> Nowadays my writing [] has totally devolved into "prompt-ese."
I've noticed this myself. Even in my Obsidian vault, which only I read and write in. I think it's a development into writing more imperatively, instinctually. Thinking more in instructions and commands than the speaking and writing habits I've developed organically over my life. Or just "talking to the computer" in plain English, after having to convert my thoughts to code anytime I want to make it do something.
I've been thinking about the role of "director" in media as an analogy to writing with LLMs. I'm working right now on an "essay," that I'm not sure I'll share with anyone, even family (who is my first audience). Right now, under the Authorship section, I wrote "Conceived, directed, and edited by Qaadika. Drafted by Claude", with a few sentences noting that I take responsibility for the content, and that the arguments, structure, audience, and editorial judgments are mine.
I had a unique idea and started with a single sentence prompt, and kept going from there until I realized it should be an essay. So the ideas in it are mine. The thesis is mine. I'm going back and forth with the LLM section by section. Some prompts are a sentence. Some are eight paragraphs. I can read the output and see exactly what was mine and what the LLM added. But my readers won't. They'll just see "Author: Qaadika" and presume every single word was mine. Or they'll sniff out the LLM-ness and stop reading.
I can make a film and call myself director without ever being seen in it. Is is the same if I direct the composition of words without ever writing any of the prose myself? Presuming I've written enough in prompts that it's identifiably unique from cheaper prompts and "LLM, fill in the blank".
We credit Steven Spielberg with E.T. But he didn't write the screenplay. He probably had comments on it, though. He didn't operate the camera. But he probably told the operators where to put it. He didn't act in it. But he probably told the actors where to stand and where to move and how to be. He didn't write the music. But he probably had a sense of when and where to place it in the audio. And he didn't spend every moment in the cutting room, placing every frame just so.
But his name is at the top. He must have done something, even if I can't point to anything specific. The "Vibe" of the film is Spielberg, but it's also the result of hundreds of minds, most of whole aren't named until the end of the film, and probably never read by most viewers.
His contribution to the film was instructions. Do this, don't do that. Let's move this scene to here. This shot would be better from this angle. The musical swell should be on this shot; cut it longer to fit.
So where, exactly, is "Spielberg" in E.T.? What can we objective credit him with, aside from the finished product: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Coming June 1982?
Uh, Steven Spielberg is all over E.T. For one thing, he storyboarded the big special effects sequences. He collaborated closely on the screenplay because it was drawn from his own childhood experiences. He was the final say in casting. His relationship with editor Michael Kahn is famously collaborative.
I think comparing your telling an LLM what to do and Steven Spielberg directing a movie just shows a total lack of understanding of how movies are made, and also inflates your own sense of your self.
> Uh, Steven Spielberg is all over E.T. For one thing, he storyboarded the big special effects sequences. He collaborated closely on the screenplay because it was drawn from his own childhood experiences. He was the final say in casting. His relationship with editor Michael Kahn is famously collaborative.
That's all meta. Trivia. Decisions he made or feedback he gave, that while influencing the final product cannot be observed in the final product (e.g. show me the actual Spielberg-drawn storyboard in the film; It doesn't exist, because the storyboard turned into a sequence of shots made by the cinematographer, instructing the camerawoman to point the camera at the actors lit by the gaffers, or into a work breakdown strucutre then followed by the SFX team painstakingly drawing it frame by frame). No one but Spielberg could say "That part was me, this part was Kahn's." I can't find any of that out just by watching the movie. When I engage with a piece of media, I presume the author is dead. What is in the media is canon, and what's not in it isn't. The behind the scenes, or the director's biography, or the interviews aren't part of the art. Art shouldn't rely on "Oh it's good, or even better than you thought it was once you know this cool fact or that wild story from production."
