> If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts

The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the sentences or _language_ they're written in. Not completely independent, but to claim thoughts are completely dependent on text (thus also the language) is nonsense.

> Might as well just give people your prompt.

What would be the value of seeing a dozen diffs? By the same logic, should we also include every draft?

▲

mrguyorama 10 days ago | parent | next [-]

>The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the sentences or _language_ they're written in.

Not even true! Turning your thoughts into words is a very important and human part of writing. That's where you choose what ambiguities to leave, which to remove, what sort of implicit shared context is assumed, such important things as tone, and all sorts of other unconscious things that are important in writing.

If you can't even make those choices, why would I read you? If you think making those choices is unimportant, why would I think you have something important to say?

Uneducated or unsophisticated people seem to vastly underestimate what expertise even is, or just how much they don't know, which is why for example LLMs can write better than most fanfic writers, but that bar is on the damn floor and most people don't want to consume fanfic level writing for things that they are not fanatical about.

There's this weird and fundamental misconception in pro-ai realms that context free "information" is somehow possible, as if you can extract "knowledge" from text, like you can "distill" a document and reduce meaning to some simple sentences. Like, there's this insane belief that you can meaningfully reduce text and maintain info.

If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like "children shouldn't run a community", you've lost immense amounts of info. That is not a good thing. You are missing so much nuance and context and meaning, as well as more superficial (but not less important!) things like the very experience of reading that text.

Like, consider that SOTA text compression algorithms can reduce text to 1/10th of it's original size. If you are reducing a text by more than that to "summarize" or "reduce to it's main points" a text, do you really think you are not losing massive amounts of information, context, or meaning?

	▲	the_af 10 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like "children shouldn't run a community" To be honest, and I hate to say this because it's condescending, it's a matter of literacy. Some people don't see the value in literature. They are the same kind of people who will say "what's the point of book X or movie Y? All that happens is <sequence of events>", or the dreaded "it's boring, nothing happens!". To these people, there's no journey, no pleasure with words, the "plot" is all that matters and the plot can be reduced to a sequence of A->B->C. I suspect they treat their fiction like junk food, a quick fix and then move on. At that point, it makes logical sense to have an LLM write it. It's very hard to explain the joy of words to people with that mentality.
	▲	athrowaway3z 9 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can rewrite a sentence on every page of lord of the flies, and the same important ideas would still be there. You can have the thoughts in a different language and the same ideas are still there. You can tell an LLM to tweak a paragraph to better communicate a nuance until you're happy with it. --- Language isn't thought. It's extremely useful in that it lets us iterate on our thoughts. You can add in LLMs in that iteration loop. I get you wanted to vent because the volume of slop is annoying and a lot of people are degrading their ability to think by using it poorly, but "If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts" is just motivated reasoning.

▲

y0eswddl 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

language we use actually very much dictates the way we think...

for instance, there's a tribe that describes directions only using the Cardinals. and as such they have no words for nor mental concept of "left and right".

and coincidentally, they're all much more proficient at navigation and have a better general sense of direction (obviously) than the average human because of the way they have to think about directions when just talking to each other.

===

is also why the best translators don't just do a word for word replacement but half to force think through cultural context and ideology on both sides of the conversation in order to make a more coherent translation.

what language you use absolutely dictates how and what we think as well as what particular message is conveyed