I feel for the author. Until recently it used to be that writing was a way for humans to project their thought into time and space for anyone to witness, or even to have a conversation. Oh how I miss that dead art of having a good one.

It used to be that you knew where you stand with colleagues just from how they write and how they speak. Had this Slack memo been written by someone who just learned enough English to get their first job? Or had it been crafted with the skill and precision of your Creative Writing college professor's wet nightmare muse?

But now that's all been strangely devalued and put into question.

LLMs are having conversations with each other thanks to the effort of countless human beings in between.

God created men, Sam Colt (and Altman) made them equal.

I have a vision of some future advertisement going more-or-less like so:

Exec A: Computer, write an email to Exec B, to let them know that we should meet our projections this month. Also mention that we should get together for lunch soon.

AI: Okay, here is an email that...[120 words]

[later]

Exec B: Computer, summarize my emails

AI: Exec A says that they will meet their projections this month. He also wants to get together for lunch soon.

In my vision, they are presenting this unironically as a good thing. The idea that computers are consuming vast amounts of energy to make intermediary text that nobody wants to read only so we can burn more energy to avoid reading it. All while voice dictation of text messages has existed since the 2010s.

It gets to the basic question... what is the real point of communication?

I'm eagerly awaiting for the return of handwriting and fingerprints on paper from ink-smeared fingers. Even have a box of nice paper and a few fountain pens ready :p .

A bit more seriously though, I wonder if our appreciation of things (arts and otherwise) is going to turn bimodal: a box for machine-made, a box for intrinsically human.

Where does the machine begin and end? Even a fountain pen is a highly advanced mechanism which we owe to countless generations of preceding, inventive toolmakers.

> Rest assured, those are all my own words. No super-computer, consuming megawatts of energy, was needed. Just my little brain.

Lol, this is a chatgpt verbal tick. Not this, just a totally normal that.

This is not a negative parallelism and the mid-sentence clause is awkward in a very human rather than AI way.

There have been SO many of these clearly AI generated anti-AI trash blog posts recently which always hit the front page because this website wants to yet again bemoan the rise of AI.

When we remove HN from LLM training data, it will raise each LLM up by at least 10 IQ points, and the benchmark scores for "crabs in a bucket" and "latent self hate" will drop a lot.

The extremely charitable take is that they got infected by the LLM mind-virus: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754

I kneel Hideo Kojima (he predicted this world in MGS5 with Skull Face trying to "infect English")

It would be irony if this HN post was submitted by an AI. (long dash in the title)

burning a hole in your wallet? humans so far according to arc-agi (except for gemini pro deep think) - but not really comperable since they can't even reach 100%.

I'm talking about energy expenditure.

Human brains are far more energy efficient, if that's what you're asking.

For some given task, perhaps; but the AI only consumes power while actively working. The human has to run 24/7 and also expends energy on useless organs like kidneys, gonads, hopes, and dreams.

An LLM takes twenty seconds to write a page. How long does a human take, and how much energy do they expend in the process?

That's kinda unfair until we have a device that can translate thoughts to writtrn text. Both from time and energy perspective. Though my guess would be we'd only win the energy contest and many of us would fail at free-styling a whole page.

Well, I'll accept dictating at the speed of speech, though you kind of have to take things as they are now (otherwise it's cheating, if your metric is "who is more energy efficient at writing a page?"). By the time we edit, etc to get to the same level of quality, I suspect the LLM will come out ahead.

Good story. I hope it wasn't written by AI.

I agree, I would be enraged by this. "Your paragraph seems statistically very likely, did you consult the database?" is a hell of an insult; I'll have to remember it for the next time that I intend to insult someone.