subtask, even if I
| ended up giving it to an AI tool in the end.
| ineptech wrote:
| Relatedly, there was a major controversy at work recently over
| the propriety of adding something like this to a lengthy email
| discussion:
|
| > Since this is a long thread and we're including a wider
| audience, I thought I'd add Copilot's summary...
|
| Someone called them out for it, several others defended it. It
| was brought up in one team's retro and the opinions were divided
| and very contentious, ranging from, "the summary helped make sure
| everyone had the same understanding and the person who did it was
| being conscientious" to "the summary was a pointless distraction
| and including it was an embarrassing admission of incompetence."
|
| Some people wanted to adopt a practice of not posting summaries
| in the future but we couldn't agree and had to table it.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I think the attribution itself is a certain form of cowardice.
| If one is actually confident that a summary is correct they'd
| incorporate it directly. Leaving in the "Copilot says" is an
| implicit attempt to weasel out of taking responsibility for it.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I see it more as a form of honesty, though maybe also
| laziness if they weren't willing to edit the summary, or
| write it themselves.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It's probably just transparency, because the summary will be
| written in a different voice and sound AIish either way.
|
| If I were to include AI generated stuff into my communication
| I'd also make it clear as people might guess it anyway.
| jsheard wrote:
| I've noticed that even on here, which is generally extremely
| bullish on LLMs and AI in general, people get _instantly_
| downvoted into oblivion for LLM copypasta in comments. Nobody
| wants to read someone else 's slop.
| jddj wrote:
| I checked your website after this and wasn't disappointed.
| Funny stuff.
| coliveira wrote:
| It is an admission of incompetence. If you need a summary, why
| don't you add it yourself? Moreover, any person nowadays can
| easily create a chatGPT summary if necessary. It is just like
| adding a page of google search results to your writing.
| prymitive wrote:
| I often find Copilot summaries to be more or less an attempt at
| mainsplaining a simple change. If my tiny PR with a one line
| description requires Copilot to output a paragraph of text
| about it it's not a summary, it's simply time wasted on someone
| who loves to talk.
| duskwuff wrote:
| LLMs aren't even that good at summarizing poorly structured
| text, like email discussions. They can certainly cherry-pick
| bits and pieces and make a guess at the overall topic, but my
| experience has been that they're poor at identifying what's
| most salient. They get particularly confused when the input is
| internally inconsistent, like when participants on a mailing
| list disagree about a topic or submit competing proposals.
| agentbrown wrote:
| Some thoughts:
|
| 1. "When copying another person's words, one doesn't communicate
| their own original thoughts, but at least they are communicating
| a human's thoughts. A language model, by construction, has no
| original thoughts of its own; publishing its output is a
| pointless exercise."
|
| LLMs, having being trained using the corpus of the web, I would
| argue communicate other human's thoughts particularly well. Only
| in exercising an avoidance of plagiarism are the thoughts of
| other human's evolved into something closer to "original thought"
| for the would-be plagarizer. But yes, at least a straight
| copy/paste retains the same rhetoric as the original human.
|
| 2. I've seen a few advertisements recently leverage "the prompt"
| as a means to resonate visual appeal.
|
| i.e a new fast food delivery service starting their add with some
| upbeat music and a visual presentation of somebody typing into a
| LLM interface, "Where's the best sushi around me?" And then cue
| the advertisement for the product they offer.
| satisfice wrote:
| I blogged about this just yesterday. The problem of disguised
| authorship ruins your reputation as a thinker, worker, and
| writer.
|
| https://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/487881
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| As someone who is an immigrant that had to go to high school in
| English speaking country and who struggled a lot and couldn't do
| anything about improving essay writing no matter what I did, I
| say all these English teachers deserve this. I wish ChatGPT
| existed during my school years, I would've at least had
| someone(thing) explain me how to write better.
| palata wrote:
| > I would've at least had someone(thing) explain me how to
| write better.
|
| I actually don't think that it is good at that. I have heard of
| language teachers trying to use it to teach the language (it's
| a model language, it should be good at it, right?) and realised
| that it isn't good at that.
