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Credit where credit is due

Credit where credit is due

evakhoury

Comments (44)

  • pxc
    > In a post on his blog, software engineer Indradhanush Gupta writes that he is no lon­ger crediting Anthropic’s Claude on his code changes, because "adding an LLM as co-author gives you a way for you to shirk responsibility for mistakes." Pressed by commenters that this sounds like a pretext for hiding LLM use, Gupta insists that it is not.I use LLMs every day at work. At the same time, I've never had an LLM appear as a "co-author", not because I'm making any effort to hide my LLM use, but because I've never been comfortable letting an LLM commit code. I use staging changes, hunk by hunk (or sometimes even line-by-line), as my review process. I don't want LLMs performing any git operations that add or push commits. I imagine I'm not the only one.PS: If you want some bumpers to help avoid having your LLMs commit code, configuring Git for commit signing and blocking access to your signing key, agent socket, write access to your local Git config, etc., is pretty effective in my experience.
  • hatthew
    This article is chock full of interesting links. The link about Kenyan English/LLMs [0] describes something that feels like it should have been obvious to me.[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
  • zugi
    > Software engineers who use LLMs should save a curated prose document describing the software, alongside the code that was generated from it.That sounds great! Though software engineers are all about being lazy - typically in a good way. So I expect in practice they'll use LLMs to generate some code, iterate a few times until it works well enough for them, and then have the LLM generate "a curated prose document describing the software..."
  • arjie
    Nothing wrong with LLM textual content per se. Current LLMs simply cannot produce sufficient quality of it. And the problem is that P(garbage|LLM) is so high that P(LLM) means you're going to extract a small amount of content from it.However, there is another problem: first-party content becomes unreliable. "I looked at X and when I did Y, I noticed that a dropped by b%". Vast amounts of such content can be generated that are now plausible. Humans were not so good at producing sufficiently convincing information here, but LLMs are, so my heuristics required to filter down input to manually review are no longer effective.For my part, I try to write human-directed content when intended for humans, but I have a large machine-curated knowledge base of machine-written content that I consume through a machine intermediary. In some future, I'm sure that machines will perform better at communication, and so the writing will improve, but the provenance of first-party information cannot be solved now. I hope someone figures out a new mechanism to transmit facts to others interested in those.
  • 1asgtq
    Academics have completely lost it. The number of mathematicians who write with LLMs and are rationalizing their usage is frightening.And they have the audacity to claim that the public will defund them if they don't use new tech. No, the public will defund you if you continue cheating like a 10 year old and you are evidently superfluous.Just say no!
  • elliotmr
    I'm interested in people's thoughts on the basic question: If I write something and ask an LLM to edit or critique that piece, is it LLM generated or is it mine?I usually follow this procedure for formal emails. I write an initial draft and ask an LLM for a review. I iterate several times as I frequently feel that the LLM has changed a subtle meaning or makes a specious argument that isn't in line with what I want to communicate.If I could afford a full-time copy editor, I’d use one for the same reason. I am just trying to convey my meaning accurately and I believe that I get more precise results with an LLM helper.
  • matt3210
    Tools can’t have credit, only People.
  • ChrisMarshallNY
    I've been increasingly letting the LLM take the wheel, in my coding. It's working out very, very well.I undersign everything under my imprimatur; LLM, contract programmer, intern, whatever. If it has my chop; it has my support and accountability.The "A" word (Accountability) has been getting deprecated far longer than LLMs have been around. It seems that no one wants to stand behind their work, anymore; regardless of how that work was done.I had the advantage of spending almost 27 years, at a company that really made sure that I was Accountable. I ran a team, but it was my butt on the line.
  • bassie123
    I wonder what it was like when we first got calculators; people saying its cheating at arithmetic. AI is just the next tool humans can apply to problems to solve.
  • 98codes
    You're telling me this author uses that many em-dashes in their normal writing?
  • warkdarrior
    > Then we can all asses how useful they really are.Clearly not written by LLM. (NB: emphasis mine)
  • ramesh31
    Pangram et. al are complete total nonsense. The academic world was trained for decades to rely on tools like TurnItIn.com because they were fairly reliable; searching for hashes of known text is a simple tractable problem, and so being non-technical they've conflated the two. There's no going back now unless you are performing pencil and paper proctored exams.