That's because you're measuring yesterday's worlds with today's demented expectations.
Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.
We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.
Everyone would prefer a nicer handmade chair (if not by the price difference).
Chairs are not comparable to OPs cards; writing on a card costs nothing (but intent, which seems to be in low stock these days).
Finally, factoring in the real operating cost, ongoing capital costs, and environmental/social externalities, the AI chair in your example would cost something like 1000x a handmade chair.
Yeah I thought the same. The short sentences, like "The Web may become like IRC, FTP, Gopher, or BBSs. Not dead. Just smaller.", kind of gave that impression.
That's a poor analogy, because the intention is orders of magnitude greater on those things than with an LLM. You still need the intention to write Python instead of C, or C instead of assembly. You need an insignificant amount of intention for LLMs, which will happily spew code even for the worst, most incomplete or nonsensical commands.
Same for me. It is the spectral signal of LLM writing. I'm a writer and last week I re-read one of my own books, that was written a few years before LLMs appeared. And I saw I used the "It's not X; it's Y" construction and I cringed, and now I have a moral dilemma: it feels so painful LLM robot speak that I want to rewrite that sentence for the next edition. But on the other hand, I want to keep it in because it is what I wrote and it was me talking not an LLM. Oh the moral dilemmas one must face!!!
What’s painful is that you’re thinking of letting robots suppress your authentic voice. Also, they got that way by copying humans, and if you continue to cede to them everything they copy, you’ll have no place left to be.
There used to be (is...?) an xkcd IRC chatroom where you were only allowed to post things that had never been said before. Violations resulted in an n-minute ban, increasing with each violation.
Maybe this is the future of all (interesting/worthwhile) human writing. Perpetually stay one step ahead of the machines.
Surely there are times when using that pattern is a great way to communicate the point to be made. The problem is LLMs over-use it and apply it in lots of cases when it's not appropriate.
My low-confidence theory is that it's an artifact of making the LLMs better at coding.
My two cents: think carefully if that pattern is a really great way to say what you want to say in your book. If it is, leave it, if you could say it better, change it.
How LLMs write and how people feel about them is evolving and the current dynamic will pass...
Chatbots can be prompted to write into all kinds of styles, this is just their default "help me with the homework" presentation. It doesn't make sense to drop some construct where it is appropriate just because bots overuse it.
The author might be human, but used an LLM to help them draft the letter. Something I do sometimes is brain dump into an LLM and have it help me organize it, and then I iteratively refine what I want to say.
20 some odd years ago I read zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, and it made the point that writing is hard when trying to decide what to say and how to say it at the same time. Just stuck with me. Brain dumping into an LLM is one way to get some momentum.
That said, the negation parallel pattern LLMs overuse drives me nuts and I'm always having to manually edit those out. I can't help but wonder if there is an advantage to thinking like that that helps with coding. E.g. defensive negation in coding probably improves code quality, but it dilutes good writing when over used.
That example flowed well and didn't stand out to me.
But what happens when you no longer feel that you have a decent chance of being able to determine that something might have been created with LLM assistance? Do you not mind because you can't tell anyway, or do you refuse to read anything at all for fear of potentially consuming some LLM assisted work?
I'm fine with it as long as it's not full of the usual signals, because that's just bad writing that I don't enjoy.
I had exactly the same thought yesterday. For now the "its not Y, its X" idiom is a strong LLM marker. It should be fairly simple for the brain trust at the labs to get rid of it, and I'm sure they eventually will when prose writers becomes a relevant enough customer base.
It already is very hard to identify AI text, and we probably consume a lot of it unbeknownst to ourselves. Its like microplastics now -- you can find it everywhere (or so the propaganda goes).
I don't have a solution for when they fix that stupid idiom. I'm already reading less current things in general because of this, and might just do more of that. Even if its impossible to distinguish, I think people will pro-actively mark their stuff as LLM-free. There isn't a tech to support/prove that rn, but there might be in the future.
Google removed "Don't be evil" from its Code of Conduct in May 2018. Shocking that it took 8 years for the author to make their ethical stand -- during which time Google stock went up 600%...
No it didn't, it's still in the employee handbook. As the saying goes, a lie will go around the world before the truth can put its pants on.
What changed was Google's motto, and it changed from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing". The given reason is that the prior motto also included inaction.
MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.
I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free
Results Among 68 946 participants (78.0% female; mean [SD] age at baseline, 44.2 [14.5] years), 1340 first incident cancer cases were identified during follow-up, with the most prevalent being 459 breast cancers, 180 prostate cancers, 135 skin cancers, 99 colorectal cancers, 47 non-Hodgkin lymphomas, and 15 other lymphomas. High organic food scores were inversely associated with the overall risk of cancer (hazard ratio for quartile 4 vs quartile 1, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.63-0.88; P for trend = .001; absolute risk reduction, 0.6%; hazard ratio for a 5-point increase, 0.92; 95% CI, 0.88-0.96).
Conclusions and Relevance A higher frequency of organic food consumption was associated with a reduced risk of cancer. If these findings are confirmed, further research is necessary to determine the underlying factors involved in this association.
It might be like that. Everyone should strive to make the best decisions and not go with the mainstream. Always question the mainstream, it's dangerous. Make a change for the better. Everything starts with you. Then your family, friends, neighbors...
Do you have the opportunity to grow something yourself? Do that.
There's some value in that line of thinking, as the mainstream often (okay, euphemism there) pushes bad choices, like in the past smoking being mainstream to the point of doctors being paid to promote the "health benefits" of cigarettes.
But at the same time I don't think its healthy to _always_ question everything in the mainstream. Its mainstream for a reason (sometimes an angle pushed by economic groups like big cig in the example above), and sometimes the reason is reasonable. Be critical and keep an open mind, but don't assume its fake because its mainstream.
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