|
| Of course I understand the point of your message, which is that
| you feel your teachers were not helpful and I have empathy for
| that.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| I ask Claude to respond like Hemingway would. It works.
| Herring wrote:
| I think half the population of the world wants just the facts,
| the other half wants long flowing beautiful content like on
| apple.com, and neither group knows the other exists. Of course
| this is the right way to do it!
| staunton wrote:
| I'm sure it's beside the point but...
|
| Your benchmark for "long flowing beautiful content" is
| apple.com? It's competing with Hemingway?
| Herring wrote:
| Spoken like a true "just the facts" guy. If this is a
| competition then Hemmingway is losing hands down. Serious
| well-funded marketing departments came up with that long-
| form style, because that's what the vast majority of people
| respond to. I'm just happy they have a tiny "tech specs"
| section for me (and presumably you).
| staunton wrote:
| I just went on apple.com and tried for 8 minutes to find
| "long beautiful flowing content". Most of the actual text
| I came across there were not-so-beautiful legal
| disclaimers...
|
| Can you share a link to what you mean?
| Herring wrote:
| I meant the whole site. I was using the word "content"
| broadly. That website is far from concise. 50 pictures of
| everything.
| neilv wrote:
| > _[...] but not so distinctive to be worth passing along to an
| honor council. Even if I did, I'm not sure the marginal gains in
| the integrity of the class would be worth the hours spent
| litigating the issue._
|
| The school should be drilling into students, at orientation, what
| some school-wide hard rules are regarding AI.
|
| One of the hard rules is probably that you have to write your own
| text and code, never copy&paste. (And on occasions when
| copy&paste is appropriate, like in a quote, or to reuse an off-
| the-shelf function, it's always cited/credited clearly and
| unambiguously.)
|
| And no instructors should be contradicting those hard rules.
|
| (That one instructor who tells the class on the first day, "I
| don't care if you copy&paste from AI for your assignments, as if
| it's your own work; that just means you went through the learning
| exercise of interacting with AI, which is what I care about"...
| is confusing the students, for all their other classes.)
|
| Much of society is telling students that everything is BS, and
| that their job is to churn BS to get what they want. Early "AI'
| usage popular practices so far looks to be accelerating that.
| Schools should be dropping a brick wall in front of that. Well, a
| padded wall, for the students who can still be saved.
| eunos wrote:
| There's also strong inferiority complex. When you read and find
| out the output your motivation to at least paraphrase the prompt
| output instantly dive because it looks so good and proper whereas
| your original writing looks so dumb in comparison
| palata wrote:
| > A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of
| hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they
| shall receive a degree
|
| Yes, totally. Unfortunately, it takes time and maturity to
| understand how this is completely wrong, but I feel like most
| students go through that belief.
|
| Not sure how relevant it is, but it makes me think of two movies
| with Robin Williams: Dead Poet's Society and Will Hunting. In the
| former, Robin's character manages to get students interested in
| _stuff_ instead of "just passing the exams". In the later, I
| will just quote this part:
|
| > Personally, I don't give a shit about all that, because you
| know what? I can't learn anything from you I can't read in some
| fuckin' book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And
| I'm fascinated. I'm in.
|
| I don't give a shit about whether a student can learn the book by
| heart or not. I want the student to be able to think on their
| own; I want to be able to have an interesting discussion with
| them. I want them to _think critically_. LLMs fundamentally
| cannot solve that.
| unreal37 wrote:
| Looks like a "GPT text output condenser" might be a good project
| to work on.
| laurentlb wrote:
| There are many ways to use LLMs.
|
| The issue, IMO, is that some people throw in a one-shot, short
| prompt, and get a generic, boring output. "Garbage in, generic
| out."
|
| Here's how I actually use LLMs:
|
| - To dump my thoughts and get help organizing them.
|
| - To get feedback on phrasing and transitions (I'm not a native
| speaker).
|
| - To improve tone, style (while trying to keep it personal!), or
| just to simplify messy sentences.
