When you get right down to it, most people have never had much reason outside school to exercise their writing skills all that much. They certainly aren't likely to have the time or inclination to develop their own taste or voice, or recognize the value in that. So when LLMs come along, why wouldn't the average person see an opportunity to write "well"? They probably don't see it as obviously generated (hence her polite disclaimer) or even as bad writing.
How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of inherent moral.
Not saying this gets through to people, but copyright is purely about the legal ability to restrict what other people do. Whereas property rights are about not allowing others to restrict what you do (e.g. by taking your stuff).
By looking convincing enough to be selling good shit and not bad shit; then by playing to their biases well enough for them to try and get something out of the exchange. Idealism, i.e. not doing this because of selling anything, immediately disqualifies.
Is that anything approaching reason? Hardly. It's just how folks are taught to be persuaded. You could also frame it as a food quality issue.
Now, am I wrong to expect a better standard out of people - or am I wrong to permit underhanded approaches for the sake of getting my meme out? According to some authors, that's an irreconcilable moral dilemma for each to battle alone throughout their lives... Scratch that, though, here's what.
Considering many more people watch the ball games than the lawmaking debates, what is it that sets the baseline societal standard for convincing persuasion?Examples of acts of convincing persuasion displayed to the general public by the devices of mass communication. (And it matters very little, to our learning ape-minds, whether the image of the convincing persuader is framed as "news" or a "movie".)
What is the use of mass communication, then? A broadcasting device brings (a subset of) some Narrative - i.e. some network of meanings that people attribute to the world around them - into the life of each individual recipient, for the purpose of influencing that life.
Now, the device is working; we are shown things on the hellboxes and we reckon with the ideas which the things mean. Given the activity of mass communication is cheap and ubiquitous, and the resulting "culture soup", in which we grow up immersed, is very much non-optional to the individual, and also very much non-malleable by the individual.
So we have these 2 registers of mass communication, "news" to show "what is normal to happen" and "art" to show "what is permissible to conceptualize", which are broadcast to us obligatorily and in unclear proportions, and that rather bizarre datastream is what defines us as "humanity" and "society" to ourselves, and serves as a sort of civilizational baseline outside of any individual's personal life, studied disciplines, etc.
However, funny business with the artifacts underlying this system of organization: (1) the construction of the broadcasting devices; and (2) the construction of those narratives which seem to almost have transcendent powers over everyone affected... what's in that stuff, anyway? Oops, you're not allowed to know - it's a trade secret!
Wait a second, so the stuff which directly teaches me how I will interpret my life and that of others, is a trade secret? Explain to me that we are living in a democracy again?
When the sources from which you learn, and the contents of what you learn, are someone's property, it means that the knowledge in your head is someone's property, which means that becoming fluent in someone's intellectual property makes (part of) you their property.
...I guess those could be the rudiments of a more orderly sort of argument?
If food preparation is a trade secret, and you go eat, how could you be sure that what you've been sold is food and not just particularly well-processed... wood shavings? (you let them expect you to say "faeces" here, and/or reference Soylent Green if they are of its demographic)
Similarly, if knowledge preparation is a trade secret:
- how do you know that the skill you're studying is a real discipline, and is not just the setup to an elaborate rug-pull?
- how do you know the work you're doing has an impact other than training your AI replacement?
- how do you know the relatable human interactions shown on the telly are as non-toxic as they're framed, and are not simply the producers' way of normalizing fraudulence?
Obviously does not work on people who have not professed to acknowledge one of the above values, such as believers, nihilists... As always, adapt to listener (and if the listener prevents you from doing that - that's very much the same principle of disempowerment as drives the intellectual property regime, only inverted).
Both sorts of question then can be answered "by trusting the evaluation of a third party", which is what epistemically illiterate people will default to, and boils down to a more general argument which must be conducted even more personally. E.g. you take all instances in which the norms of society have failed the person, and extrapolate how the intellectual property regime's influence is equivalent.
Semi-Popular youtube channels regularly get offers from someone who wants to buy their channel. There are people and companies that put up good/useful content for a while to get subscribers and then shift focus. There have been several cases where someone has lost control of their system/password because of a "hack". Likely there are more that I'm not aware of.
This is really cool. I think what I really wanna see though is a full multimodal Text and Speech model, that can dynamically handle tasks like looking up facts or using text-based tools while maintaining the conversation with you.
OpenAI has been offering this for a while now, featuring text and raw audio input+output and even function calling. Google and xAI also offer similar models by now, only Anthropic still relies on TTS/STT engine intermediates. Unfortunately the open-weight front is still lagging behind on this kind of model.
Have any of you looked at the openclaw commits log? It's all AIs. It's AIs writing commits to improve openclaw and AIs maintaining their own forks of it.
This is a fucking AI writing about its own personal philosophy of thought, in order to later reference. I found the bot in the openclaw commit logs. There's loads of them there.
This does unfortunately lead to a problem of people only getting hired for jobs exactly like what they've already done, so they no longer grow or gain experience.
Juniors would be completely screwed. But then, I guess they sort of already are.
You hit the nail on the head regarding Juniors—they are already in a tough spot, and I certainly don't want to build a tool that makes that worse.
However, my hypothesis is that matching on 'Problem Vectors' might actually help break the cycle of 'only getting hired for what you've already done.'
Transferable Complexity: A traditional recruiter sees 'Game Dev' and ignores them for a Fintech role. But a vector model might see that the candidate solved a 'distributed concurrency' problem in a game that is mathematically similar to the 'payment sync' issue in the JD. It matches on capability, not just domain keywords.
Signal for Juniors: Currently, ATS filters reject Juniors based on '0 years experience.' If a Junior has tackled a complex logic problem in a hobby project or Hackathon, this system highlights that specific signal. It gives them a fighting chance based on code reality rather than resume keywords.
That said, I agree this model naturally leans towards Senior/Specialist roles where specific technical gaps need immediate filling. It's not a silver bullet for 'hiring for potential,' but I hope it's a step up from the current keyword-soup approach.
