Which can, of course, be random, self-reinforcing, etc.

This is a fundamental problem and one reason we're mired in this culture war. Social friction is caused by jostling based on group membership, and there's no common values-based scaffolding we can use to collaborate in building a better way.

I used to scoff when told to say the pledge of allegiance as a young person. Now, the closing words "liberty and justice for all" sound quite aspirational.

Why?

Whether the LLM could do a better job than me at writing the essay is a separate question...I suspect it probably could. But it wouldn't be as fun.

"LLMs" are like "screens" or "recording technology". They are not good or bad by themselves - they facilitate or inhibit certain behaviors and outcomes. They are good for some things, and they ruin some things. We, as their users, need to be deliberate and thoughtful about where we use them. Unfortunately, it's difficult to gain wisdom like this a priori.

I heard someone say that LLMs don't need to be as good as an expert to be useful, they just need to be better than your best available expert. A lot of people don't have access to mental health care, and will ask their chatbot to ask like a psychologist.

"We present Dreamer 4, a scalable agent that learns to solve control tasks by imagination training inside of a fast and accurate world model. ... By training inside of its world model, Dreamer 4 is the first agent to obtain diamonds in Minecraft purely from offline data, aligning it with applications such as robotics where online interaction is often impractical."

In other words, it learns by watching, e.g. by having more data of a certain type.

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-body-electric-rob...