6 ms·

[flagged]

jampekka 3y ago
Journalists have found the lifehack way earlier: just copypaste with minor tweaks whatever some lobbyist says or press releases.
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  I would say that the primary benefit of having journalists is not to produce articles for papers or magazines, but to have people who understand what’s happening and why. Communicating that understanding is also important, but if you don’t have the understanding, you can’t communicate it. I don’t see LLMs as playing any significant role in building understanding. Humans need to process (read and write notes about) information to understand it. Also, the problem of LLM hallucination make them unsuitable for any serious use.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Most journalists halucinate at least as much information as LLMs. There is a small number of publications that try to do reasonably well, but most have enganged in such a race to the bottom that I'd expect a current generation LLM to produce more accurate articles if given the same sources
  - raesene9 3y ago
    In an ideal world, I'm sure what you say is true, but in the real world of publications and incentives for journalists, I doubt that's what happens. Anyone reading news media recently will have noticed the vast amount of badly written/researched articles, often with click-bait headlines. Recently I've even noticed that sources considered "high quality" like the Times in the UK are heavily using click-bait techniques.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I'd say that "people who understand what’s happening and why" would not be unique to journalists, but also be true for all intelligence analysts feeding into the government (and that this is why dictatorships don't all instantly fall over due to a lack of a free press). I think the USP of a free press is to shine a light on the issues missed by the formal government — be that large-scale corruption, or hyper-local potholes, or systemic racism or sexism in some (public or private) institution. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Ideally, if not in reality, it's the press.
  - stevofolife 3y ago
    > I don’t see LLMs as playing any significant role in building understanding. Wrong. LLM plays a significant role in building understanding in this day and age. Combining Google (Internet) Search and LLM to do one's research and knowledge accumulation is the bread and butter.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    I think there's a small chance that LLMs will actually increase understanding in media (for a while at least). The press release copypaste and verbatim lobbyist statement printing is at least in part just due to hurry and the journalists not understanding the subject matter very well. With LLMs you could get even some background or context to the stories with perhaps even a hint of critical "thinking". Although more probably the press releases will be more and more just passed through LLMs to match the paper's "style". Most publishing is not in the business of increasing understanding. It is difficult to get a business to understand, when its revenue depends on it not understanding.
- zwischenzug 3y ago
  I worked briefly as a journalist at The Times in yhr late 90s and this pretty much what it was then. It's partly why I didn't pursue that career.
- dmd 3y ago
  So if you want to be a professional writer, go into PR or lobbying.
- justinjlynn 3y ago
  Journalists with articles and Politicians with laws... yep.
amelius 3y ago
Well you can still learn and expand your understanding by writing bullet point lists, and then use an LLM in the final stage where you turn these points into a text.
- palata 3y ago
  If what you have to say fits in 10 bullet points, why would you make me read a full essay? Do you think that the LLM will add a lot of information that is not in those bullet points, or do you think that I am not clever enough to understand your bullet points and therefore I need an LLM to paraphrase them? Or do you think I enjoy losing my time reading stuff that you could not even be arsed to write yourself?
  - amelius 3y ago
    Addition to my comment: Of course, the irony is that your readers might take the full text and use an LLM to summarize it back into bullet points.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
zwischenzug 3y ago
As the author, I can only agree :-)
raesene9 3y ago
You understand that this article wasn't meant as a serious attempt to broaden understanding, but instead as a "game" to see what LLMs can do? The author explicity mentions that in the article and highlights that they would have read the source material if it had not been for the self-imposed constraints of the game...
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  Yes, but people misinterpret or reinterpret things all the time and I wanted to state why this should not be seen as a use case for LLMs.
  - raesene9 3y ago
    In an ideal world where the incentive of a student is solely to broaden their understanding perhaps that's true (although I'd still be inclined to use an LLM for getting a broad brush overview of a new topic, or ideas of where to start investigating). However, the education system, as formulated in many countries, isn't solely focused on broadening understanding and instead on students getting a degree with a given grade to aid them in getting a job in their preferred career. With that goal in mind, their incentives may not be solely focused on learning and more on passing essay questions by creating texts. In that case, it's possible to see how their incentives might line up with the use of LLMs to partially or wholly create their essays. This is, of course, nothing new. There's a reason why universities have plagerism detection software and systems. Students often do not write essay purely themselves, and LLMs will be just one technique to allow them to do so more easily...
