LLMs are pure magic! I don’t understand how, but it somehow manages to not only blurb out coherent answers but also be creative if you want it to be, already outclassing my literary skills :(
I have always liked reading essays and short snippets dense with ideas. Always on the hunt for good authors and new things to read. LLMs should have been the holy grail for me, but for some strange reason, I never got hooked on reading what an LLM has to say. I tried them all - ChatGPT, Bard, ran Llama and other variants locally on my computer with all the prompt injections I could try, but the responses always felt so bland.
Have you listened to a song live and then tried listening to the same song with headphones? Even the most expensive pair of speakers don’t come close to the feeling of listening to it live. That’s the same difference I felt between LLM produced essay and reading what a person wrote. The “human-ness” was adding another layer of depth for me, knowing that there’s a person behind these words somehow creates a connection between me and the author.
All the traditional reasons to write blogs and essays - fame, opportunities, money, sharing knowledge, vanity are slowly going to go away now that LLMs are here. So why should I write? Because we must. For the same reason why Rumi wrote poems, XXXTentacion mumbled and screamed into the mic and Rakhi Sawant does whatever Rakhi Sawant does.
To the person behind the blogs, essays and Instagram posts who changed me, I hope I can pay it forward 🤍