|
| - To identify issues, missing information, etc. in my text.
|
| It's usually an iterative process, and the combined prompt length
| ends up longer than the final result. And I incorporate the
| feedback manually.
|
| So sure, if someone types "write a blog post about X" and hits
| go, the prompt is more interesting than the output. But when
| there are five rounds of edits and context, would you really
| rather read all the prompts and drafts instead of the final
| version?
|
| (if you do:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6817dd19-4604-800b-95ee-f2dd05add4...)
| palata wrote:
| > would you really rather read all the prompts and drafts
| instead of the final version?
|
| I think you missed the point of the article. They did not mean
| it literally: it's a way to say that they are interested in
| what _you_ have to say.
|
| And that is the point that is _extremely difficult_ to make
| students understand. When a teacher asks a student to write
| about a historical event, it 's not just some kind of ceremony
| on the way to a degree. The end goal is to make the student
| improve in a number of skills: gathering information, making
| sense of it, _absorbing_ it, being critical about what they
| read, eventually building an opinion about it.
|
| When you say "I use an LLM to dump my thoughts and get help
| organising them", what you say is that you are not interested
| in improving your ability to actually _absorb_ information. To
| me, it says that you are not interested in becoming
| interesting. I would think that it is a maturity issue: some
| day you will understand.
|
| And that's what the article says: I am interested in hearing
| what _you_ have to say about a topic that you care about. I am
| not interested into anything you can do to pretend that you
| care or know about it. If you can 't organise your thoughts
| yourself, I don't believe that you have reached a point where
| you are interesting. Not that you will never get there; it just
| takes practice. But if you don't practice (and use LLMs
| instead), my concern is that you will never become interesting.
| This time is wasted, I don't want to read what your LLM
| generated from that stuff you didn't care to absorb in the
| first place.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Exactly it is a tool which needs skill to use. I would add
| extra use of mine:
|
| - To "Translate to language XYZ", and that is not sometimes
| strightforward and needs iterating like "Translate to language
| <LANGUAGE> used by <PERSON ROLE> living in <CITY>" and so on.
|
| And the author is right, I use it as 2nd-language user, thus
| LLM produces better text than myself. However I am not going to
| share the prompt as it is useless (foreign language) and too
| messy (bits of draft text) to the reader. I would compare it to
| passing a book draft thru editor and translator.
| egglemonsoup wrote:
| FWIW: Your original comment, in the first message you sent
| ChatGPT, was way better than the one you posted. Simple,
| authentic, to the point
| qustrolabe wrote:
| It's actually doesn't matter. I hated this hassle of writing
| various texts while studying so much. Like does it really matter
| whether student would generate this text or just go google and
| copy paste some paragraphs from somewhere? And don't even hope
| for them to genuinely write all that stuff themselves because
| it's a huge waste of time even for those who actually cares and
| interested in the subject.
| jez wrote:
| Where I especially hold this viewpoint is for end-of-year peer
| performance reviews.
|
| People say "I saved so much time on perf this year with the aid
| of ChatGPT," but ChatGPT doesn't know anything about your working
| relationship with your coworker... everything interesting is
| contained in the prompt. If you're brain dumping bullet points
| into an LLM prompt, just make those bullets your feedback and be
| done with it? Then it'll be clear what the kernel of feedback is
| and what's useless fluff.
| sieve wrote:
| Depends on the situation.
|
| I like reading and writing stories. Last month, I compared the
| ability of various LLMs to rewrite Saki's "The Open Window" from
| a given prompt.[1] The prompt follows the 13-odd attempts. I am
| pretty sure in this case that you'd rather read the story than
| the prompt.
|
| I find the disdain that some people have for LLMs and diffusion
| models to be rather bizarre. They are tools that are
| democratizing some trades.
|
| Very few people (basically, those who can afford it) write to
| "communicate original thoughts." They write because they want to
| get paid. People who can afford to concentrate on the "art" of
| writing/painting are pretty rare. Most people are doing these
| things as a profession with deadlines to meet. Unlike you are
| GRRM, you cannot spend decades on a single book waiting for
| inspiration to strike. You need to work on it. Also, authors
| writing crap/gold at a per-page rate is hardly something new.
