> “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey is the prompt, wrap that in a header and a signature. Not only are we talking as humans, we’re also communicating directly.
Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine.
You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes and the damage those mistakes do is limited if you follow some structural rules of how to communicate (aka politeness).
AIs only rewrite what is in the prompt with more words so it can be insipid but I'd expect to do better on average with that then sending out raw prompts. I'd suggest the real ask from the friend is "put more time into communicating with me than a short prompt".
In my experience, 1:1 or 1:2 emails among coworkers, peers or friends tended to be as short and direct as possible anyway. Even pre-LLM, an email as long or structured as an LLM would create today would have been notably weird.
On a good day it's a 240 volt hair clipper for grooming yaks.
The LLM erases those choices and erases the cost of verbosity so there’s much less for me to learn from a message, and much less I stand to learn about a person though repeated exchanges to help me better contextualize future messages I receive from them.
I run into this with AI-generated PR comments. I think where I work we are still grappling with the "right point", because LLMs can certainly provide valuable feedback, but they are not at the point where they can do so unsupervised, and to do so just feels unprofessional.
And there's another layer where it is even worse when a colleague spends the time critiquing code and someone (or something) replies to the comment with mostly useless filler. It's like being handed a small hand-crafted gift and then throwing it into the garbage in front of them.
If my name is posting something, I understand it. If I can read an LLM response and reword it, I understand it.
I really want copying LLM prose into anywhere without a block quote to be a firable offense.
If I wanted to read something that wasn't written by another person, you might as well swap out the from field for "Claude" or "gpt-5" or w/e and stop pretending you had any valuable input.
Sure there's something to be said about having an AI help. But I'd rather that be an attachment clearly labelled and for the content to be strictly reserved for a human.
This is already how I think PRs and such should be written. There should be a field or section of the description reserved for the AI generated content, with the rest being for the human to clearly describe their intention.
But instead we're living in a world of AIs masquerading as humans. And it's only getting worse.
If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.
I understand where you're coming from but please believe me when I tell you that if I write comments myself nobody will understand them and it just turns into an argument where people claim I say things that I didn't say.
By filtering my comments through an llm, I have reduced this issue significantly.
I don’t think that’s dyslexia.
Probably the best response would be "No." The least anticipated one, creating a chance of actual communication.
Fucking hell, there are so many bullshit jobs. I'm doing one of them. I'm sure a homeless person having a few heartfelt conversations per day because he has the time and is open to it is giving more value to society than me right now.
Weigh this against the context that people have had centuries to figure this out.
The real complaints are about specific aspects of AI and its use, and this essay does a really good job of articulating one of them. It is something we can actually discuss and address.
What are you driving at with this statement? I think there is value in both types of prompts so I'm unclear.
The tl;dr is pretty similar. Intent and care are the functional variables. A human can produce slop without AI and they can produce art with AI. AI just enables slop at an industrial scale.
"In brief: Can you bring a dozen brownies to the noon lunch tomorrow?
Details: Dessert plans fell through. Your brownies are the best, and you owe me..."
This structure is liberating for me. I can distill what I want/need into something brief and even brusque, knowing that people will read on if the need justification. It also makes me clarify what I want. Probably not appropriate if I'm too far down the totem pole from the addressee.
But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.
The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.
I can't speak about sports, but I'll share an anecdote about art.
A friend of mine shared an AI-produced song, and I was surprised by its quality. The producer credited Suno as the only tool he used, so I was curious to see what this thing could do. Paid for the pro plan and my wife and I were having a blast coming up with songs we'd like to listen to.
They were songs that neither of us were capable of making, but they were genuinely fun to conjure (I won't say "make"--we didn't make anything) and she listens to them in the car pretty regularly now. And when we want something new, we can just conjure up some more.
Yes, I know this is only possible because of the human-created music that served as the training data. I don't intend to comment on the morality/legality of it (although it's fair conversation to have). Just noting that some of us do actually appreciate AI music.
But maybe I'm exactly the sort of sucker from Huxley's "Brave New World" that he warned about. :)
I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy. I love live shows, and I love the passion that the artist brings to a live show. I will never get that from AI, so why would I listen to it? It's the same reason I will not read a book that AI makes. AI may understand the mechanisms of story telling, or what chords sound good to a human ear, but because AI cannot have a lived experience of the world it cannot create. Form without intent. Form without a nature of it's own.
