Human Routers of Machine Words

The immediate problem is, as we’ve established, the author[ of AI-written text]’s an idiot. If you are so stupid you can’t even turn some bullet points into prose, then your ideas are probably worthless.

The first three paragraphs alone contain so many ad hominems against AI users, which ironically makes the blog’s author look like the idiot here.

Didn’t read the rest. After all, if you can’t even make an argument without throwing a temper tantrum, then your ideas are probably worthless.

Joking aside, I also hate reading AI-written text. I get it feels good to rant, but this style is not what I browse Lobsters for, personally.

I have read bad LLM writing where the ideas made it worth reading. For example, algorithm design can be tested with mediocre implementations of some parts, and can be valuable even badly explained.

I have also read many human-written articles which have no new ideas to convey, one of them being the linked article.

Oh, and I have read LLM prose which handled bullet points uniformly enough that I actively prefer it to median careful writeup of the same bullet points, because it is more skimmable.

Helpful to see this phenomenon put into (suitably outraged) words. I voiced a related thought on the orange site last year:

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years.

The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they will be automated away.

I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. A robot is just a "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical" (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=robot).

I'm afraid far too many are captive to the ideology of productionism (which is just a corollary of consumerism). Creative activity is not about content production. The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation. Generation of digital artifacts may be useful for these purposes, but most uses seem to assume content production is the point, and that is a dark, sad, dead end.