3 ms·

I'm not able to judge this for content, but it feels frustrating to read something so obviously Claude-authored as being written "by" Jude Gomila. It's interest

by tel 1mo ago

I'm not able to judge this for content, but it feels frustrating to read something so obviously Claude-authored as being written "by" Jude Gomila. It's interesting to see the (presumed correct) reduction in this bound and this presentation is pretty compelling. I learned a bit about the Polymath 15 project from this post and I enjoyed that a lot. That said, I have no idea what contribution may have been done by Mr. Gomila or not. I don't know if I can ask him for more details. Even if he wrote the whole thing (and either has deeply internalized Claude's voice or had it edited and rewritten by an agent) it's difficult to believe that he's the sort of expert I'd expect of someone who had actually done all this work. This is basically the same feeling I have about vibe code contributors.

drx 1mo ago
Personally I found it pleasant to read. Why does it matter if/how much AI was used to write it if the end result is great?
- NooneAtAll3 1mo ago
  I personally didn't it starts with concentrated dose of ai-ness, combined with non-human website design sure, it may become better the longer it goes, but it brings the worst to the front
- nxobject 1mo ago
  For one, the whole text would show up in Safari's Reader mode, so I can skip past the hilariously low UI density that AI-generated websites have these days. Before AI you'd have to go out of your way put that much CSS padding into Wordpress! If everyone's going to play Terence Tao, at least copy his stylesheet.
koliber 1mo ago
He posted it. That’s some of the work you question. Presumably he queried the AI and led it in some way. That’s also work. As far as the exact breakdown we will never know. But questioning the authorship in a way that leads us to believe that the author did nothing is wrong.
- anon48293 1mo ago
  Are you sure both of these things aren’t also done by AI? It’s totally valid to question authorship when the author was an LLM.
abeppu 1mo ago
So, maybe this is not quite a fair analogy but a lot of famous modern artists don't do a lot of the actual execution of their work. If Jeff Koons relies on a team of artisans and technicians to make a balloon dog, and if Dale Chihuly depends on a workshop of glass blowers to make a chandelier, and if Paul Cummins used a team of ceramicists to make poppies, what did the headlining artist contribute? Not everything, certainly, but also not nothing. Ideas, vision, feedback, guidance? I think we're used to the idea in math of generally every idea coming from a specific contributing human. In code, maybe less so, but still we generally we find it useful to attribute at least _lines_ to who touched them last. But maybe, if Claude were just less annoying in the prose it made, and could better imitate an actual human, we'd be able to get used to the idea of humans claiming credit for something that the human guided the software to create?
- tel 1mo ago
  I appreciate the connection to artists guiding their teams. I think that's a good analogy. At the same time, when Koons or Chihuly or Cummins sign their work I do have that expectation that they guided the piece in a meaningful and material way or that the people who built it did it in such a way that owes lineage and authorization to the style Koons/Chihuly/Cummins developed. If I asked one of them about their work and it was clear that they had become so disconnected from it that they couldn't be seen as the authority on it, that they'd delegated that away, then I'd also feel them signing it had a mark of dishonesty about it. To that end, I genuinely don't know Mr. Gomila's engagement here. Worse, it, to my ear, very clearly is written in a style that's extremely reminiscent of LLMs. In that way, it directly invokes that feeling of inauthenticity when he claims authorship. This reminds me of academic writing there there's sometimes a convention in author lists that the first author(s) did more of the work and the last author(s) were the PIs and guides. This anchors the work amidst all the authors, at least loosely. I understand that if I want to ask a question about the details of the procedure I can reach out to the first author and if I'm trying to understand the larger research objectives of the lab I can investigate the last author. Personally, I think I'd feel more comfortable with this piece if it were attributed in that style. Or, again, if this is genuinely work done in the majority by Mr. Gomila and the writing feels LLM-derived for some other reason then it's merely an unfortunate side-effect of this writing register.

by tel 1mo ago

drx 1mo ago

Personally I found it pleasant to read. Why does it matter if/how much AI was used to write it if the end result is great?

NooneAtAll3 1mo ago
I personally didn't it starts with concentrated dose of ai-ness, combined with non-human website design sure, it may become better the longer it goes, but it brings the worst to the front
nxobject 1mo ago
For one, the whole text would show up in Safari's Reader mode, so I can skip past the hilariously low UI density that AI-generated websites have these days. Before AI you'd have to go out of your way put that much CSS padding into Wordpress! If everyone's going to play Terence Tao, at least copy his stylesheet.

koliber 1mo ago

He posted it. That’s some of the work you question. Presumably he queried the AI and led it in some way. That’s also work. As far as the exact breakdown we will never know. But questioning the authorship in a way that leads us to believe that the author did nothing is wrong.

anon48293 1mo ago
Are you sure both of these things aren’t also done by AI? It’s totally valid to question authorship when the author was an LLM.

abeppu 1mo ago

So, maybe this is not quite a fair analogy but a lot of famous modern artists don't do a lot of the actual execution of their work. If Jeff Koons relies on a team of artisans and technicians to make a balloon dog, and if Dale Chihuly depends on a workshop of glass blowers to make a chandelier, and if Paul Cummins used a team of ceramicists to make poppies, what did the headlining artist contribute? Not everything, certainly, but also not nothing. Ideas, vision, feedback, guidance? I think we're used to the idea in math of generally every idea coming from a specific contributing human. In code, maybe less so, but still we generally we find it useful to attribute at least _lines_ to who touched them last. But maybe, if Claude were just less annoying in the prose it made, and could better imitate an actual human, we'd be able to get used to the idea of humans claiming credit for something that the human guided the software to create?

tel 1mo ago
I appreciate the connection to artists guiding their teams. I think that's a good analogy. At the same time, when Koons or Chihuly or Cummins sign their work I do have that expectation that they guided the piece in a meaningful and material way or that the people who built it did it in such a way that owes lineage and authorization to the style Koons/Chihuly/Cummins developed. If I asked one of them about their work and it was clear that they had become so disconnected from it that they couldn't be seen as the authority on it, that they'd delegated that away, then I'd also feel them signing it had a mark of dishonesty about it. To that end, I genuinely don't know Mr. Gomila's engagement here. Worse, it, to my ear, very clearly is written in a style that's extremely reminiscent of LLMs. In that way, it directly invokes that feeling of inauthenticity when he claims authorship. This reminds me of academic writing there there's sometimes a convention in author lists that the first author(s) did more of the work and the last author(s) were the PIs and guides. This anchors the work amidst all the authors, at least loosely. I understand that if I want to ask a question about the details of the procedure I can reach out to the first author and if I'm trying to understand the larger research objectives of the lab I can investigate the last author. Personally, I think I'd feel more comfortable with this piece if it were attributed in that style. Or, again, if this is genuinely work done in the majority by Mr. Gomila and the writing feels LLM-derived for some other reason then it's merely an unfortunate side-effect of this writing register.