Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
Depends. If the 700 bits were arrived at by the LLM while spending a lot of tokens, and the result is "good", I may want it through you as a middleman because it used up your tokens and won't eat my subscription usage limit to ask the AI to supply those 700. If you spend the tokens and put the result online, plenty of people can spare their tokens because they don't have to ask the AI to derive it. Bonus if that result was run through some kind of testing and verification.
Obviously this doesn't really apply to super simple questions that the LLM can just spit out the answer to right away.
Sure, but then that's less "making an LLM write for you" and more "making an LLM research for you" which I don't think is what TFA is talking about
True. There is at least one more case: when LLM the other person is using has access to their context and information repositories that they don't want to share directly, and so the LLM text gives a peek at a slice of that, and that's not something I can recreate from thin air. In that case the LLM text may have utility for me.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
Obviously this doesn't really apply to super simple questions that the LLM can just spit out the answer to right away.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