Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if itās ānormal overwroughtā or āLLM bullshit.ā You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I donāt say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like āas a language modelā).
No one describes their algorithm as āefficiently doing [intermediate step]ā unless youāre describing it to a general, non-technical audience ā what a coincidence ā and yet it keeps appearing in my studentsā writing. Itās exhausting.
Edit: I really canāt overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get
which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get1
and Iām fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.
1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I havenāt determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect itās only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.
My sympathies.
Read somewhere that the practice of defending oneās thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.
I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because āthat is what humans doā. My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didnāt get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.
But we know the tech behind these models right? They dont change their weights when they produce output right? You could have a discussion if updating the values is learning, but it doesnt even do that right? (Feeding the questions back into the dataset used to train them is a different mechanic)
Thatās true, and thatās one way to approach the topic.
I generally focus on humans being more complex than the caricature we need to be reduced to in order for the argument to appear plausible. Having some humanities training comes in handy because the prompt fans very rarely do.