alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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> Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas.
Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use.
All that "X is a thing only humans do" type of circular definitions will buy you, is to expand the definition of what humanity is. And I doubt that's really what you think.
> An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article.
Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.
> LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating
I often use LLMs to translate from "shitty English" to "good English". The substance remains the same but it's nicer to read.