I think that one’s opinion of this article’s premise is really an index into what your program was like.
I totally forgot that it has a readable (I.e. guessable domain name) because AWS’ equivalent service doesn’t. I also had a company subdomain pointing to it so someone got to put up a malicious page on our domain for a day :(
At the same time, thanks to anti-AI-snobs like this distinguished gentleman, I have started spending significant amounts of time to deliberately not sound like an LLM (foreign-language speaker, analytical writer, typographical nerd who used em-dashs unironically), which makes me do double the work (and ironically makes the workflow of 'think yourself' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' more expensive than 'let the LLM do the thinking' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' in a business setting).
And yet - on the other hand - this absurdity has given rise to a strange, decadent joy: I've begun to write in florid, fanciful style simply to lampoon the process itself. A mockery wrapped in velvet. A jest dressed in brocade. If one must dance for the algorithmic (or anti-algorithmic) court, why not do so with powdered wig and fan in hand?
I sort of take this as a compliment, because I've been writing like this my whole life and if it reads like LLM slop, then there's the implication that the result of all of OpenAI's A/B testing and post-training leads to something like my style which at least means it gets people to engage with it!
I cannot tell whether that's a joke, but I'm very interested if it's serious
We had this project (all public research) to classify buildings and identify their different subsystems (e.g. load-bearing structure, roof type, ventilation type) to figure out the expected casualties if there was a WMD event of some type. We could get decent data for much of the world, but for some places we had literally nothing beyond a tiny picture of it from satellite imagery.
I had been playing with using GPT-3 to try to have it autocomplete forms like the following. This was 2021 before we had good APIs for instruct models, so this was just straight up letting the LLM regurgitate after pretraining. Here was the type of prompt we used:
""" Engineering building report for building located at 123, X Street, Knoxville TN Prepared by Benjamin Lee, FE --- Building footprint area: 1200 m2 Roof type: built-up roofing Facade material: brick HVAC present: """
Surprisingly (at the time), this was a decent prior. You could also add all sorts of one-off points of interest and amenities like swimming pools and other trivia to help guide the conditional probabilities.