Irenes (many)Mar 17

today, in attempting to do a close-read of a piece of alleged research to assess how much role a human had in writing it and to what extent the arguments and sources support the key take-aways it suggest

we found a section which purports to describe the oversight that a human performed over an LLM in writing it

and that section has several major non-sequitors that have nothing to do with the subject matter

Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 17
it's kind of a new low, asking the machine to write the section that describes how you supervised the machine, and then not even reading that section
Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 17
it really worries us that people are going to take this sort of piece seriously, that real strategic decisions about activism are going to be based on it
Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 17

we're not naming it because the point is not to have a conversation about a specific piece

it's to remind everyone to engage your brains when reading these things. don't be on autopilot, don't let your assessment of plausibility be based on how formal the writing is or anything like that

Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 17
we also found that the top-level takeaway of this piece had very little to do with the arguments it advanced, it's just that it's long enough and formalistic enough that you really have to go over it slowly to realize there isn't actually a connection there
Show threadIrenes (many)Mar 17
and it's painful to go over these things slowly because at every level, they fail to say anything, every list of five bullet points has two that seem vaguely on-topic and three that could make sense if the rest of the piece explains them in some way, and then only after reading the whole thing do you realize it doesn't
Show threada kilo of saucepans (rakslice)
@ireneista the pattern from the pre-llm era i most associate this with is "specification that doesn't actually specify anything"
Mar 18 at 5:05amWeb
Show threada kilo of saucepans (rakslice)6d ago
@ireneista but, thinking about it, I recently got the same feeling reading california ab-1043 (2025-2026), where certain provisions don't really make sense because other parts they would obviously require are just nowhere to be found
https://mastodon.social/@rakslice/116161658804295422
Show threada kilo of saucepans (rakslice)6d ago
@ireneista of course there are lots of possible reasons for this in a formal document edited by a collaborative bureaucracy, but let's say it feels familiar
Show threadIrenes (many)6d ago
@rakslice hah. yes. right on.