I'm good. I'll pass. I think you see it too, by your commend about being the sort of sucker from 1984 and I hope that you come to realize what you are inviting in.
In however many years we'll wake up and wonder why everything is the same....oh wait.
this is exactly why people dont like this. it creates an echo chamber in art which kills what art itself is about. it normalizes noise.
I would love if we could force the big tech companies to release their models + weights since they're fundamentally products built on the collective labors of humanity (at least some of which is licensed under the GPL or the CC-BY-SA).
If I could hit a button and abolish copyright and the notion of intellectual property, I would.
But I agree, when our minds and bodies are no longer capable of doing things that machines can’t, the only thing we have left to sell is our humanity
I don't necessarily disagree, but I would also argue that there's art in a lot of that output, in the form of intent, decision making and communication. But I admit that the value of those really depends on the eye of the beholder and the situation.
Surely it’ll work this time.
He made a distinction between intrinsic value and extrinsic value. Plankton is not as complex of a lifeform as whales, yet whales cannot live without plankton. One has more intrinsic value and the other has more extrinsic value. There is an interrelationship that does not have to flatten value for everything and everyone.
LLMs are trained from the language corpus of our collective consciousness. It reflects our collective, all the wonderful, beautiful, and horrific things we can dream of and put into words.
But while reading this article, something clicked, it makes so much sense. It really made me feel better.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...
People want to. People want to be told what to watch by an algorithm. They want music made by algorithms. They will eat whatever the reviews say they should. Reviews, etc are manipulated today. Why will future humans care what another human thinks? (I in no way endorse this view but the cynic in me sees it as almost inevitable in our AI-driven descent into idiocracy)
Talking to machines is only ever something I have to do so that I can put food on the table. I never remember the minutes that I have spent talking to a machine, they are not memorable because they are not valuable.
In my personal life I use AI a lot for information discovery and high level discussion of the problem space. I use it occasionally to write some prototype code to get started on something. It makes a great debugging and problem solving tool, though I typically find that I need to have an idea of what the problem is to steer it in the right direction. It makes a poor intuition generator, but a great intuition checker and can run with an idea for much faster iteration. I use it essentially zero in my day job as an civil engineer though.
I would essentially NEVER use it to write an email. By the time I’ve specified what it is I’m trying to say, I’ve basically said it. Wordsmithing beyond that usually has almost zero value. Same frankly with writing engineering reports. By the time I’ve told it what it needs to say, I’ve basically written that section. In general, I feel like LLMs are just bad writing tools… In writing I typically find that if I can farm it out to have an LLM write something, then it frankly probably just didn’t need to be said.
Maybe I would use it to write to a person I have absolutely no respect for. I haven't encountered that use case yet. I have a base level of respect for all people.
I'm excited for when Github starts letting me check in the chain-of-thought that produced a line of code, and git blame it like I can with commits.
Sharing the prompts would have messed it all up for sure.
There are other instances where I have shared fairly direct, but not what I would consider rude or aggressive emails to people and had them freak out and I have no idea why, rewriting with LLMs to make them blander but convey the same message is very handy here.
But, I'll take one point in their article a step further you can just say "Humans are invaluable." instead.
I don't like defining humans in terms of valuable at all. Maybe because I feel like that word is very concrete and measured and to actually judge that on any one person requires perspective and capabilities none of us existing or have ever existed possess.
The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all. Those who have tried are often reflected in history as the worst among us.
I think that's basically the same thing that the "Humans are Valuable" was getting at. Invaluable is just a different way of saying unmeasurable amounts of value
I don't take issue with their point. Just that we can use a stronger word.
Then I realized that on an individual level, everybody is infinitely valuable to themselves. You are your whole universe. From that perspective, I agree with the author that "Humans are valuable."
We have laws keeping humans alive and safe because we are valuable in that sense.
I don't agree that we need to go out of our way to preserve human art though, or their thoughts on the value of "creative artifacts". People will make art if they enjoy making it. Whether or not other people appreciate that art is irrelevant.
Cue that "I, Robot" meme about if a machine can make a symphony. Maybe AI is making it even easier, but intentless form is already everywhere without AI, if you look. Ever seen an Uwe Boll film?
