This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified.

LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.

I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.

I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.

I suppose using LLMs to write is like not wiping your ass, and using LLMs that are bad at writing is like not wiping your ass and wearing a T-shirt that says "Wiping is for losers."

I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.

> You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing.

That's not how i read the article. The author more-so claims that the proof of effort by a human was large part of the credibility to the writing; Proof that the author of the text has thought it through and come to their convulsions though effort and reflection, and spent effort articulating that into words they expect other humans to find insightful.

If i see LLM signs; did the author just rephrase with AI model or did a AI model content farm produce the whole post based on the prompt "write a inspiring linked-in post"?

Disclosure of LLM use is simply the author addressing the concern and building a case for why the article is worth reading.

I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effort.

>using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

'Without disclosure' is about taking credit for work that isn't yours.

WP defines 'ghostwriter' as: "a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author."

Anyone could choose to go through life relying on a reputation manufactured from many lies. They might want to think about how hard that reputation will hit the ground, if it does.

> If LLMs get better at writing

They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human.

> It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.

Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.

People shouldn’t pass off largely unedited AI writing as their own, but I’d much rather live in a world where that writing would be of high quality in both form and content, than in the world we live now. In that sense, lack of disclosure is the lesser evil.

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing, regardless of how good the LLMs get good at writing.

Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.

I just feel like technology companies keep proving over and over that they are more than capable of forcing us into new behaviors regardless of our actual preferences. Once the domination is complete nobody will know what was lost in the process anyway.

I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well.

There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.

And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.

Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.

Personally, I'd be fine with LLM writing if it wasn't so unpleasant to read

I agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs.

The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.

I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.

>I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing."

That’s not the argument. The argument is “LLM’s tend to write the same way all the time regardless of who prompted it.” You can't call it “your writing” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s.

Use an LLM to assist? Cool, go ahead. Prompt, ctrl-c, ctrl-v? Go fuck yourself. I can’t be expected to put more effort into figuring out your take than you out into communicating your take to me.

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> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:

1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.

2. The prose style is horrible to read.

If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)