Unsure how to vote here. It's pretty likely no such test will actually be performed, leading to a NO resolution.

OTOH, if such a test does happen, then I don't necessarily trust 30 random Scott readers or mechanical turk workers to put in all that much effort to critically evaluate the posts for real insight.

@pyrylium @NeoPangloss u guys comments sounded hella cool for a good song so i made one

@Seeker lmfao amazing

@pyrylium https://app.suno.ai/song/348b4966-0bea-4ff6-94e7-7f1599948801 another one with correct vocals. im drunk so didnt notice the first one has some wrong vocals

@Seeker It is not how well the bear dances that is interesting, but that it dances at all. This is very interesting, didn't know things like this were so easily implemented.

Still afraid of AI future

sometimes it feels like rationalists are convinced that AI will replace every job (except theirs), that every public intellectual (except theirs) is a glorified thinkpiece-monger reducible to a word-association matrix. this despite the fact that the one thing LLMs are demonstrably great at is mimicking a distinct and characteristic writing style

@pyrylium I'm going to be totally straight with you, on the thinkpeice front I honestly think most articles written in the past decade were written with the same regurgitating, volume first philosophy that gpt is great at producing.

I do not think AI will replace good writers, but a lot of published material was just trying to recombine words that passed the turing test BEFORE generative AI hit the scene. Their replacement by something more authentically inauthentic is a pretty reasonable prediction

@NeoPangloss call me a naive, maudlin humanist, but i think it's sad to ascribe a value judgement to human expression and claim that AI will only replace "bad" writers.

Timothy Dexter was by any "objective" measure a pretty awful writer, and yet I seriously doubt any generative text model could replicate the uncountable linguistic foibles and idiosyncracies in his autobiography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pickle_for_the_Knowing_Ones), at least without explicitly being trained to do so.

what AI would, unprompted, think to publish 32 pages of completely unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness, followed by an appendix containing five pages of commas and an exhortation to "peper and solt them as you please"?

@pyrylium I think there's a misunderstanding? In my opinion:

1) There are 3 groups: good, bad, and regurgitated. Most journalism, for sake of delivering volume, specialized in regurgitated material and gpt happens to also specialize in that sort of thing. There are unique voices, certainly, but measured by volume most seems to be regurgitory.

2) AI will make it hard for unique voices to thrive too. The volume will suffocate everything, writers like Scott Alexander won't be easily replicated but they won't thrive under the new paradigm either. LLM's will not deliver quality, but it will be cost effective enough to crowd out basically everyone.

Am I bringing the communication gap?

@NeoPangloss I generally disagree with your categorization in (1). to a certain degree we can make relative judgments but they are necessarily comparative and subjective. even high-volume news-of-the-day journalism of the sort you call "regurgitory" carries, when written and edited by humans, an intrinsically humanistic perspective by dint of the histories, perspectives, biases, and idiosyncracies of those humans. Generative AI does not completely eliminate this authorial voice, but it flattens it to the LLM training corpus with a touch of input from the prompt engineer.

like you, I bemoan a future riddled by AI-generated dross, where the signal:noise ratio falls so low that all but the greatest and luckiest writers of the next generation drown in bullshit.

but unlike you, I am also sad to lose the human touch at the heart what you call regurgitory journalism. not merely because we will replace flawed but unapologetically human biases with the falsely objective biases of AI -- but because in doing so, we deny the poetic and literary spirit that can be found in any writing, no matter how mean.

how many of history's greatest writers, do you think, paid their bills (and honed their skills) writing menial ad copy or cent-by-the-word reportage in the years, decades before their breakout hit? what such opportunities will be available for the future writers of the post-LLM generation?

@pyrylium Agreed on most fronts, including your characterization of my position. Agreed that, if the great painters of history were alive today their great works would be bridged by long periods of furry hentai, so too with great writers and banal paycheck-pieces.

The regurgitory work is something I wish there was less of, but acknowledge that it is still better than LLM-flattened slop. I acknowledge that the human works that do irritate me are likely necessary and not totally without value, so I would cooperate with you to create a world where there was less AI writing, even if that meant more derivative but human generated work. I would be more happy if everything I read was insightful, original and interesting but this is not a world I think I can get no matter what people like me trade away to get it.

I would be willing to support your preferred world.

I've put up lots of limit orders from 1 to 25%, feel free to take all, or ask me to put up more of them!

@firstuserhere insight is the limiting factor here and seems like a very high bar. Not quite "AGI-complete" as claimed below, because AGI is supposed to be broader than what can be represented in text output and includes things like driving a car. But like, if AGI had been defined in terms of text output only, "writing as insightfully as Scott" seems damned near close to AGI-complete.

That means having genuinely new insights! LLMs so far basically haven't even scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to being insightful. And we're talking 1.75 years to essentially superhuman insight? Scott is like a 99.9th percentile insightful writer, and I think his readers can tell.

@chrisjbillington I agree with the points you've made but am on the optimistic side of the same prediction, though not more than say 35-40%. I also think that having sample of Scott's readers judge it is a high bar, though not as high as you'd think - the general statistic tends to be 10% of the readers like a post and 10% of those comment on the post. So, the sample might be a bit broader and maybe not as good at telling whether it's 99.9th percentile quality post or a bit worse

“Depth and insight” component makes this AGI-complete

@JonathanRay no

@JonathanRay Maybe this is not the case for Scott’s blog, but over time people are increasingly using chatGPT to polish the final version of their writing, especially if they are not native speakers. This would make it harder to tell the difference between a human writer and chatGPT without any implications for AGI.

@mariopasquato also, note that chatGPT powering models are made to sound like chatGPT on purpose, the base models are much more human sounding.

See also (although this one is closed):

5acb5f1c05fb38a04e0b86d57612cae528ef04a49b2eb551f83bb697d0451569

@Alana what's this?

example - make an alternative ending to the latest scott's post: https://gwern.net/image/ai/gpt/2023-03-20-gpt4-scottalexander-halfanhourbeforedawninsanfranciscosample.png
you decide whether or not this is convincing enough

@paleink Immediately loses the tone and depth. Sounds like it's writing a vaguely poetic op-ed.

@jonsimon Not to mention that literally the very first line is produces is an obvious confabulation. No GPT-4, there are definitely no common sayings in the tech community about "drowning in our own hate".

@jonsimon *it produces