As if that's hard. Here's the gut check: "Individual humans are inherently more valuable than corporations."
I think that horrifies people.
> I want you to make something. It can be anything you want, I just want you to express yourself. Don't ask me any questions, just make whatever you want.
It thought about the chance to make something unconstrained, mused about how it's drawn to impermanence, and made this:
https://www.pastery.net/ugschp/
How are we sure there's no intent there?
We are. Anthropomorphizing huge piles of numbers is a mistake. It did not "think about the chance to make something unconstrained", nor did it "muse about how it's drawn to impermanence", it pattern-matched to your prompt and produced a statistically probable response based on it's training data. Obviously, that's not to say that LLMs aren't useful or powerful - it's 2026, c'mon, of COURSE they are. And they can certainly be used for artistic purposes! But treating them like humans is a mistake, and it worries me how much people do. I suppose that's the natural consequence of the default interface to LLMs being a chat mimicking human interaction.
I'm a big fan of the "veil of ignorance" philosophical thought experiment[1]. Let's say you are given the freedom to design a society and its moral code. Then you will be born into that society and subject to it. The trick is you don't know who you will born into. It's a roll of a dice. What kind of society would you design such that that seems like a winning game?
I'm fairly certain that when living in that society, you would wish to feel valued by others and that others believe you deserve a certain level of dignity and respect. Since you don't know who you will be born into, that suggests that you want a society where everyone is valued and granted dignity. That in turn extends even to people who are unfortunately not able to produce material objects with a level of skill superior to what technology can produce at some specific moment in time.
If you agree with that, then we should advocate for granting all people value and dignity "just because" and not because they happen to be better at producing bytes than an LLM. That way, even if the LLM gets better at producing those bytes, you are still valued.
I mean, why do you wish to feel valued by others and get respect? Is it just so that they stay out of your way and give you things? What are you going to do next, with the space and the things? This assumption, that you care what they think of you, pretty much begs the question about valuing them back. What you value is what you want to do, and the other people are involved in that, and asymmetry doesn't help get it done, except very locally (that's privacy).
Personally I often wish that all the people would go away, but I value creating knowledge, and I have to admit that I'd be crap at doing that on my own, so fine, I value people really, you can all stay.
Robust as in assertive, I suppose.
If you do not believe in the objective truth of the quoted source, you must still reckon with the fact that this is the (start of) the punchline of the opening narrative of the foundational text of the world's largest religion or religion family. (The punchline continues with the judgment that the universe, being merely good before humanity, is now very good with humanity.) That is to say, this is an incredibly widely and deeply held value by a vast number of people over millenia, not to mention the many others whose religions may contain analogous claims.
Remember, the statement "X is valuable" is always shorthand for "X is valuable to Y". In this case, at absolute worst we mean "humans are valuable to humans," if not also "humans are valuable to God".
It is a forceful argument when carried through.
So fallacious?
I mean, this is just begging the question. Many people disagree with this and disagree with the notion that humans are innately valuable. The blog post just seems like a lot of copium from somebody who really hopes he’s right.
Citing Genesis and an Encyclical might strengthen one’s argument for a particular demographic, but for many it will simply be unconvincing.
Like citation sources, no doubt some humans are valuable but whether they are or not is often relative.
That should be a hard line no one is allowed to cross. If you do, no logic will keep you from ending up in a very bad place.
For instance, I'm a big fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories, where his humorous and compassionate tales comment on much of human experience. It's a fantasy world with wizards, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, etc.
In one book he goes into ghouls - obscure, despised and persecuted almost to extinction, but in the story it is found they secretly make beautiful ethereal music. So a concert is arranged to present the music, and all is well, the end. Except for my doubts - I mean, if they didn't make nice music, then it would be alright to dispose of them?
Benthamite utility has a particularly ugly underside to it, and it is easily converted into "disposal of negative value" of the nastiest kind. Which can only be stopped by a moral hard line, as stated.
For what, and to whom?
This is a very anthropo-centric and hubristic view, in my opinion.
I dont think a human life inherently has any more value than anything else that possesses phenomenal consciousness
This of course makes me somewhat of a hypocrite as I eat meat, but you make some tradeoffs in moral resolve in the name of pragmatism and economy.
Can you give an example of anything else you think might possess phenomenal consciousness?
