I'm interested in people's thoughts on the basic question: If I write something and ask an LLM to edit or critique that piece, is it LLM generated or is it mine?
I usually follow this procedure for formal emails. I write an initial draft and ask an LLM for a review. I iterate several times as I frequently feel that the LLM has changed a subtle meaning or makes a spurious argument that isn't in line with what I want to communicate.
If I could afford a full-time copy editor, I’d use one for the same reason. I am just trying to convey my meaning accurately and I believe that I get more precise results with an LLM helper.
This article is chock full of interesting links. The link about Kenyan English/LLMs [0] describes something that feels like it should have been obvious to me.
> In a post on his blog, software engineer Indradhanush Gupta writes that he is no longer crediting Anthropic’s Claude on his code changes, because "adding an LLM as co-author gives you a way for you to shirk responsibility for mistakes." Pressed by commenters that this sounds like a pretext for hiding LLM use, Gupta insists that it is not.
I use LLMs every day at work. At the same time, I've never had an LLM appear as a "co-author", not because I'm making any effort to hide my LLM use, but because I've never been comfortable letting an LLM commit code. I use staging changes, hunk by hunk (or sometimes even line-by-line), as my review process. I don't want LLMs performing any git operations that add or push commits. I imagine I'm not the only one.
PS: If you want some bumpers to help avoid having your LLMs commit code, configuring Git for commit signing and blocking access to your signing key, agent socket, write access to your local Git config, etc., is pretty effective in my experience.
> I don't want LLMs performing any git operations that add or push commits.
Why not? It seems rather odd to let it generate code but draw the line at git commands. Maybe a quick reminder that git operations have detailed history and are entirely reversible is in order.
Academics have completely lost it. The number of mathematicians who write with LLMs and are rationalizing their usage is frightening.
And they have the audacity to claim that the public will defund them if they don't use new tech. No, the public will defund you if you continue cheating like a 10 year old and you are evidently superfluous.
PhD student in math here. Doing LLM math is soulless and takes most of the fun out of solving difficult problems (for the most part - my opinion only, I'm happy to talk to mathematicians who like this kind of work). But ultimately the public funds us to produce and understand as many mathematical results as possible for downstream use (if you ask OpenAI/Anthropic, to cure cancer). In that case it doesn't matter who figures a result whether it be a human, LLM, or dog.
So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.
I would suggest that hardly anyone in the public is asking you to increase efficiency. That is the argument you read on pro-AI VC forums and Reddit.
In other words, it is a made-up argument. I think some mathematicians are either addicted (Feynman disease) or hope to make a breakthrough and somehow get credit. So they use "the public" to justify their habit.
The real public that is not on these forums wants academic freedom and independence from corporations. Both will suffer if you are entering soulless production pipelines.
The “real public” wants math to advance so that we can reap the benefits. We don’t care what tools you are or are not using, grant money will go to whichever group is making more progress.
I suspect that the mathematicians who adapt best to AI will treat it like astronomers treat a telescope, as a source of possibly-interesting data to be analyzed. Maybe it looks like finished output, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready to show.
“Cheating”? I expect academics to pursue objective excellence in whatever shape or form it comes and not just the artisanal handwritten medieval nonsense shape.
Stop crying and start producing. The time to talk was five years ago. Everyone is way, way too tardy to the party.
It’s the same with developers: oh, but everything will collapse and nothing will work right without us manually signing off on this divinely ordained logic. Well, guess what? Nothing happened and things actually improved. Take a good hard look at software dev over the last ten years and tell me it was fine.
I am not at all convinced the current gen professionals are getting us to where we need to go.
I wonder what it was like when we first got calculators; people saying its cheating at arithmetic. AI is just the next tool humans can apply to problems to solve.
I've been increasingly letting the LLM take the wheel, in my coding. It's working out very, very well.
I undersign everything under my imprimatur; LLM, contract programmer, intern, whatever. If it has my chop; it has my support and accountability.
