Posting LLM generated writing is an afront to the intelligence of everyone that you want to read it, and a direct insult to humanity as a whole.
The time to mince words about this is long gone.
I saw a piece of writing on Hackernews the other day that was obviously LLM generated, and I had a bit of a crashout. I won’t link the piece here, because I won’t give any validity to what is being shared, nor should you.
The writing always has a specific odor about it, it is easy to pick out when you’ve seen it for about 2 minutes, and is littered with corpospeak and feels like you’re talking to a middle manager or someone in HR.
If it took you all of 30 seconds to generate a piece of writing, but you expect me to spend 5 minutes reading it, I’m sorry, but the ROI for me isn’t there.
Worse, you don’t see me as a human being.
You see me as a revenue point or some metric in your analytics.
No thanks.
Just give me the prompt, bro.#
You don’t have anything special, sorry to tell you; Your “prompt library” isn’t worth VC money (you know what, maybe it is - it’s best if idiot-tier VCs go to zero).
So, just hand over the prompt that you used to generate your mediocre piece of writing, and I can then have an LLM distill it down to the main talking points, forgoing all of your padding slop.
I ain’t reading your LLM’s drivel and “It’s not this, it’s THIS”-isms.
I am not going to waste the ever-shortening time that I have on this planet to “consume” computer generated text that you didn’t think was worth the effort of writing yourself.
And frankly, nobody else should.
If you open a piece of writing and from the get-go it is obviously LLM generated, post a comment of ai;dr and bounce.
Save everyone else’s time, do God’s work.
The race to mediocrity#
The most insufferable thing about this whole phenomenon is that we are accelerating toward a world in which everything is the same; neutered, stale, boring.
Mediocre by all measurements.
If we continue down this path, my guess is that we will destroy any future ability to create great works, not just for us now, but our children’s children.
Everyone is forgetting mastery in the pursuit of convenience. Everyone is trading in greatness for a lie.
Sadly, it seems that even many of our fellow human beings are being converted to LLMs in real time with the way that they write.
If you read any blog post these days, the incessant LLM-isms in writing that is even hand written is getting out of control. I see it in my own writing - and it frightens me.
Long term exposure to this stuff is going to make your IQ drop, there will be studies that come out in a few years time saying this was the new smoking, along with social media use.
Stay human#
It seems to me that the way forward is to seek mastery, to stay human, to stay curious - to push forward with a human first perspective and in all things try to find connection.
The hilarious thing that “AI” might actually be useful for is sniffing out and then entirely blocking this sort of thing. I will in the near future hash out how to best do this, if there are already projects that are existing with this as the goal, feel free to email me or comment below. But, my thought is that you will run a simple local model that will be trained on AI-isms in writing and immediately blank out the browser tab saying that the writing is generated and to not waste your time.
There does seem to be various tools used in academia that provide this sort of service:
run on this paragraph
If we allow it, the computer can steal your humanity - but I feel that it was meant to encourage you to enhance humanity through your ideas, your words, the code and things you create. We let computers get corporatised, focused on profit and “efficiency”, and they efficiently ripped out the humanity of much of this life.
So, in this vein, LLM generated anything seems to be an affront to humanity.
Anything created by an algorithm is going to be a direct attack on your being, it is going to be meant to engagement farm you, to pull you in and manipulate your emotions, getting you to stay in the advertisement silo.
Perhaps the challenge has always been to stay human - and then pursue the fullest extent of that humanity.
Conclusion#
As always, God bless, and until next time.
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