Star Wars isn't good only because George Lucas was a genius, or because they spent a lot of time on the models and tried a cool new text intro sequence, or because of any of the other novel effects. Lots of movies spend a lot of time in production, with a lot of experts and a lot of novel ideas, and still fail. Star Wars is good because the finished movie is good. We credit Star Wars generally as being George Lucas' brainchild, but if you know the backstory, it's only good because he had good editors to reign him in. But that's meta. Nobody knew that in 1977. They just knew they enjoyed the movie and it said "written and directed by George Lucas."
When I watch the movie I don't see the storyboard, or the redlines in the screenplay, or the casting notes, or the conversations and discussions with Kahn. All I know from the movie is the credits, and the credits don't say "Written by Melissa Mathison (with close collaboration by Spielberg based on his childhood experience)". Those are, from a lay viewer's POV, 'facts not in evidence.'
E.T. was a single example. I'm comfortable claiming my argument applies to all directors of all films, and all forms of art that are created by more than one person. Another example: "Over The Edge" and "Off The Wall", two books about deaths in US national parks. They each have two authors. Only one author co-wrote both of them. To whom do I credit my love for those books? Only to Ghiglieri, since I can see the consistent tone between them? That would be unfair to Myers and Farabee. Only to Myers and Farabee, because they're the park rangers that witnessed a number of the emergencies and deaths? That would be unfair to Ghiglieri. What about the editors, who surely worked hard to make books that are basically a list of stories about death interesting as a cohesive narrative. My only option is to credit all the authors, and everyone else involved, equally, and not try to break down paragraphs between "this author wrote this one, and that author wrote that one." They didn't distinguish, so I can't either. [1]
I'm all over my essay. I drafted and organized the original outline. I've made substantial changes to the order of paragraphs and what and how the arguments are built and developed based on my personal experiences. I am the final say for whose quotes are included and which ones are cut. My relationship with myself is famously collaborative (famous among my family and friends).
None of that matters to the reader. Whether I wrote it myself or with a friend, or used a ghostwriter, or used an LLM, the audience is going to credit or blame it on the name at the top. My papers in college weren't graded based on whether I spent 300 hours on them and revised them 20 times, or whether it was I or my classmate who coined that pithy line I then used throughout, or because I used niche knowledge about the subject I knew before taking the class. That's trivia. They were graded on the final single copy I submitted. I got once chance.
The only difference between an essay of mine being written by a ghostwriter I hired and an LLM is that the LLM output is always going to sound like an LLM. They are identical in that neither of them are "me". The ghostwriter will sound either like the ghostwriter or like the ghostwriter trying to write like me. But whether I hired a ghostwriter and published their work under my name, or if I used an LLM and the audience didn't notice, at the end of the day they'll credit or blame me entirely, because my name is at the top, no different as if I'd written the entire thing from scratch. I have no excuses except for the final product.
For this essay specifically, If I ever did release it or publish it, it would be under my real name. Firstly because I've never liked being "anonymous" online (I feel I never act or write like myself unless I'm speaking under my own name; opposite of most in my experience), and second because I would want the reader to know that there's a human they can credit or blame for it. I guess for me that's the tradeoff. When anonymous I won't use LLMs, because my ethos comes from being (and sounding) like a human being who merely doesn't want to share their name. Under my real name, however, I feel more comfortable saying "directed and edited by [real name], drafted by [llm]," because then the reader can decide if the ethos associated with my real name and affilations is strong enough to justify reading a logos and pathos that the human freely admits is not entirely from their own fleshy brain.
[1] They do, actually, at times. When one of the authors was directly involved in one of the stories and is recounting their personal experience, they will write "I (Myers)..." or "I (Farabee).." Aside from that they do not say who wrote what, or who influenced who.
> the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search.
PRESS RELEASE: UNITED BURGLARS SOCIETY
The United Burglars Society understands that being burgled may be inconvenient for some. In response, UBS has introduced the Opt-Out system for those who wish not to be burgled.
Please understand that each burglar is an independent contractor, so those wishing not to burgled should go to the website for each burglar in their area and opt-out there. UBS is not responsible for unwanted burglaries due to failing to opt-out.
