All my life I've gone by my middle name, and it's turned out to be useful in a similar way. When I receive a message or phone call and they address me by my first name, I immediately know it's someone who doesn't really know who I am.
I received the exact same email, except they offered me 50% of earnings, so the message sending script probably has some randomization built in. My guess is that their true objective is to get you to install their "interview support app" which is mentioned at the end of the email, I anticipate that it makes your device remotely useful to them, or installs ransomware. But it could be a more involved scam.
I've had my writings directly plagiarized by other people--people who made word-for-word copies of my work, replaced my name with their own, and made a tidy profit on it. They profit more than I ever managed, because they have more resources. In the aftermath, my writings are still "there", not "stolen" in the physical world sense, but my ability to make a living is damaged, and the plagiarism is deeply unethical.
LLMs and "AI" are just one small step removed from straight-up plagiarism. They are massive moral injury[1] machines.
I remember being advised to do this ~20 years ago when I was going to be answering questions from a group of people. I was told that it's good practice to say something like "that's a great question" every time someone asks anything, as a form of social lubrication, to encourage others to ask questions. I can't say whether it works, and it was advice for a spoken context rather than written, but I don't know how to finish this sentence.
When I go to research lectures, I sometimes hear that in response to audience questions, although not especially consistently. Some speakers do this more than others, I don't think anyone does it all the time.
It was so long ago that the specifics have faded, but I remember I was coached to use a variety of positive responses. "That's a great question," yes, but also things like "I'm glad you brought that up," and "I was hoping someone would ask about that!" It wasn't my cup of tea, too artificial, but the advice was contemplated.
The next question (which is a great one, from what I understand) is: Why do LLMs use these phrases so much if humans rarely use them in written form? Maybe a fair portion of training data comes from lecture transcripts, where such responses are common when responding to direct questions? And/or system prompts are just instructed to be like that?
> Why do LLMs use these phrases so much if humans rarely use them in written form?
As far as I understand, it's due to RLHF. The reviewers the AI companies use don't necessarily know what kind of question is a good one, so when the LLM answers "That's a good question!", they tend to rate the answer higher because they like being flattered. Proxy models that are themselves trained on RLHF inherit this pattern. Similar effects contribute to sycophancy.[1]
I've always seen and used "That's a great question!" and similar vacuous phrases when speaking as a polite way to buy some time while formulating an actual response to the questioner.
That's a good question... => I didn't think about this, I don't know the answer yet.
That's a great question! => I can tell you understood what I explained and used that understanding to reach the next step of reasoning just like I did.
I've been running websites on WordPress almost as long as WordPress has existed, my oldest site has been running on it continuously for 20+ years[1]. Between forcing Gutenberg into the core (it should have been a plugin), Mullenweg's recent unhinged actions (e.g., the ACF fiasco[2]), the increasing number of naggy subscription-based plugins, and now this contemptible AI integration, I'm going to start the process of migrating my sites, probably to ClassicPress[3].
I wrote an article about this same general topic way back in 2007[1], wherein I conducted a thought experiment with an Arecibo observatory traveling away from Earth. I calculated that even mighty Arecibo would be unable to detect Earth's omnidirectional FM radio as far out as Saturn, let alone from another star.
Since that writing, we've lost Arecibo observatory, discovered gobs of exoplanets, started scrutinizing those exoplanets with JWST, and increased our radio sphere radius by another 19 lightyears.
> I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it
The key word there is "license." Open source often has strings attached--an obligation to credit the source, an obligation to release derivative code under the same license, etc. LLMs seldom respect the license, they just quietly and extensively plagiarize everything.
Ordinarily I don't prefer video, but the visuals are helpful here.
Also, an online interactive, but it seems to only work in Chrome: https://superspl.at/scene/ff1d0393
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