The "A" word (Accountability) has been getting deprecated far longer than LLMs have been around. It seems that no one wants to stand behind their work, anymore; regardless of how that work was done.
I had the advantage of spending almost 27 years, at a company that really made sure that I was Accountable. I ran a team, but it was my butt on the line.
If I sign off on something; no matter how it was made, it's my ass on the line. If I trust a shyster, and sign off on junk, then I walk the plank, not the shyster.
Legal people have known this for hundreds of years, but tech people seem to have forgotten it.
TL;DR: the process matters less than the result (although good results come from good processes). If someone is known for reliably producing good results, then their personal brand becomes a valuable currency. Classic stuff.
The tech industry has become so tied up with producing junk, that it has atrophied its sense of integrity.
Funny, there's been quite a few incidents where AI has made up case citations in briefs submitted by attorneys and then the same attorney submitted a LLM generated brief with similar errors when asked to defend themselves from sanctions.
A fish rots from the head. The increase in recording and reporting has shown us the people at the top are rarely held accountable and make billions doing so. Why follow the rules if it's going to financially harm you. It's every industry.
edit: you're making literally the same argument that Provost Santiago Schnell is quoted as making in the article, and the entire article is dedicated to dismantling it. Please have a read.
It appears that you might benefit from giving the ol' Ts and Cs of this site a quick shufti. I'm pretty sure that I remember them mentioning "did you read the article" as a Bozo no-no.
I specifically mentioned that I use LLMs in my work (which was what he was writing about, anyway), and, as you would expect, it got a few moldy tomatoes thrown my way.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on the basic question: If I write something and ask an LLM to edit or critique that piece, is it LLM generated or is it mine?
I usually follow this procedure for formal emails. I write an initial draft and ask an LLM for a review. I iterate several times as I frequently feel that the LLM has changed a subtle meaning or makes a spurious argument that isn't in line with what I want to communicate.
If I could afford a full-time copy editor, I’d use one for the same reason. I am just trying to convey my meaning accurately and I believe that I get more precise results with an LLM helper.
This article is chock full of interesting links. The link about Kenyan English/LLMs [0] describes something that feels like it should have been obvious to me.
[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
HN discussion at the time (513 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273466
> In a post on his blog, software engineer Indradhanush Gupta writes that he is no longer crediting Anthropic’s Claude on his code changes, because "adding an LLM as co-author gives you a way for you to shirk responsibility for mistakes." Pressed by commenters that this sounds like a pretext for hiding LLM use, Gupta insists that it is not.
I use LLMs every day at work. At the same time, I've never had an LLM appear as a "co-author", not because I'm making any effort to hide my LLM use, but because I've never been comfortable letting an LLM commit code. I use staging changes, hunk by hunk (or sometimes even line-by-line), as my review process. I don't want LLMs performing any git operations that add or push commits. I imagine I'm not the only one.
PS: If you want some bumpers to help avoid having your LLMs commit code, configuring Git for commit signing and blocking access to your signing key, agent socket, write access to your local Git config, etc., is pretty effective in my experience.
> I don't want LLMs performing any git operations that add or push commits.
Why not? It seems rather odd to let it generate code but draw the line at git commands. Maybe a quick reminder that git operations have detailed history and are entirely reversible is in order.
Do you even LLM at that point?
Academics have completely lost it. The number of mathematicians who write with LLMs and are rationalizing their usage is frightening.
And they have the audacity to claim that the public will defund them if they don't use new tech. No, the public will defund you if you continue cheating like a 10 year old and you are evidently superfluous.
Just say no!
PhD student in math here. Doing LLM math is soulless and takes most of the fun out of solving difficult problems (for the most part - my opinion only, I'm happy to talk to mathematicians who like this kind of work). But ultimately the public funds us to produce and understand as many mathematical results as possible for downstream use (if you ask OpenAI/Anthropic, to cure cancer). In that case it doesn't matter who figures a result whether it be a human, LLM, or dog.
So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.
I would suggest that hardly anyone in the public is asking you to increase efficiency. That is the argument you read on pro-AI VC forums and Reddit.
