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A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs - for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/com…

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This entry was edited (3 months ago)
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in reply to Cory Doctorow

Marcel DuChamp's sculpture "Fountain" (a urinal set on its back side) both confirms your definition - the feeling in the artist's mind, the wish to transmit that feeling - and also seems to contradict your point since what is produced by an AI is not produced by the artist but only selected by him/her.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

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in reply to FoolishOwl

@foolishowl "Campaign" is a key word there. Even a GM who's merely "decent" will use any opportunity to foreshadow things he/she has a vague plan to use later in the campaign.

But, foreshadowing is planning, and planning requires consciousness, not just an uncanny ability to autocomplete text.

I wouldn't be surprised if an AI GM is among the harder AI challenges. A GM has to continuously adapt their narrative based on player choices and dice rolls, while still keeping the major future plot points they want to hit in mind.

in reply to Cory Doctorow

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in reply to Cory Doctorow

what the fuck why are they boiling the planet to embiggen the points and then compress back to the points. this is the most insane horseshit. that people ostensibly responsible for teaching high level legal shit are doing this makes me think this is why the supreme court has made rulings translating the ability to spend money as free speech. the why being, there is not an ounce of responsibility for social good taught through behaviour and culture.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

This was something I was eagerly waiting to hear regarding A"I" for some time now.
With LLMs being utilized to be done with "annoying" writing by many, I have started to think about the necessity of things.
Using LLMs to turn some bullet points into bloat and then recipients use LLMs to turn the bloat back into bullet points, is showing you can skip the (now) useless steps and just use the bullet points, because the rest is meaningless. It might not have been before, but it is now.

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in reply to Phil

@h0ru2 effectively decreasing the bandwidth of media. Real "information economy" hours

Edit: I tried to explain to a manager how using LLMs to fluff up quarterly performance pieces isn't actually adding VALUE, but they couldn't see past the Taylorist nicety of it

@Phil
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in reply to Cykonot

@h0ru2 ah, this is Taylorism for business communication. The appearance of value via professional presentation, without any additional value

Maybe this could help generate more human-readable reports — but only for people not properly qualified to parse them. Like, if the bullet points don't effectively communicate what you needed to know, the failure to contextualize is on you (or HR). Also, an old-school expert system could plug-and-play data points for a report

@Phil
in reply to Phil

@h0ru2 it came up in a work conversation the other day when I said I'd never used an llm to write an email, to the surprise of some. If it's important, I'll write it by hand to ensure it's correct, and if it's not...I just don't send the email.
@Phil
in reply to Kiytan

@Kiytan @h0ru2 but the lesson is the value of your personally written letter has been drastically reduced by the lack of integrity of others. It's like grade inflation - makes it very difficult to differentiate those near the top
in reply to Cory Doctorow

as a musician, this basically encapsulates how I feel about art as well. An AI artist can create using multiple prompts until they achieve the effect they're aiming for, and some artists use LLMs in a similar manner as the cutup method that was popular with beatniks. But I agree that the fewer decisions made in the creative process, the less meaning there is to glean from the final product. If formulaic pop art is "empty calories" like junk food, AI art is like eating styrofoam.

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in reply to Vincarsi

@Vincarsi the funny thing is: a lot of pop music is made following the same principles, and what works gets copied again and again and again, but it gets a little more flat every time. In a way, pop producers are already creating AI-type music without AI. Implementing AI in pop music will just result in more flat and soulless songs, and more of the same. Just like it is now. Yay!
in reply to Cory Doctorow

did you read Ted Chiang's essay on the subject?

He writes "art is something that results from making a lot of choices", which chimes a lot with your piece.

newyorker.com/culture/the-week…

in reply to Cory Doctorow

same! 😀

respectfully: i'm surprised that you didn't include a link to his piece, as your post's thesis is very similar. would have been nice to give intellectual credit where it's due, and also perhaps develop the idea further?

in reply to ikesau

@ikesau I hadn't thought of it while thinking through this piece. I have norovirus and wrote it between barfing, so some references escaped me.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

agree with this nuanced take! There's an interesting future ahead of us as ML image models begin to show detailed control through longer prompts and other control methods we see more of these micro decisions becoming present in their output and the communication and artistic value increase. We also at the same time see more automation at the low end, with lower effort inputs producing higher fidelity work. Perhaps artists contextualization of their work is becoming more important?
in reply to Cory Doctorow

AI talk

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