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- Hacker News
- > We’re getting something that isn’t totally crooked
Is there a secret corner of LinkedIn that I’m not aware of that isn’t just the most shameless promotion of AI, crypto, and various other techno-babble BS you’ve ever seen?
by yunwal - > with LinkedIn we know that we’re getting something ... that isn’t totally crooked
Citation desperately needed.
by SoftTalker - LLM writing is boring. Write it yourself. You are more interesting than a LLM because you make mistakes, do stupid things, don't go for the average content, and can be ridiculous in a way that an LLM can never be. LLMs are great for large tasks which would take you several hours or several days to complete that are routine or tedious. Even then, you have to make it human by putting in your own viewpoint and misguided ideas. I really liked the article. I use LinkedIn a lot, I think it is a better platform than he is describing. There is some dumbing down so it meets the average person. That is its strength and weakness.by NishanStepak
- You’ve made me realize that LLM’s greatest strength is iteration. It helps you iterate really fast, but it’s not original. It doesn’t help you think of new ideas. So writing about the things you know is great and using AI to learn about things you don’t know and then writing about them is also great.
The way I explain it to young people is that AI is a force multiplier. Everyone gets the benefit of that force multiplier, but it’s that initial force that you need to build up now. Preliminary knowledge of domains, things that the AI doesn’t really understand. AI can help you increase that initial force. So use it to learn new things, not just do things for you.
I was blown away by the fact that AI solved an unsolved math problem, but it made complete sense when it was Terrence Tao, someone who has a PhD in math, that was guiding that agent to that solution, so that initial force is important more than ever.
- I can always tell when someone uses an LLM to write and never gave the LLM proper context on how to write (i.e., writing samples, skills files specific to writing, etc). These are also the people who tend to complain about AI's writing style.
You can get pretty good results if you take the time to tune it. Tropes and the like still sneak in but if you take the time to edit and rework things, it ends up being a pretty good workflow (especially for stuff that's more procedural, not artistic).
by rglover - > These are also the people who tend to complain about AI's writing style.
What? No, the complaints come from the people who end up expected to read the result.
by zahlman - When I log into LinkedIn, it seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand.
Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting.
There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.
by aviperl - > branding suicide.
Or not. I mean, if you had no voice and nothing to say before, you can amplify that signal 10x now. Basically, you’re boosting your brand as a tasteless brainless schlub.
by tempodox - So much this. My average linkedin in exprience is a sprinkling of updates from people i personally know, in an oceon of inane "content" by ~$0 net worth people with 40 word self professed titles.
I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.
by pxmpxm - What baffles me, isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right? And realize how what they put out sounds exactly the same? Or did people completely stop reading what they've "wrote" before hitting that magical submit button?
- Yeah I don't quite understand it either. Where's the intersection between people producing AI slop and people that have never read AI slop? I guess it's bigger than we thought... Or maybe they just don't give a shit. That's probably it.by IshKebab
- if they had been half decent at writing before they would notice the quality issue, not being able to see it is also a writing skill issue, now it's just kind of spammy as people are just reaching for the tool in ai nighsosisby luxuryballs
- It blows my mind. A customer of ours, whom I respect the technical opinion of, drops fully unedited Claude posts on LinkedIn now. I don't get how he thinks they read like anything but slop.by jjice
- People like this generally don't read, for pleasure or edification. Their posts are advertising, designed to work by repetition. They're not necessarily looking to persuade smart people; they're going after the same sort of people who want to fix problems with this one weird trick (doctors hate him!).by anigbrowl
- > isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right?
This style emerged from a large number of people explicitly preferring it over alternatives when offering feedback. There is genuinely no accounting for taste (and if there were, many people would be in crippling debt).
by zahlman - I don’t want to read content written by AI.
A feature I would like on LinkedIn would be a 100% verified human content flag for users. LinkedIn can then do the scans and flip that to false for any users it catches posting AI assisted content. Let me filter that out of the feed.
If we don’t do something to maintain some standard of discourse, we lose intellectually and as a piece of our humanity.
LinkedIn is the only social media I use and it is on thin ice.
by wj - Under European law don't you have to mark AI generated content as such?by ciupicri
- How do you think they will verify this?
With AI?
by biztos - They don't want you to do that because you will realize how quiet and dead these spaces are becoming.by asdff
- I worked at LinkedIn (briefly, before retirement) and the product had been useful to me for years before that, so I used it a fair bit but not much anymore since it doesn't serve any of my current needs. There were always awful million-view posts written by humans, useless influencers promoted by the algorithm. That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success, because engagement, so the LLM tries to replicate that garbage, does a mediocre job, and the result is this sort of weird garbage. Basically the LLM appears to be high on its own supply. Problem is the viral stuff was always what made me want to run out of the room and lock the door, so even if the LLMs did a better job of replicating that garbage, it would still be garbage, just a little less weird.by siskiyou
- Part of it also with seeing the feed is that it is basically useless for me. The only interesting thing is when it automatically tells me someone I know got a new job someplace. All the rest is pure and I mean pure slop. No one I actually know ever posts anything to linked in. It would be like making a facebook status update these days. Like who does that, other than the influencer types of course?by asdff
- > That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success
Well, no; they looked like success to the people doing the RLHF.
by zahlman - If I may compare written work to restaurants, a title and byline are like the storefront; I get an idea of what's being served, and if I'm hungry, I'll walk in and order. Sometimes the meal is amazing. Usually it's pretty good. Occasionally it's bland, or even bad, but not often enough to discourage future ventures; of course, I'm unlikely to revisit that particular proprietor.
With LLM writing there's an additional outcome. I walk in and the walls are pleasant, if beige. I follow the smell and promise of food down a hallway. At the end is an unmarked door, which I open and peek through. Myriad hallways lead away, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Say I am very hungry and have the guts to explore; I may find that I can never actually reach the food, that it's just an endless hall of mirrors, presenting structure but with nothing at its core.
Sometimes I do find food, but it's never better than bland.
The facade of these places, at first glance, still looks like human-run restaurants, though we're all learning the tells. Nowadays, when I open the first door and see more hallways, I'll turn around and look elsewhere.
by ericbarrett - I think the most important line in this post is: But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you.
When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
by jgrahamc - The Cloudflare blog used to be great to read, so thanks for your work there.by fwip
- I published a magazine for ten years, and this was by far the hardest editing challenge we had; our authors were from all over the world, and some of them had to be pretty heavily edited because English was very much not their first language. Thankfully, we had really good editors who did a fantastic job of it… nothing would have killed us faster than a heavy-handed attempt at “normalizing” the content to a house style.
That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
by mtabini - I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing."
My reasoning is: 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?
Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)
by dynm - 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.by layer8
- > 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.
by zahlman - >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.
by 8bitsrule