|
| LLMs are probably the most interesting thing I have encountered
| since I did the computer. These puritans should get off of their
| high horse (or down from their ivory tower) and join the plebes.
|
| [1] Variations on a Theme of Saki (https://gist.github.com/s-i-e-
| v-e/b4d696bfb08488aeb893cce3a4...)
| YmiYugy wrote:
| Hate the game not the player. For the moment we continue to live
| in a world where the form and tone of communication matters and
| where foregoing the use of AI tools can put you at a
| disadvantage. There are countless homework assignments where
| teachers will give better grades to LLM outputs. An LLM can
| quickly generate targeted cover letters dramatically increasing
| efficiency while job hunting. Getting a paper accepted requires
| you to adhere to an academic writing style. LLMs can get you
| there. Maybe society just needs a few more years to adjust and
| shift expectations. In the meantime you should probably continue
| to use AI.
| Mbwagava wrote:
| Surely this just makes a mockery of the same tone and style
| that indicates someone put effort and thought into producing
| something. This just seems in net to waste everyone's time with
| no benefit to us.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| I can't even think of what the new set of expectations would
| even be of that shift were to occur.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| > Either the article is so vapid that a summary provides all of
| its value, in which case, it does not merit the engagement of a
| comment, or it demands a real reading by a real human for
| comprehension, in which case the summary is pointless.
|
| There's so much bad writing of valuable information out there.
| The major sins being: burying the lede, no or poor sectioning,
| and just generally verbose.
|
| In some cases, like in EULAs and patents that's intentional.
| rralian wrote:
| I've used ChatGPT as an editor and had very good results. I'll
| write the whole thing myself and then feed it into ChatGPT for
| editing. And then review its output to manually decide which
| pieces I want to incorporate. The thoughts are my own, but
| sometimes ChatGPT is capable of finding more succinct ways of
| making the points.
| investa wrote:
| I have found that it is no where near a human editor. I use
| LanguageTool to check the basics.
| Tostino wrote:
| I generally make sure I use diff tools for that type of task,
| because LLMs are really good at making subtle changes you don't
| easily notice that are wrong.
| dakiol wrote:
| All it takes is to provide a slightly better prompt ("write the
| answer in a natural prose style, no bullet points, no boring
| style, perhaps introduce a small error). It's not that difficult.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| I mostly use LLMs as a more convenient Google and to automate
| annoying code transformations with a conveniency of a natural
| language interface. Sometimes, I use it to "improve" my writing
| style.
|
| I have to admit I was a bit surprised how bad LLMs are at the
| continue this essay task. When I read it in the blog I suspected
| this might have been a problem with the prompt or the using one
| of the smaller variants of Gemini. So I tried it with Gemini 2.5
| Pro and iterated quite a bit providing generic feedback without
| offering solutions. I could not get the model to form a coherent
| well reasoned argument. Maybe I need to recalibrate my
| expectations of what LLMs are capable, but I also suspect that
| current models have heavy guardrails, use a low temperature and
| have been specifically tuned for problem solving and avoid
| hallucinations as much as possible.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I just want to point out that AI generated material is naturally
| a confirmation bias machine. When the output is obviously AI, you
| confirm that you can easily spot AI output. When the output is
| human-level, you just pass through it without a second thought.
| There is almost no regular scenario where you are retroactively
| made aware something is AI.
| djinnish wrote:
| The vast majority of the time people question whether or not an
| image or writing is "AI", they're really just calling it bad
| and somehow not realizing that you could just call the output
| bad and have the same effect.
|
| Every day I'm made more aware of how terrible people are at
| identifying AI-generated output, but also how obsessed with
| GenAI-vestigating things they don't like or wouldn't buy
| because they're bad.
| Hasnep wrote:
| I've heard this called the toupee fallacy. Not all toupees are
| bad, but you only spot the bad toupees.
