Unless they directly embed promotions in it. I could see this being an avenue for brand-derived fake artists. I wonder if they already have a policy for that and I wonder why it wouldn’t apply to, say, the beastie boys talking about adidas.
That only works if the mascot is people’s primary association with the brand, and they have some initially positive experiences with the brand. Most people see AI as suspicious, if not outright sinister. Trying to put a cute fuzzy face on something like that makes it seem more suspicious ands sinister, not less.
I don’t think people are idiots if they don’t understand how a normally intelligent person might not intuit that. I do think they have a seriously underdeveloped theory of mind.
I don’t give a flying fuck what people think. Most colleges copied or adopted my (for a few semesters) school’s style guide, so LLMs are essentially copying me, and I won’t change my punctuation usage because they suck.
But people at work who are copying responses from LLMs into emails to others also suck, and I want to distance myself from them as much as possible. I'm kinda hoping we will eventually have a wave of "what the fuck are we paying you for if you're just copying stuff from an LLM to Slack" firings.
This is a pointless and infinitely losing arms race. LLMs will learn to use hyphens instead of em dashes, and so what? You’re going to start using em dashes again?
At this point, I believe the LLM "style" is on purpose. Perhaps the labs want to be able to distinguish their slop from human content for future training; I don't know. But it feels very deliberate that they've kept the style so consistent for so long.
I agree. They're voluntarily adding fingerprints to images so I expect the default voice is intentional and it wouldn't surprise me at all (though I have no evidence of this) if the output text has a fingerprint stenographically embedded in it.
In a video of Hank Green, he interviewed an AI expert (if there even is such a thing), and he said that in the thinking part of the conversation, LLMs seems to use code language to communicate with itself, like in the usage and ordering of words, and such.
I think that there could be even more then a fingerprint in those messages.
He’s not an expert in anybody’s estimation other than his own. He’s a blogger, tech booster, executive, SEO guy, etc. He was big into NFTs. He gloms onto every buzzy tech thing because squeezing all the “gee whiz” he can out of tech optimism is that guy’s career. He has no education in ML or anything related.
I'll take this opportunity to repeat that the natural language interpretation of thinking traces don't appear to be "real" by any reasonable definition. Even if they can at times be useful (at least seemingly). There's research demonstrating the usage of arbitrary symbols, even just repeating a single symbol, leading to a similar improvement in ability. This makes sense if you consider how the attention mechanism and KV cache work as the sequence iteratively grows.
Basically we optimize the models to produce output with certain characteristics but that doesn't mean that what we see is the whole truth or even that the relationships in the underlying system are structured in the way that we might expect.
Ok— I don’t give a flying fuck if people jump to the conclusion that I am an LLM. And that concludes my willingness to engage in those pedantic semantic antics.
Sure— I don’t do any professional writing at this point, so my stakes are a lot lower. If I work in a field where people care about what I write, again, then maybe I will. Complete sentences are often seen as unforgivably inefficient in my current position.
Shakespeare was written for the masses. Hence being full of dick jokes.
Similar story for Chaucer, and so many others. I don't think good writing, things we appreciate so much it lasts generations, has much to do with signalling education or class.
> The purpose of good writing style has always been to signal education and class
Sure, that’s why there have never been any authors that became famous despite being poor and deliberately writing with that affect.
Good writing style does connote good education, and in environments where being upper-class bolsters social standing, some people flaunt it to signify class, as they would with any other wealth signifier, like expansive shoes.
I am a union tradesman— the third generation to work in manufacturing in this area. Affecting an upper-class identity diminishes social standing in my environment. Having a lot of money, definitely doesn’t. My dirty work boots probably cost as much as many of the trendiest shoes on the market, and the guys at work know that and admire them… but my wearing them doesn’t signify class. Similarly, you can use good writing style in a way that shows you went to a good school and paid attention without wearing it like a Harvard Business School fleece.
It’s not that they don’t understand that it’s a problem, it’s just that the easy way to address it is with reduced, flat-rate pricing… but they are already losing gobs of cash on their regular users. Their business model, as it stands, is not sustainable. That’s not saying they won’t find a stable one, but the one they have now is definitely not. The external cash is drying up, and they need to figure out a way to shed the low-revenue users, and charge the remaining users a lot more or they’re going to go under. They would probably do a goddamned backflip if every flat rate user that wasn’t willing to switch to API pricing went local, or even better, went with a competitor.
There are so many reasons being in a union is beneficial.
Developers should consider the likelihood of even modest efficiency gains from AI, along with a naturally cooling job market, cratering labor demand in software. Every shred of cushiness and every dollar above average in your paychecks is because you’re in a high-demand field, but it’s been that way so long that many developers have mistaken that for some sort of inherent specialness. Companies don’t pay people what they’re worth, they pay people what they’ll work for. If the demand for developer labor goes away, people that are as-or-more qualified than you will do your job for a lot less, and your employer will hire them and kick you to the curb. Being an ‘AI engineer’, unless you’ve got an advanced degree in ML or something, is no safety net. If you can make the transition from ‘developer’ to ‘fancy AI orchestrating developer’ in a few months, so can a lot of other people, and they’ll be looking for jobs.
The leverage might already be diminished enough to make unionization impossible in many places, but it’s certainly not going to get any easier. Consider it.
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