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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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My first comment is, that there are enough humans out there that don't really comprehend what they are writing and often also make shit up as they go. I was not talking about the underlying mechanism, which is rather speculative since we have little idea how complex functions of the brain - like text generation, work. Just making a humorous light hearted comparison.
Our conversation is a nice illustration how, maybe we as humans aren't as good at understanding text - as we might think. (Again - that is a light hearted comment and not some profound complex observation).
To be clear, I'm not talking about underlying mechanisms, either, but the approach to the task. A human writer, even one bad at writing and not understanding the topic, will approach the writing with a goal and write to that goal and topic. They can even research if they so choose, but even if they are just making things up, there is intent and context there.
An LLM doesn't have any of that. It literally just generates words that match certain patterns, with no actual purpose or goal. It may have been programmed with a goal in mind, but it doesn't have one of its own. It can't reason, it can't research, it can't make decisions. I think that is an important distinction that people who are just saying "Who cares? It's all bad writing anyways" are missing.
You never made an experience of having to writer for a topic you genuinely don't care about, where you just string along words, vaguely related to the topic to make specific word count? I'm not arguing that all human writing is like this - people are definitely capable of writing text with purpose and context, at least some. But that is not all human writing.
And exactly that was my point, that humans often do the same. Not all the time. But it definitely happens, especially in professional writing where you maybe have to write about a topic you don't understand or care about.
And again, there are tons of people out there that can't do this things either. It's like a very intelligent chimpanzee is smarter than a very dumb human. So are LLMs better at generating text than quite a lot of humans.
Then you're missing the distinction as well.
I think you are just in a bubble where you don't have much contact with dumb people. I would have thought the same during my university time, but chosing not academia or science for that matter opened a whole new wold of ignorance for me. By the way - maybe our brain is just a Markov Model prediction machine and consciousness ist just an illusion, would not surprise me much if we are not that different from LLMs. But that is even more speculative.