Technology

As is with software developing, actually writing the stuff down is the easiest part of the work. If you already have someone fact checking and editing.. why do you need AI to shit out crap just for the writing? It would be easier to gather the facts first, fact check them, then wrangle them through the AI if you don't want to hire a writer (+ another pass for editing).

LLMs look like magic on a glance, but people thinking they are going to produce high quality content (or code for god's sake) are delusional.

I don't think this one is even an LLM, it looks like the output of a basic article spinning script that takes an existing article and replaces random words with synonyms.

AI doesn't exist, but it will ruin everything anyway.

https://youtu.be/EUrOxh_0leE?si=voNBJjvvuyzb8oZk

The danger about current AI is people giving them important tasks to do when they aren't up to it. To put it in War Games terms, the problem is not Joshua, not even Professor Falken, but the McKittricks of the world.

Dude really went wild during the steam summer sale.

Gotta teach it to add qualifying language. The above is falsifiable (even if it happens to be true).

Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in approximately 67 video games over two seasons

Throughout his NBA profession, he performed in at least 67 video games over two seasons

The second one is only technically falsifiable. It wouldn't be practical though as you'd have to prove you investigated every video game over a 2 year period (and not necessarily contiguous). Not an easy task.

The thing is LLMs are extremely useful at aiding humans. I use one all the time at work and it has made me faster at my job, but left unchecked they do really stupid shit.

It's already made my life much easier.

The technology is amazing.

It's just there's a lot of stupid people using it stupidly, and people whose job it is to write happen to really like writing articles about its failures.

There's a lot more going on in how it is being used and improving than what you are going to see unless you are actually using it yourself daily and following research papers on it.

Don't buy into the anti-hype, as it's misleading to the point of bordering on misinformation.

I'm going to fight the machines for the right to keep slaving away myself

And when I'm done, capitalism will give me an off day as a treat!

As someone who works in content marketing, this is already untrue at the current quality of LLMs. It still requires a LOT of human oversight, which obviously it was not given in this example, but a good writer paired with knowledgeable use of LLMs is already significantly better than a good content writer alone.

Some examples are writing outside of a person's subject expertise at a relatively basic level. This used to take hours or days of entirely self-directed research on a given topic, even if the ultimate article was going to be written for beginners and therefore in broad strokes. With diligent fact-checking and ChatGPT alone, the whole process, including final copy, takes maybe 4 hours.

It's also an enormously useful research tool. Rather than poring over research journals, you can ask LLMs with academic plug-ins to give a list of studies that fit very specific criteria and link to full texts. Sometimes it misfires, of course, hence the need for a good writer still, but on average this can cut hours from journalistic and review pieces without harming (often improving) quality.

All the time writers save by having AI do legwork is then time they can instead spend improving the actual prose and content of an article, post, whatever it is. The folks I know who were hired as writers because they love writing and have incredible commitment to quality are actually happier now using AI and being more "productive" because it deals mostly with the shittiest parts of writing to a deadline and leaves the rest to the human.

Dead people really are quite useless in basketball.

"Hello, I'm the agent for dead player 'Magic Bob', I'd like to enrol him in your team of the Eagles...
Hello?"

Yeah, but that's a key part of the problem. The media had already automated a lot of the news curation into Google News, MSN and other portals, getting people used to not paying much attention to the particular source of news. The news is now moving to generating the actual content in an automated way, rather than just the aggregation step.

Okay but when's the last time you had 17 factors in a recreation in opposition to the Milwaukee Bucks, hmm?

That's some top notch obituary writing, AI.

Imagine being an AI-generated summary of an article criticizing AI-written articles