It's been interesting the past year or so watching myself turn more and more into one of the tin-foil wearing linux users. I'm not sure how it happened, but self-hosting became more and more alluring and hyperfocusing on taking as much data as I can offline became worth spending entire weekends on.
It should take 0 seconds, because I shouldn't have to do it.
That's my bar. My time is my time, and anything that takes time from me better have a damn good excuse. Github is not bringing any good reasons to the table to justify making me take my time to protect privacy I've had by default up to now.
First response: It doesn't matter if I use copilot right now. It matters if I will ever use copilot in the future. Opting-out is future-focused. What if I said "no, I don't use copilot, so I don't need to opt out", then a year from now start using copilot, completely forgetting about this whole debacle? That's the evil of opt-out. My inaction only benefits them, never me.
Second response: Maybe? I press the little button to auto-generate commit titles and messages that showed up in my Github Desktop. Does that count?
I'm asking sincerely. I don't "use Copilot" as in using it in VS Code or while writing code, so I'm honestly not sure if I am.
Do we get a choice? I did not ever explicitly enable it yet GitHub's web UI by default uses copilot to autofill my web-based edit commit messages. It also shows up on the home screen by default now.
I'm pretty sure if you use the site you're using GitHub Copilot in some way, so your question becomes irrelevant.
I felt myself starting to sweat as I read. I can't imagine doing this at my apartment complex, let alone at someone else's. Messing with building controls (old or unused as they may be) sounds like a great way to get your lease nixed and your ass out the door quicker than a lawyer can say "Yeah, I can't help you here, they're well within their rights to evict you for that."
I was hoping they'd mention something about the legality (or lack thereof), but I guess that's an exercise left to the reader who wants to try this out at their own apartment.
> sounds like a great way to get your lease nixed and your ass out the door quicker than a lawyer can say "Yeah, I can't help you here, they're well within their rights to evict you for that."
For repairing a broken thing? After provably trying in vain to get the landlord to fix it?
Well he didn't "fix" it, he hacked it to work for one tenant. And to allow said tenant's non-tenant's friends free access into the building. "fixing it" would be restoring the voice call ability to its original function. Not modding it for one random tenant's Apple Home setup.
And it's definitely possible to get in trouble for "fixing" something if you're not authorized to fix it.
I would call this "bypassing building controls to allow unauthorized access to the building." Frank has access to the building through the allowed means per his lease, not through any means. If his lease is like mine there's a whole page to initial about being granted access through the gates or pool or whatever with only the complex-assigned keys and RFID tags.
(I presume Frank lives in the US, and his state's tenancy laws similar to mine apply.)
> For repairing a broken thing? After provably trying in vain to get the landlord to fix it?
Down the hallway from my office used to be the management of a small hotel chain. We often had lunch together and I got to hear a bunch of interesting anecdotes over the years.
Way back when they started up and didn't yet have enough cash to actually own the buildings they operated in, they rented. One of the buildings turned out to have numerous issues (holes in the roof, gaps near exterior walls, etc...). To the point that they eventually didn't pass a fire inspection. They repeatedly asked the owner to have it fixed. Pressed for time, they themselves eventually payed someone, out of their own pocket, so it would at least be up to code for the fire inspection.
From what I was told, the owner threw a tantrum over them modifying the building, terminated the contract and sued them. Successfully.
If you are a tenant in a rental apartment, you'd probably have more leniency on the legal side (compared to a company renting a business property). But still, I'd be very careful making any assumptions about the legal situation rather than risking some sort of Kafkaesque legal mess.
Over here at least, it is very common in apartment complexes that the apartment owner is a different person/entity than the building owner and only the later has the rights to mess with stuff installed in the walls (e.g. plumbing) and especially stuff elsewhere in the building (e.g. an external intercom system). If you ask the landlord to fix it, the best they could do is forward that request to the building owner. If you pulled a stunt like the OP did, there's a good chance that the building owner will sue your landlord.
In the US states that I know well, a residential tenant may perform necessary repairs to bring the space up to health and safety codes, and may deduct the cost from their rent. They have an obligation to notify the property manager, in advance in the case of non-emergency repairs, or after the fact otherwise. There are additional details to consider as well.
