They still seem pretty horrible at writing. Overly complicated prose, weird phrasing, poorly structured paragraphs. I don't know why they're so bad at communicating, but I feel very confident that humans are still much better at writing than any of these LLM models are, regardless of how advanced they are in other areas.
Some humans are much better at writing. Most humans are not. If you think they are, you are luckier than I am when it comes to the humans you need to communicate with.
As a non-native English speaker, I think the current LLMs write better English than me. I still write better than them in my native language (Norwegian), but the same cannot be said about most of my compatriots.
Many people are terrible at writing. LLMs write better than them.
However, many more people are "OK" at writing. But what their writing conveys is personality. Every comment here is written by someone who may not have grammatically perfect writing, but their writing conveys how they talk and think. It conveys what they think is important, and what they brush over. It conveys how much they care about the topic being discussed. Behind each comment is a person. Online forums and discussions are, at their heart, a shared experience of humanity.
LLMs write consistently in the same personality. If your writing is filtered through an LLM, your personality is stripped out. Unless the idea being conveyed is particularly novel or interesting, you might as well not have bothered. Imagine a niche forum where everyone discussing things was speaking through an LLM. It would be BORING.
I asked the same question to chatgpt, claude, and kimi and kimi gave the most sane answer. Part of me wonders if it has anything to do with having more chinese language structure in their dataset
But they do use their models internally quite a bit. Claude code head talks about how he doesn't write any code himself anymore and just uses agents to do everything. So they are using it themselves.
It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
I go to HN to read about technology and startups. I don't want to read about Israel/gaza, etc, I get enough of that everywhere else in life. But I guess that makes me not a compassionate person.
Yep. There was something outside of coding that gpt was plain wrong about (had to do with setting up an electric guitar) and I couldn't convince it that it was wrong.
I remember the total uproar about the name! Everyone said it was too close to a Feminine hygiene product, or too close to iPod. Nobody's complaining any more.
Advertising is not a recent evolution of capitalism, it's a foundational piece of it. Whatever you do as a job would not exist if there was no one marketing it. This hostility seems insane.
“No advertisements” seems extreme to me. I want to know when a good band is playing at a local venue, or has an album out. I like hearing about new books, or a restaurant near me.
The absolutist position that “all ads are always bad” is a non-starter for me. Especially as long as we exist in a capitalist system. Small business, indie creators, etc. must advertise in some fashion to survive. It’s only the behemoths that could afford to stop doing it (ironically). I’ve never really understood why, e.g. Pepsi and Coke spend so much on advertising: most people already have a preference and I am skeptical that the millions they spend actually moves the needle either way. (“Is Pepsi okay?” “It absolutely is not.”)
>I’ve never really understood why, e.g. Pepsi and Coke spend so much on advertising
When was the last time you saw an ad for something non digital and you stopped everything and bought it or even made concrete plans to do so later ? Probably almost never right ? So why still so many ads ? More importantly, why is it still so profitable ?
Because much of the impact of advertising is sub conscious imprint rather than conscious action. Have you ever been in a grocery store and you needed to get something and picked a "random" brand ? Yeah, that choice may not have been so random after all.
Or perhaps you're sitting at home or work and have a sudden seemingly unprompted craving for <insert food place>. Yeah, maybe not so unprompted.
There are (and continue to be) millions of young people who do not yet have firm preferences. For the already faithful, their advertising is mostly about reminding them to consume more.
The early theorists of capitalism didn't imagine that advanced psychology (that didn't even exist back then) would be used to convince people to buy $product.
Messages of that sophistication are always dangerous, and modern advertising is the most widespread example of it.
The hostility is more than justified, I can only hope the whole industry is regulated downwards, even if whatever company I work for sells less.