In other words, it is a made-up argument. I think some mathematicians are either addicted (Feynman disease) or hope to make a breakthrough and somehow get credit. So they use "the public" to justify their habit.
The real public that is not on these forums wants academic freedom and independence from corporations. Both will suffer if you are entering soulless production pipelines.
The “real public” wants math to advance so that we can reap the benefits. We don’t care what tools you are or are not using, grant money will go to whichever group is making more progress.
I suspect that the mathematicians who adapt best to AI will treat it like astronomers treat a telescope, as a source of possibly-interesting data to be analyzed. Maybe it looks like finished output, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready to show.
Sure, this is in agreement with some people's view that math will become an empirical science. Basically humans probing/mining the brain of an LLM.
please do not quit
“Cheating”? I expect academics to pursue objective excellence in whatever shape or form it comes and not just the artisanal handwritten medieval nonsense shape.
Stop crying and start producing. The time to talk was five years ago. Everyone is way, way too tardy to the party.
It’s the same with developers: oh, but everything will collapse and nothing will work right without us manually signing off on this divinely ordained logic. Well, guess what? Nothing happened and things actually improved. Take a good hard look at software dev over the last ten years and tell me it was fine.
I am not at all convinced the current gen professionals are getting us to where we need to go.
Tools can’t have credit, only People.
But people are tools, usually
You're telling me this author uses that many em-dashes in their normal writing?
option+shift+dash, baby: https://github.com/alexpetros/dotfiles/blob/2f3fb68add60cdd1...
Why not? And Pangram thinks it’s 100% human-written.
I wonder what it was like when we first got calculators; people saying its cheating at arithmetic. AI is just the next tool humans can apply to problems to solve.
Wow, AI is a tool. I have never heard that one before!
No, I don't think calculators were associated with cheating. More with a skill atrophy.
Stockfish on the other hand is of course associated with cheating because it does all the work, unlike calculators.
> Then we can all asses how useful they really are.
Clearly not written by LLM. (NB: emphasis mine)
I've been increasingly letting the LLM take the wheel, in my coding. It's working out very, very well.
I undersign everything under my imprimatur; LLM, contract programmer, intern, whatever. If it has my chop; it has my support and accountability.
The "A" word (Accountability) has been getting deprecated far longer than LLMs have been around. It seems that no one wants to stand behind their work, anymore; regardless of how that work was done.
I had the advantage of spending almost 27 years, at a company that really made sure that I was Accountable. I ran a team, but it was my butt on the line.
dont understand what point you are trying to make
That's the problem.
People no longer understand Accountability.
If I sign off on something; no matter how it was made, it's my ass on the line. If I trust a shyster, and sign off on junk, then I walk the plank, not the shyster.
Legal people have known this for hundreds of years, but tech people seem to have forgotten it.
TL;DR: the process matters less than the result (although good results come from good processes). If someone is known for reliably producing good results, then their personal brand becomes a valuable currency. Classic stuff.
The tech industry has become so tied up with producing junk, that it has atrophied its sense of integrity.
Funny, there's been quite a few incidents where AI has made up case citations in briefs submitted by attorneys and then the same attorney submitted a LLM generated brief with similar errors when asked to defend themselves from sanctions.
>People no longer understand Accountability
A fish rots from the head. The increase in recording and reporting has shown us the people at the top are rarely held accountable and make billions doing so. Why follow the rules if it's going to financially harm you. It's every industry.
"it's ok when _I_ use LLMs"
edit: you're making literally the same argument that Provost Santiago Schnell is quoted as making in the article, and the entire article is dedicated to dismantling it. Please have a read.
Nope. Try again.
[EDIT:] I did read it (it's fairly...prolix).
It appears that you might benefit from giving the ol' Ts and Cs of this site a quick shufti. I'm pretty sure that I remember them mentioning "did you read the article" as a Bozo no-no.
I specifically mentioned that I use LLMs in my work (which was what he was writing about, anyway), and, as you would expect, it got a few moldy tomatoes thrown my way.