I don't know if this would apply to a commercial tenant.
But it would definitely not apply to non-violating conditions like the OP's case.
> the owner threw a tantrum over them modifying the building, terminated the contract and sued them. Successfully.
Was the unauthorized modification permanent or undoable? If the latter, I think some people should really get their judge card (or landlord card) revoked.
Did the judge at least suggest what alternative action the tenant should have taken to comply with the law and code?
Most likely the (legally) correct thing to do in the US is to first report the landlord to the relevant agency, possibly named something like Licensing and Inspections or Fair Housing or somesuch. Each local jurisdiction will have it's own agencies for this, so do research. Failure to respond to that would next involve a landlord-tenant lawyer.
Whether or not it's worth all the trouble and time is a different matter. For most people, I'd say reporting to relevant authorities to make the landlord's life harder without needing much continuing effort is probably worth doing, but the lawsuit side is likely to be a huge time and money sink and it's almost always easier to just move. Let the city sue them for continuing to accrue complaints of unsafe living conditions.
In the same way, a landlord cannot evict you themself if you just fail to pay rent, but there are multiple legal mechanisms to eventually get the sheriff to do it for them. Basically, if landlord-tenant negotiation fails, I think the only legal recourse is to involve governmental third parties unless you technically open yourself up to legal reprisal.
A "software engineering team" is human, so that does change the argument. It becomes a human-human problem, not a human-machine problem. Or in OSHA terms, a problem to be solved with administrative controls rather than engineering controls.
Yeah, I wonder if the author has been in a situation where a brief explanation was taken by a higher up (or a cc'd higher-up x2, or x3) as "It was entirely my fault and I'm withholding details that would further implicate me and giving only the facts that don't."
I've had to work to balance emails like this between "they don't want the nitty gritty, they just want to be satisfied the issue is solved" and "They will definitely want the nitty gritty and think something is up if the details seems suspiciously sparse". Especially if the recipients are technical, and they know that you know that they're technical. what are you hiding, Qaadika? you're usually more verbose than this.
My wallet was stolen a few weeks ago. I was able to get my bank cards cancelled, but my only state ID is lost. I live within the US, so I've never needed anything more than my state ID.
I got this state ID using my previous state's ID. The old one is now void. So I need to get a new one. I'll need my birth certificate mailed to me from my parents, because I'm still in the habit of letting them keep all the important family documents. I move alot.
My car broke down a few months ago. Good thing I can walk the relatively (americanly) short distance to work. For after-hours or weekend travel I take the buses (the few my city has) or an uber. Even though it would take me 20 minutes to drive directly to the DMV, the bus route is an hour and ten minutes, and the Uber is going to cost me money. Even if the ID was free, I had to have money to get to the DMV to get it. If I drove, I'd still have paid for the gas.
My work is understaffed and I'm one of the more knowledgable non-managers. I'm working before business hours start and leaving after they end. I can't see a weekday in the next month where I can take time off during the day "just" to get an ID. My boss might understand a medical appointment, but the DMV is not on his list of "reasons I can lose Qaadika for half a day or more".
The grammatical structure in the middle two is identical, and they're all similar in that way.
- "- Name - {Noun with modifiers} {comma} {verb-ing with modifiers}."
- "- Name - {Noun with modifiers} {comma} {verb-ing with modifiers}."
The phrasing is the same, which I notice sometimes happens in my own notes, but it's most noticeable when an LLM is asked to summarize items. An LLM written job description (without major prompting) for a resume comes out the same way, in my experience. It's the simplest full-sentence grammar for describing what something is, and then what something does.
If we used the developer's descriptions (from the github repo) to populate the info, it would look like this:
- hollance/neural-engine - Everything we actually know about the Apple Neural Engine (ANE)
- mdaiter/ane - Reverse engineered the Apple Neural Engine, with working Python and Objective C samples
- apple/ml-ane-transformers - eiln/ane - Reverse engineered Linux driver for the Apple Neural Engine (ANE).
