Eh I think this sounds ok. If you prompt an AI to improve your text, you submit that, and another human reviews that (and maybe asks you to make changes) it should be fine. I can see this giving more people the ability to make edits (e.g. non-native speakers)
The problem is, it doesn’t improve text, it worsens it. And if your grasp of the language isn’t good enough, you can edit a page in your own language, or ask nerds in the discussion section to help you, it will be better written, they will be happy, and you might learn something.
Asking a slop generator to generate some slop about what you wanted to write will make things worse.
This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.
It truly blows my mind that people need to use AI to write coherent sentences with proper punctuation at all. The shit that I receive in my inbox from people making far more money than me, that have multiple advanced degrees no less…it makes me weep for a future where no one is able to function without a computer holding their hand through the entire interaction.
We’re going to get to the point where its all AIs talking to each other and humans are merely pressing the send button.
I do not agree with this at all. Some of the smartest people I know have severe dyslexia. And those are not just extremes, all of us exist on a spectrum where we have strengths and weaknesses, and not all of us can be literary geniuses.
The fact that capitalism promotes mediocre bootlickers to positions of power has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Of course it will be exploited by these exact same people - all the more reason why we shouldn’t give them a monopoly on what’s genuinely a transformative technology.
There’s a world of difference between having lessor skills or ability and offloading it all to a machine so you don’t have to be bothered. Namely, effort.
Its not the fact that people can’t write well that bothers me, it’s that people don’t care to even try to write passably almost at all anymore that bothers me. We’re going backwards, not forwards. This is not some niche skill, the ability to communicate concisely. This is a fundamental part of being a social animal. And people are leaning more and more on machines to do it for them.
At what point does the language start influencing the thought?
Well, I think to most of us, language is extremely closely tied to our actual thoughts. So verbal expression is at the very least part of the thinking process.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just not faced with the abuses of LLMs the way you are? I don’t regularly experience people who clearly skipped the effort and just let an LLM do the thinking for them. (It happens, and it’s problematic, but at in my experience it’s rare.) And it’s possible that it’s just because my bubble haven’t caught up yet.
Working in IT, what I’ve seen so far has been terrifying enough on a technical level, but the effect on the way people think is so, so much worse.
It’s like the joke people make about how, before smart phones, you could rattle off a dozen phone numbers by heart, but now you can’t even remember your immediate families? You’ve offloaded that part of your brain to the machine. So have I, almost everyone has. And when you’re without your phone for whatever reason and need to get a hold of someone, you’re boned outside of like 1 or 2 people maybe.
But what happens as more and more of these tasks get reduced to queries and the thinking part starts to atrophy? As we offload more and more to the machine. Like why even read at all if you can just have the machine read it for you and you can listen in your airpods? And what happens when you eventually can’t even verify if what the voice in your ear is saying is correct and not just a digital hallucination?
Anyways, not trying to be argumentative, it’s just, through the lens of what I experience day to day it’s extremely concerning how quickly people are losing their ability to do things without leaning on AI, and more importantly, how quickly they’re forgetting how to do things without it.
If you can write a full-ass Wikipedia article you don’t need slopogen to smoother it into a paste of an average. You already wrote a full-ass Wikipedia article, good, done. Nerds from all over the world will fix your wording if it’s appropriate, that’s why it’s collaborative, that’s what made it good.
We all know it’s not how people use slopogen. People use it instead of thinking, instead of working, instead of writing. And if not banned completely, that’s what people will be doing with it, all the time, because people like to not spend any effort.
I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredible curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.
We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?
And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay and figure out how to reconcile that fact with a better future.
I think it’s more nuanced than that. It all depends on what you’re asking it to do (and a bit of luck that it complies as intended). Using a thesaurus can also either improve or worsen a text.
I’m not a native English speaker, but have lived in an English speaking country for many years now. I still make mistakes, but there is no point in me asking for help with English writing as my mistakes are subtle and I don’t realise I made them. Getting an AI to detect clumsy use of English and grammar mistakes has worked quite well for me before publishing reports. While I don’t always use the correct grammar while writing, I’m very capable of judging whether an LLM suggested improvement is actually better.
Of course, letting an LLM rewrite a whole text is much riskier in terms of the original meaning getting lost. But that’s not the only way to use it.
There’s definitely a lot of nuance in this topic. I think discarding the whole thing and saying “And if your grasp of the language isn’t good enough, you can edit a page in your own language” is a bit naïve. English is the lingua franca of the world, so if you have knowledge about something that should be in Wikipedia but isn’t, adding or appending to a English page will reach the widest audience. Ideally you’d then do the same for your native language as well.
As long as there are humans at the beginning and end of the pipeline I at least hope that this won’t negatively affect the quality.