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      in the 1980s at super-competitive UC Berkeley, where non-native English speakers have high stakes outcomes, many organized groups passed pre-written material, essay answers, multiple-choice answers etc among each other in multi-year organized cheating. Then, with prestigious and difficult degree in hand, proceeded to financially succeed. At the same time, UC Berkeley is a great research university with specialists in hundreds of fields doing post-doc expansion of human knowledge - on a competitive basis. Both of these true at the same time, integrated via finance. Fanciful ideas of pure education with its motives and methods are almost like fairy tales in this environment.
JBorrow 3y ago
Did you read TFA? That is a core part of it.
Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
In a publish or perish environment, for some, the purpose is to not perish.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
This was the same take from the competitive debate community when I showed them my body of work around automating the process of summarizing documents. The vitriol and hate I got from the “educators” about me depriving the students of their oh so necessary education time via summarizing hundreds of documents was extremely strong. Needless to say, I hold those who believe in work for “educations” sake in contempt and I’m gleeful to see wide spread proliferation of the tools for young folks to subvert the intentions of authoritarian “teachers”.
eszed 3y ago
> The point of writing an essay is not to produce a text, but to learn and expand one’s understanding. Indeed. What I thought most interesting about this exercise were the ways in which this author's process pushed him towards learning and understanding - even to the extent that he found himself tempted to read the original sources for himself! I'm a former humanities lecturer, in both English and History, so it's a thought exercise for me to consider how LLMs would change my pedagogy. It'd be naive to assume that students won't want use this technology, and foolish to think that they can be stopped. The only sensible approach, it seems to me, is to guide students towards productive use - ie, methods which will expand their understanding. This author's most productive use, it seemed to me, was his literature review, which guided him towards useful sources, and an understanding of the contours of debate around the topic. Those, in traditional pedagogy, are the primary purposes of the instructor. It's notable that to do this he had to provide his own corpus of texts (of dubious provenance!), and self-train the model. Both of those functions require skills which are beyond most students and nearly all humanities professors. The most obvious use was the structuring and writing of the essay. He pointed out one hallucination he caught, but there were probably more that he did not. In the humanities we have traditionally used a well-structured and elegantly-written essay as the gauge of learning and understanding. Will that have to change? Based on this example, and others I've seen, I'd want to review students' working process, and help them refine their use of the LLM. If the prose it produces can be expected to be of reasonable quality - and it's already far better than most undergraduates (unfortunately) are able to produce - then the truer test of their understanding is the guidance they have given it. Or maybe essays are now the wrong "proof of work"? If so, then what replaces them? I have no firm conclusions, besides a depressing expectation that educators in the humanities will remain entirely naive to these technologies, to their and their subjects' detriments. I appreciate the author's project, and welcome further discussion.
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  > In the humanities we have traditionally used a well-structured and elegantly-written essay as the gauge of learning and understanding. Will that have to change? No! If the student produces a poorly written essay they should receive a bad grade. This "engaging with the LLM" is nothing more than Googling the answers. It's incredibly detrimental to the student's understanding. One way to prevent this kind of cheating would be to require essays to be hand-written, or typed on a mechanical typewriter.
falcor84 3y ago
The "point" of writing an essay appears to me to have been one of those proof-of-work challenges that are relatively easy to assign and grade, but very time consuming to write; I can't recall any cases when the student actually had anything original to say, which the lecturer was really interested in discussing. So seeing that essays aren't a good proof of work anymore, lecturers would need to come up with a better one. Or, heaven forbid, allow students to actually do something productive with their time.
dang 3y ago
Can you please make your substantive points within the site guidelines? You broke several of them here: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "Edit out swipes." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

