It’s a nice fact that LLMs are pretty smart and useful now but suck at writing good prose. Suggests writing well really is very hard.
It’s a nice fact that LLMs are pretty smart and useful now but suck at writing good prose. Suggests writing well really is very hard.
- The best predictor of a piece of writing’s quality is the writer
Chris Best • Writers Writing, Readers Reading, Creators Creating
"A key challenge of (LLMs) is that they do not come with a manual! They come with a “Twitter influencer manual” instead, where lots of people online loudly boast about the things they can do with a very low accuracy rate, which is really frustrating..."
Simon Willison, attempting to explain LLM
LLMs are extremely good at a type of knowledge called tacit knowledge (knowledge about something as it pertains to something else) but are extremely poor at pretty much any other type as far as I can see. It just so happens that tacit knowledge also happens to be the type of knowledge that drives natural language so it makes them looks super smart,... See more
Column: These Apple researchers just showed that AI bots can't think, and possibly never will — Apple’s AI researchers gave these AI systems a simple arithmetic problem that schoolkids can solve. The bots flunked.
- Robert, who looks at ~1,000 pieces of writing a day, has discovered that the best predictor for the quality of a writing piece is the writer
Chris Best • Writers Writing, Readers Reading, Creators Creating
Chess AIs far exceed humans, yet human chess is more popular than ever.
In this analogy, LLMs become better than humans at writing. But so what? We like human writing. Text isn’t interesting if it’s not part of a (para)social relationship.