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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21337 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Believe me, these days I do indeed mostly talk to machines. They are not great conversationalists but they're extremely helpful.

Talking to humans has several functions for me. First, indeed, personal relationships of terminal value. Second, political influence, affecting future outcomes, and more mundane utilitarian objectives. Third, actually nontrivial amount of precise knowledge and understanding where LLMs remain unreliable.

There still is plenty of humans who have high enough perplexity and wisdom to deserve being talked to for purely intellectual entertainment and enrichment. But I've raised the bar of sanity. Now this set does not include those who have kneejerk angry-monkey-noise tier reactions to high-level AI texts.

Believe me, these days I do indeed mostly talk to machines. They are not great conversationalists but they're extremely helpful.

Would you mind elaborating on this? I am in the somewhat uncomfortable position of thinking that a) Superintelligence is probably a red herring, but b) AI is probably going to put me and most people I know out of a job in the nearterm, but c) not actually having much direct contact with AI to see what's coming for myself. Could you give some discription of how AI fits into your life?

First, indeed, personal relationships of terminal value.

This militates against top level AI copypasta. That doesn't develop personal relationships.

Second, political influence, affecting future outcomes, and more mundane utilitarian objectives.

Highly unlikely that posting on the motte or talking to machines accomplishes either of these, so call it a wash. Recruiting for a cause is also against the rules, anyway.

Third, actually nontrivial amount of precise knowledge and understanding where LLMs remain unreliable.

Same as point 1. Precise knowledge and understanding usually comes from asking specific questions based on your own knowledge rather than what the LLM wants to know.

Your own reasons for posting here seem to suggest that there's no point in posting LLM content, and especially not as a top level post.

I have explained my reasons to engage with humans in principle, not in defense of my (R1-generated, but expressing my intent) post, which I believe stands on its own merits and needs no defense. You are being tedious, uncharitable and petty, and you cannot keep track of the conversation, despite all the affordances that the local format brings.

The standards of posting here seem to have declined substantially below X.

Friendo, you are the one who can't keep track of the conversation.

  1. You say it's dumb to have a rule against AI posts.

  2. Someone asks you why anyone would want to read AI posts.

  3. You say talking to AIs is great, maybe even better than talking to humans.

  4. I asked why you post here at all instead of talking to LLMs all the time.

  5. You responded with three reasons to prefer talking to humans vs LLMs

  6. I point out that these very reasons suggest that this forum should remain free from LLM posts.

  7. You bristle and say that your post needs no defense (why are you defending it up and down this thread then?)

At risk of belaboring the point, my response in point 6 is directly on the topic of point 1. To make it as clear as I can possibly make it, people come to this forum to talk to people because they prefer to talk to people. It should be clear that anyone who prefers to read LLM outputs can simply cut out the middleman and talk to them off of the motte.

Okay, fair. #6 is contrived non sequitur slop, barely intelligible in context as a response to #5, so that has confused me.

In conclusion, I think my preference to talk to people when I want to, to AI when I want to, and use any mix of generative processes I want to, has higher priority than comfort of people who have nothing to contribute to the conversation or to pretraining data and would not recognize AI without direct labeling.

Your preferences do not have a higher priority than everyone else's preferences, or what we've told you are the mods' preferences. If you don't like the rules and you think conversation here is terrible, nothing is keeping you here.

I am not saying I want you to leave, but you are attacking everyone who's less enamored of AI output than you, and the antagonism and condescension is not improving your position.

It would be optimal to assume any post of yours from now on is DeepSeek preprompted on your post history, and only reply with what DeepSeek spits out in response.

I might not have much to contribute most of the time, but why not inflate my wordcount and reduce the amount of effort further?

It is unremarkable that you believe your preferences have higher priority than the preferences of others. The question is why everyone else who doesn't want AI copypasta on this forum has to come around to your point of view.

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