- apple/ml-ane-transformers - Reference implementation of the Transformer architecture optimized for Apple Neural Engine (ANE)
IMO It may not be as information-packed as the LLM list, but it is more interesting to read. I can tell, or at least think I can tell, that different individuals wrote each description, and it's what they wanted me to know most about their project.
If I were making a list of software during research (that would eventually turn into a report), the particular details I write down in the moment would be different, depending on the solution I'm looking for or features it has or doesn't have, will add or won't add. I don't try to summarize "the Whole Project" in one clean bullet point, i (or my readers) can re-read the repo for that, or glean it from surrounding context (presuming enough surrounding context was written). But unless I made an effort later to normalize the list, the grammar, length, and subpoints would vary from the form-identifiable "LLM Concise Summary." It's more work for me to write to a standard, and even more work to consciously pick one.
EDIT: Upon re-reading the article, I noticed the "Prior Art" section is written in past-tense, as I would expect. But the list is in present tense. I feel like it jumps from "narrative" to "technical details list" back to "narrative". And the list is 70% of the section! I wouldn't mind reading a whole paragraph describing each project, what worked, what didn't, what they could use and what they couldn't, in the past tense, if it were interestingly-written. Something that tells me the author dove into the previous projects, experimented with them, or if they interacted with the developers. Or something interesting the author noticed while surveying the "prior art". but "interestingly-written" isn't really the LLMs goal, nor its ability. It's maximal information transfers with minimal word count. So the result is a list that smells like the author merely read the repo readme and wrote a summary for the masses in a technical report.
tl;dr The list is just "a list", and that makes it not interesting to read. If it was not interesting to read it was probably not interesting to write, which I take as an LLM writing it.
I've noticed this myself. Even in my Obsidian vault, which only I read and write in. I think it's a development into writing more imperatively, instinctually. Thinking more in instructions and commands than the speaking and writing habits I've developed organically over my life. Or just "talking to the computer" in plain English, after having to convert my thoughts to code anytime I want to make it do something.
I've been thinking about the role of "director" in media as an analogy to writing with LLMs. I'm working right now on an "essay," that I'm not sure I'll share with anyone, even family (who is my first audience). Right now, under the Authorship section, I wrote "Conceived, directed, and edited by Qaadika. Drafted by Claude", with a few sentences noting that I take responsibility for the content, and that the arguments, structure, audience, and editorial judgments are mine.
I had a unique idea and started with a single sentence prompt, and kept going from there until I realized it should be an essay. So the ideas in it are mine. The thesis is mine. I'm going back and forth with the LLM section by section. Some prompts are a sentence. Some are eight paragraphs. I can read the output and see exactly what was mine and what the LLM added. But my readers won't. They'll just see "Author: Qaadika" and presume every single word was mine. Or they'll sniff out the LLM-ness and stop reading.
I can make a film and call myself director without ever being seen in it. Is is the same if I direct the composition of words without ever writing any of the prose myself? Presuming I've written enough in prompts that it's identifiably unique from cheaper prompts and "LLM, fill in the blank".
We credit Steven Spielberg with E.T. But he didn't write the screenplay. He probably had comments on it, though. He didn't operate the camera. But he probably told the operators where to put it. He didn't act in it. But he probably told the actors where to stand and where to move and how to be. He didn't write the music. But he probably had a sense of when and where to place it in the audio. And he didn't spend every moment in the cutting room, placing every frame just so.
But his name is at the top. He must have done something, even if I can't point to anything specific. The "Vibe" of the film is Spielberg, but it's also the result of hundreds of minds, most of whole aren't named until the end of the film, and probably never read by most viewers.
His contribution to the film was instructions. Do this, don't do that. Let's move this scene to here. This shot would be better from this angle. The musical swell should be on this shot; cut it longer to fit.
So where, exactly, is "Spielberg" in E.T.? What can we objective credit him with, aside from the finished product: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Coming June 1982?
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