A Note on LLMs

Someone asked on Mastodon if I was using AI to write this series of posts. My first response was, “Ouch.” My second was to say that yes, I’m using Claude in a couple of ways: To check for redundancy and overlap. I have a tendency to tell the same stores repeatedly (and yes, that is my wife and daughter you hear sniggering in the background). LLMs seem to be pretty good at spotting this. As a better search engine. I know a lot less than I want to about history and politics outside Europe and North America; prompting Claude to give three examples of cooperatives from other parts of the world is a lot more productive than searching on Google (in part because Google’s results have been getting steadily worse). I think (at least, I hope) the question was prompted by the volume of posts rather than by my writing style. I am a little peeved that em-dashes and semi-colons are now taken as signs that text was generated by an LLM—I’ve been using them since high school, and would hate to abandon…