Eh I think this sounds ok. If you prompt an AI to improve your text, you submit that, and another human reviews that (and maybe asks you to make changes) it should be fine. I can see this giving more people the ability to make edits (e.g. non-native speakers)
The problem is, it doesn’t improve text, it worsens it. And if your grasp of the language isn’t good enough, you can edit a page in your own language, or ask nerds in the discussion section to help you, it will be better written, they will be happy, and you might learn something.
Asking a slop generator to generate some slop about what you wanted to write will make things worse.
This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.
It truly blows my mind that people need to use AI to write coherent sentences with proper punctuation at all. The shit that I receive in my inbox from people making far more money than me, that have multiple advanced degrees no less…it makes me weep for a future where no one is able to function without a computer holding their hand through the entire interaction.
We’re going to get to the point where its all AIs talking to each other and humans are merely pressing the send button.
I do not agree with this at all. Some of the smartest people I know have severe dyslexia. And those are not just extremes, all of us exist on a spectrum where we have strengths and weaknesses, and not all of us can be literary geniuses.
The fact that capitalism promotes mediocre bootlickers to positions of power has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Of course it will be exploited by these exact same people - all the more reason why we shouldn’t give them a monopoly on what’s genuinely a transformative technology.
There’s a world of difference between having lessor skills or ability and offloading it all to a machine so you don’t have to be bothered. Namely, effort.
Its not the fact that people can’t write well that bothers me, it’s that people don’t care to even try to write passably almost at all anymore that bothers me. We’re going backwards, not forwards. This is not some niche skill, the ability to communicate concisely. This is a fundamental part of being a social animal. And people are leaning more and more on machines to do it for them.
At what point does the language start influencing the thought?
Well, I think to most of us, language is extremely closely tied to our actual thoughts. So verbal expression is at the very least part of the thinking process.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just not faced with the abuses of LLMs the way you are? I don’t regularly experience people who clearly skipped the effort and just let an LLM do the thinking for them. (It happens, and it’s problematic, but at in my experience it’s rare.) And it’s possible that it’s just because my bubble haven’t caught up yet.
Working in IT, what I’ve seen so far has been terrifying enough on a technical level, but the effect on the way people think is so, so much worse.
It’s like the joke people make about how, before smart phones, you could rattle off a dozen phone numbers by heart, but now you can’t even remember your immediate families? You’ve offloaded that part of your brain to the machine. So have I, almost everyone has. And when you’re without your phone for whatever reason and need to get a hold of someone, you’re boned outside of like 1 or 2 people maybe.
But what happens as more and more of these tasks get reduced to queries and the thinking part starts to atrophy? As we offload more and more to the machine. Like why even read at all if you can just have the machine read it for you and you can listen in your airpods? And what happens when you eventually can’t even verify if what the voice in your ear is saying is correct and not just a digital hallucination?
Anyways, not trying to be argumentative, it’s just, through the lens of what I experience day to day it’s extremely concerning how quickly people are losing their ability to do things without leaning on AI, and more importantly, how quickly they’re forgetting how to do things without it.
If you can write a full-ass Wikipedia article you don’t need slopogen to smoother it into a paste of an average. You already wrote a full-ass Wikipedia article, good, done. Nerds from all over the world will fix your wording if it’s appropriate, that’s why it’s collaborative, that’s what made it good.
We all know it’s not how people use slopogen. People use it instead of thinking, instead of working, instead of writing. And if not banned completely, that’s what people will be doing with it, all the time, because people like to not spend any effort.
I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredible curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.
We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?
And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay and figure out how to reconcile that fact with a better future.
I think it’s more nuanced than that. It all depends on what you’re asking it to do (and a bit of luck that it complies as intended). Using a thesaurus can also either improve or worsen a text.
I’m not a native English speaker, but have lived in an English speaking country for many years now. I still make mistakes, but there is no point in me asking for help with English writing as my mistakes are subtle and I don’t realise I made them. Getting an AI to detect clumsy use of English and grammar mistakes has worked quite well for me before publishing reports. While I don’t always use the correct grammar while writing, I’m very capable of judging whether an LLM suggested improvement is actually better.
Of course, letting an LLM rewrite a whole text is much riskier in terms of the original meaning getting lost. But that’s not the only way to use it.
There’s definitely a lot of nuance in this topic. I think discarding the whole thing and saying “And if your grasp of the language isn’t good enough, you can edit a page in your own language” is a bit naïve. English is the lingua franca of the world, so if you have knowledge about something that should be in Wikipedia but isn’t, adding or appending to a English page will reach the widest audience. Ideally you’d then do the same for your native language as well.
As long as there are humans at the beginning and end of the pipeline I at least hope that this won’t negatively affect the quality.