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Cake day: June 12th, 2024

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  • Anyone who believes, and confidently espouses, that the autocomplete from the dictionary included in an IDE is functionally indistinguishable from the function and output of a LLM, is betraying a foundational lack of understanding of either. The former is constrained and deterministic, whereas the latter is explosively imprecise and intrinsically unreliable.

    You keep invoking the notion that LLMs are merely tools, and should be treated as mindless subservient instruments deployed by a programmer in command. The thing, however, with tools is they can often trivially become weapons if wielded with incendiary intent, or indiscriminate instruments of destruction under the direction of incompetence.

    Skill is acquired through use over time. LLMs are far too new for anyone to have legitimately accrued enough experience which could be mistaken for competence. With this in mind, anyone claiming to know what they, or the model they’re poking with a prompt, are doing, is a charlatan.





  • To me, it matters because the use and reliance on LLMs demonstrably erodes cognitive capacity and ability, and submissions tainted by them should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, which can only be facilitated with a consummate element of transparency. That elevated scrutiny could, and probably should, also be applied to non-LLM infected submissions, but doing so wouldn’t negate the labelling of authorship.

    Good faith proponents of LLM assisted tooling should be in favour of overt transparency and labelling, as it’s a requirement to facilitate future historical analysis of their utility, efficacy, and legitimacy; you know, to build a body of evidence.