| palata wrote:
| This article really resonates with me.
|
| The very first time I enjoyed talking to someone in another
| language, I was 21. Then an exchange student, I had a pleasant
| and interesting discussion with someone in that foreign language.
| On the next day, I realised that I wouldn't have been able to do
| that without that foreign language. I felt _totally stupid_ : I
| had been getting very good grades in languages for years at
| school without ever caring about actually learning the language.
| And now, it was obvious, but all that time was lost; I couldn't
| go back and do it better.
|
| A few years earlier, I had this great history teacher in high
| school. Instead of making us learn facts and dates by heart, she
| wanted us to actually get an general understanding of a
| historical event. Actually internalise, absorb the information in
| such a way that we could think and talk about it. And eventually
| develop our critical thinking. It was confusing at first, because
| when we asked "what will the exam be about", she wouldn't say
| "the material in those pages". She'd be like "well, we've been
| talking about X for 2 months, it will be about that".
|
| Her exams were weird at first: she would give us articles from
| newspapers and essentially ask what we could say about them.
| Stuff like "Who said what, and why? And why does this other
| article disagree with the first one? And who is right?". At first
| I was confused, and eventually it clicked and I started getting
| really good at this. Many students got there as well, of course.
| Some students never understood and hated her: their way was to
| learn the material by heart and prove it to get a good grade. And
| I eventually realised this: those students who were not good at
| this were actually less interesting when they talked about
| history. They lacked this critical thinking, they couldn't make
| their own opinion or actually internalise the material. So
| whatever they would say in this topic was uninteresting: I had
| been following the same course, I knew which events happened and
| in which order. With the other students were it "clicked" as
| well, I could have interesting discussion: "Why do you think this
| guy did this? Was it in good faith or not? Did he know about that
| when he did it? etc".
|
| She was one of my best teachers. Not only she got me interested
| in history (which had never been my thing), but she got me to
| understand how to think critically, and how important it is to
| internalise information in order to do that. I forgot a lot of
| what we studied in her class. I never lost the critical thinking.
| LLMs cannot replace that.
| sn9 wrote:
| > I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is
| not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think;
| a language model produces the former, not the latter.
|
| It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent
| professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in
| education and academia.
|
| They see work as the mere production of output, without ever
| thinking about how that work builds knowledge and skills and
| experience.
|
| Students who know least of all and don't understand the purpose
| of writing or problem solving or the limitations of LLMs are
| currently wasting years of their lives letting LLMs pull them
| along as they cheat themselves out of an education, sometimes
| spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to let their brains
| atrophy only to get a piece of paper and face the real world
| where problems get massively more open-ended and LLMs massively
| decline in meeting the required quality of problem solving.
|
| Anyone who actually struggles to solve problems and learn
| themselves is going to have massive advantages in the long term.
| eric_cc wrote:
| Using llm's for papers does not mean your brain is atrophying
| though. There are lots of ways to challenge the mind even if
| you use llm's to write some papers.
| palata wrote:
| > Using llm's for papers does not mean your brain is
| atrophying though.
|
| It means that you are losing your time. If you are a
| university student and use LLMs for your classes while
| "challenging your mind" for stuff outside of class, maybe you
| should just not be studying there in the first place.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you used a wheelchair every day, your legs would atrophy.
|
| Regardless of the existence of other ways to exercise your
| legs which you also will not do, because you're a person with
| working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.
| tehjoker wrote:
| writing is one of the best way to develop your thinking.
| students really are cheating themselves if they use LLMs to
| write their assignments
| palata wrote:
| > Students who know least of all and don't understand the
| purpose of writing or problem solving or the limitations of
| LLMs are currently wasting years of their lives
|
| Exactly. I tend to think that the role of a teacher is to get
| the students to realise what learning is all about and why it
| matters. The older the students get, the more important it is.
|
| The worst situation is a student finishing university without
| having had that realisation: they got through all of it with
| LLMs, and probably didn't learn how to learn or how to think
| critically. Those who did, on the other hand, didn't need the
| LLMs in the first place.
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