Journalists have found the lifehack way earlier: just copypaste with minor tweaks whatever some lobbyist says or press releases.

avidphantasm 3y ago
I would say that the primary benefit of having journalists is not to produce articles for papers or magazines, but to have people who understand what’s happening and why. Communicating that understanding is also important, but if you don’t have the understanding, you can’t communicate it. I don’t see LLMs as playing any significant role in building understanding. Humans need to process (read and write notes about) information to understand it. Also, the problem of LLM hallucination make them unsuitable for any serious use.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Most journalists halucinate at least as much information as LLMs. There is a small number of publications that try to do reasonably well, but most have enganged in such a race to the bottom that I'd expect a current generation LLM to produce more accurate articles if given the same sources
- raesene9 3y ago
  In an ideal world, I'm sure what you say is true, but in the real world of publications and incentives for journalists, I doubt that's what happens. Anyone reading news media recently will have noticed the vast amount of badly written/researched articles, often with click-bait headlines. Recently I've even noticed that sources considered "high quality" like the Times in the UK are heavily using click-bait techniques.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I'd say that "people who understand what’s happening and why" would not be unique to journalists, but also be true for all intelligence analysts feeding into the government (and that this is why dictatorships don't all instantly fall over due to a lack of a free press). I think the USP of a free press is to shine a light on the issues missed by the formal government — be that large-scale corruption, or hyper-local potholes, or systemic racism or sexism in some (public or private) institution. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Ideally, if not in reality, it's the press.
- stevofolife 3y ago
  > I don’t see LLMs as playing any significant role in building understanding. Wrong. LLM plays a significant role in building understanding in this day and age. Combining Google (Internet) Search and LLM to do one's research and knowledge accumulation is the bread and butter.
- jampekka 3y ago
  I think there's a small chance that LLMs will actually increase understanding in media (for a while at least). The press release copypaste and verbatim lobbyist statement printing is at least in part just due to hurry and the journalists not understanding the subject matter very well. With LLMs you could get even some background or context to the stories with perhaps even a hint of critical "thinking". Although more probably the press releases will be more and more just passed through LLMs to match the paper's "style". Most publishing is not in the business of increasing understanding. It is difficult to get a business to understand, when its revenue depends on it not understanding.
zwischenzug 3y ago
I worked briefly as a journalist at The Times in yhr late 90s and this pretty much what it was then. It's partly why I didn't pursue that career.
dmd 3y ago
So if you want to be a professional writer, go into PR or lobbying.
justinjlynn 3y ago
Journalists with articles and Politicians with laws... yep.

amelius 3y ago

Well you can still learn and expand your understanding by writing bullet point lists, and then use an LLM in the final stage where you turn these points into a text.

palata 3y ago
If what you have to say fits in 10 bullet points, why would you make me read a full essay? Do you think that the LLM will add a lot of information that is not in those bullet points, or do you think that I am not clever enough to understand your bullet points and therefore I need an LLM to paraphrase them? Or do you think I enjoy losing my time reading stuff that you could not even be arsed to write yourself?
- amelius 3y ago
  Addition to my comment: Of course, the irony is that your readers might take the full text and use an LLM to summarize it back into bullet points.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

zwischenzug 3y ago

As the author, I can only agree :-)

raesene9 3y ago

You understand that this article wasn't meant as a serious attempt to broaden understanding, but instead as a "game" to see what LLMs can do? The author explicity mentions that in the article and highlights that they would have read the source material if it had not been for the self-imposed constraints of the game...

