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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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 - 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?
- 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
- 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 - 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 - These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you:
Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.
Reviewing gives you the chance to ensure the arguments connect solidly, that references are accurate (even informal references) and gives you the time to consider counter-arguments you aren't addressing.
None of this matters much on LinkedIn, but it matters a lot in our work. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.
by jeremyjh