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You will produce output that emulates the patters of Shakespeare's works, but you won't arrive at them by the same process Shakespeare did. You are subject to s
by wongarsu 8mo ago
You will produce output that emulates the patters of Shakespeare's works, but you won't arrive at them by the same process Shakespeare did. You are subject to similar limitations as the llm in this case, just to a lesser degree (you share some 'human experience' with the author, and might be able to reason about their though process from biographies and such)
As another example, I can write a story about hobbits and elves in a LotR world with a style that approximates Tolkien. But it won't be colored by my first-hand WW1 experiences, and won't be written with the intention of creating a world that gives my conlangs cultural context, or the intention of making a bedtime story for my kids. I will never be able to write what Tolkien would have written because I'm not Tolkien, and do not see the world as Tolkien saw it. I don't even like designing languages
- simianwords 8mo agothat's fair and you have highlighted a good limitation. but we do this all the time - we try to understand the author, learn from them and mimic them and we succeed to good extent. that's why we have really good fake van gogh's for which a person can't tell the difference. of course you can't do the same as the original person but you get close enough many times and as humans we do this frequently. in the context of this post i think it is for sure possible to mimic a dead author and give steps to achieve writing that would sound like them using an LLM - just like a human.
- Planktonne 8mo agoYou're still confusing "has a result that looks the same" and "uses the same process"; these are different things.
- simianwords 8mo agoWhy do you say it has a different process? When I ask it to do integrals it uses the same process as me
- Planktonne 8mo agoNot everything works like integrals. Some things don't have a standard process that everyone follows the same way. Editing is one of these things. There can be lots of different processes, informed by lots of different things, and getting similar output is no guarantee of a similar process.
- simianwords 8mo agoI don’t see why editing is any different. If a human can learn it why not an llm
- esafak 8mo agoThe process is irrelevant if the output is the same, because we never observe the process. I assume you are arguing that the outputs are not guaranteed to be the same unless you reproduce the process. If we are talking about human artifacts, you never have reproducibility. The same person will behave differently from one moment to the next, one environment to another. But I assume you will call that natural variation. Can you say that models can't approximate the artifacts within that natural variation?
- Rohansi 8mo agoIt's relevant for data it hasn't been trained on. LLMs are trained to be all-knowing which is great as a utility but that does not come close to capturing an individual. If I trained (or, more likely, fine-tuned) an LLM to generate code like what's found in an individual's GitHub repositories, could you comfortably say it writes code the same way as that individual? Sure, it will capture style and conventions, but what about our limitations? What do you think happens if you fine-tune a model to write code like a frontend developer and ask it to write a simple operating system kernel? It's realistically not in their (individual) data but the response still depends on the individual's thought process.
- esafak 8mo agoI don't know if LLMs are trained to imitate sources like that. I also don't know what would happen if you asked it to do something like someone who does not know how to do it. Would they refuse, make mistakes, or assume the person can learn? Humans can do all three, so barring more specific instructions any such response is reasonable.