avidphantasm 3y ago
Yes, but people misinterpret or reinterpret things all the time and I wanted to state why this should not be seen as a use case for LLMs.
- raesene9 3y ago
  In an ideal world where the incentive of a student is solely to broaden their understanding perhaps that's true (although I'd still be inclined to use an LLM for getting a broad brush overview of a new topic, or ideas of where to start investigating). However, the education system, as formulated in many countries, isn't solely focused on broadening understanding and instead on students getting a degree with a given grade to aid them in getting a job in their preferred career. With that goal in mind, their incentives may not be solely focused on learning and more on passing essay questions by creating texts. In that case, it's possible to see how their incentives might line up with the use of LLMs to partially or wholly create their essays. This is, of course, nothing new. There's a reason why universities have plagerism detection software and systems. Students often do not write essay purely themselves, and LLMs will be just one technique to allow them to do so more easily...
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    in the 1980s at super-competitive UC Berkeley, where non-native English speakers have high stakes outcomes, many organized groups passed pre-written material, essay answers, multiple-choice answers etc among each other in multi-year organized cheating. Then, with prestigious and difficult degree in hand, proceeded to financially succeed. At the same time, UC Berkeley is a great research university with specialists in hundreds of fields doing post-doc expansion of human knowledge - on a competitive basis. Both of these true at the same time, integrated via finance. Fanciful ideas of pure education with its motives and methods are almost like fairy tales in this environment.

JBorrow 3y ago

Did you read TFA? That is a core part of it.

Baldbvrhunter 3y ago

In a publish or perish environment, for some, the purpose is to not perish.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

This was the same take from the competitive debate community when I showed them my body of work around automating the process of summarizing documents. The vitriol and hate I got from the “educators” about me depriving the students of their oh so necessary education time via summarizing hundreds of documents was extremely strong. Needless to say, I hold those who believe in work for “educations” sake in contempt and I’m gleeful to see wide spread proliferation of the tools for young folks to subvert the intentions of authoritarian “teachers”.

eszed 3y ago

> The point of writing an essay is not to produce a text, but to learn and expand one’s understanding. Indeed. What I thought most interesting about this exercise were the ways in which this author's process pushed him towards learning and understanding - even to the extent that he found himself tempted to read the original sources for himself! I'm a former humanities lecturer, in both English and History, so it's a thought exercise for me to consider how LLMs would change my pedagogy. It'd be naive to assume that students won't want use this technology, and foolish to think that they can be stopped. The only sensible approach, it seems to me, is to guide students towards productive use - ie, methods which will expand their understanding. This author's most productive use, it seemed to me, was his literature review, which guided him towards useful sources, and an understanding of the contours of debate around the topic. Those, in traditional pedagogy, are the primary purposes of the instructor. It's notable that to do this he had to provide his own corpus of texts (of dubious provenance!), and self-train the model. Both of those functions require skills which are beyond most students and nearly all humanities professors. The most obvious use was the structuring and writing of the essay. He pointed out one hallucination he caught, but there were probably more that he did not. In the humanities we have traditionally used a well-structured and elegantly-written essay as the gauge of learning and understanding. Will that have to change? Based on this example, and others I've seen, I'd want to review students' working process, and help them refine their use of the LLM. If the prose it produces can be expected to be of reasonable quality - and it's already far better than most undergraduates (unfortunately) are able to produce - then the truer test of their understanding is the guidance they have given it. Or maybe essays are now the wrong "proof of work"? If so, then what replaces them? I have no firm conclusions, besides a depressing expectation that educators in the humanities will remain entirely naive to these technologies, to their and their subjects' detriments. I appreciate the author's project, and welcome further discussion.

jcgrillo 3y ago
> In the humanities we have traditionally used a well-structured and elegantly-written essay as the gauge of learning and understanding. Will that have to change? No! If the student produces a poorly written essay they should receive a bad grade. This "engaging with the LLM" is nothing more than Googling the answers. It's incredibly detrimental to the student's understanding. One way to prevent this kind of cheating would be to require essays to be hand-written, or typed on a mechanical typewriter.

falcor84 3y ago

The "point" of writing an essay appears to me to have been one of those proof-of-work challenges that are relatively easy to assign and grade, but very time consuming to write; I can't recall any cases when the student actually had anything original to say, which the lecturer was really interested in discussing. So seeing that essays aren't a good proof of work anymore, lecturers would need to come up with a better one. Or, heaven forbid, allow students to actually do something productive with their time.

dang 3y ago

Can you please make your substantive points within the site guidelines? You broke several of them here: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "Edit out swipes." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html