I have to admit I skipped to the end, but the conclusion of the article seems to be: "If you really care about something, make a song and dance about it. Around a bonfire. While wearing feathers and a mask."?
This was something that bugged me while writing. Someone even asked, What's the point if people aren't going to read the whole thing? Reading this made my day, not just because of the content, but because someone else cared enough to tackle the same problem. Good one, Sire.
While I appreciate the work put into this, I found it pretty hard to read because of the authors handwriting. I would never do this myself because I know that I have awful handwriting, and people would struggle to read it
i think the point is good, hadwriting forces you to think more, even from typing the same.. BUT , i am unsure this would be proof you wrote it or AI genereated it , same with tatoos , AI can genereate picutres of said Tatoo...
I love this problem and think it's super important. I've similarly noticed myself using a whiteboard to think critically for a while and then take a picture of the whiteboard as proof of deep thought, even if the next step is AI supplemented (a doc, a video, etc).
I've also started noticing people annotating a whole doc "written by humans" to try to convey effort and care. That's fine for some things but do that too often and a reader will be left with two thoughts:
1. Did they actually write this by hand? No way
2. Should they have written some of this with AI? Seems like a waste of time formatting some of this when they could've been spending their time thinking critically
I didn't finish the article, it was slightly difficult to read due to handwriting, and I'm not sure if I would have gotten any more value if I had continued. The mere of act of having written, or prompted to get something written is not intrinsically valuable to me. I have a degree in English literature, and I do not feel confident in my ability to discern AI writing from human anymore. I wasn't sure when I stopped reading if the images had been generated or not, and I don't know if it matters either way.
If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.
I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.
Generally speaking the ones that do care are those that also hope their own creations are/will be appreciated by people that similarly pour their heart into them, and they really don't understand that most people just see things for what they as consumers get out of them.
On some level writing on the net now is for an AI audience anyway. (Greetings fellow bots).
> The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something.
That's fine, but I don't think the author would suggest writing e.g. library documentation by hand. It's clearly advice for the creator side of the problem of low signal-to-noise ratio in the digital space and how to stand out/signal, rather than a general rule
LLM slop is considered low value because it contains a low information/minute as well as a low effort/minute signal. You want to know that the reader put more effort in than you do, and that it is worth your time. The effort signal just points to a possible high information/minute return.
When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.
What differentiates a splendid idea slopped into an article by AI from complete meaningless drivel being chiseled into perfection by a skilled human writer is not the form, but the content.
We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.
E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.
If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.
And also has the hallmarks of "art." I suggest, however, if one were to actually implement this, that the 'excrement' should likely be a food-safe lookalike; maybe chocolate with granola and fruit hunks. Less likely to have trouble with child welfare authorities.
If I had handwritten this, there would be at least one (likely lots more) errors in writing crossed out mingled in with the text. That there isn't makes me wonder why such a lengthy sample contains seemingly zero handwriting errors. Is that plausible?
You can handwrite more than just your first draft. It was common before the proliferation of computers to handwrite early drafts in pencil, and then handwrite the final manuscript with ink.
That was a fun read! I caught myself almost skimming the first part until i got to the mirrored paragraph, and slowed down significantly after that to read more deliberately.
I'm not sure how much actual advice one can take from this essay though beyond "use personal commitment (e.g. time or presence) to signal importance/care" and "go offline" (aka touch grass)
i just learned that these exist so you can like, prove that humanitarian funds that were supposed to fund surgery in civil war-torn Africa were actually used to perform surgery
that seems pretty ripe for a new Geldof / Bono combo to use thinking they are doing good
Yeah and if this were taken seriously, you would have Mechanical Turk style services where poors are paid pennies to hand-write submitted/generated slop, defeating the purpose.
TLDR proof of care from the article: a low bandwidth process (e.g., from handwriting to tattooing it on your body) that you voluntarily put your words through to convey their level of personal importance.
Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.
tangent rant, annoys me like "yeah senior engineer" or whatever, "yeah I can do that", puts the task into AI, puts up a dogshit PR can't explain how it works
There's never a single trick. Practically any trick to prove humanity can be tricked by AI.
There is no proof, only evidence. The best evidence is consistency of action and attitude. Those who've always cared, even before AI, will likely continue to care after AI, and those who did not care before AI will likely continue not to care. Also, if a person consistently expresses contempt for AI, that's a pretty good indicator they don't use AI. One could of course use AI to write anti-AI screeds repeatedly... but why?
...which reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyk5U2p-msk
That is consistent for both pages, but inconsistent with how they seem to be ordered within the text.
I guess the chapters were re-arranged post-script, with the "Storytellers" chapter inserted between them later?
I've also started noticing people annotating a whole doc "written by humans" to try to convey effort and care. That's fine for some things but do that too often and a reader will be left with two thoughts:
1. Did they actually write this by hand? No way 2. Should they have written some of this with AI? Seems like a waste of time formatting some of this when they could've been spending their time thinking critically
If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.
I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.
The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always.
It's like lamented handwritten script when the printing press was invented....
Generally speaking the ones that do care are those that also hope their own creations are/will be appreciated by people that similarly pour their heart into them, and they really don't understand that most people just see things for what they as consumers get out of them.
On some level writing on the net now is for an AI audience anyway. (Greetings fellow bots).
That's fine, but I don't think the author would suggest writing e.g. library documentation by hand. It's clearly advice for the creator side of the problem of low signal-to-noise ratio in the digital space and how to stand out/signal, rather than a general rule
When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without excessive hedging or jargon, and conveying a shortcut or mental model, I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable signal. No amount of fancy medium can top a well-framed idea concisely stated.
We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.
E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.
If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.
An infant scrawling the alphabet in its own excrement would have that "signal"...
Also, what’s his problem with the “Witch Priestess from the North?”
EDIT: Oh, the blue backgrounds are links. https://jacobfilipp.com/new-lord/
It isn’t?
^ at the bottom of the article
I'm not sure how much actual advice one can take from this essay though beyond "use personal commitment (e.g. time or presence) to signal importance/care" and "go offline" (aka touch grass)
that seems pretty ripe for a new Geldof / Bono combo to use thinking they are doing good
I would go further and quantify how much of the message is AI in situations where humans edit it.
Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.
Typewriters?
now more than ever can fake it
There is no proof, only evidence. The best evidence is consistency of action and attitude. Those who've always cared, even before AI, will likely continue to care after AI, and those who did not care before AI will likely continue not to care. Also, if a person consistently expresses contempt for AI, that's a pretty good indicator they don't use AI. One could of course use AI to write anti-AI screeds repeatedly... but why?