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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

At school i was made to read all of shakespeare. It wasnt about passing tests. Any LLM can read shakespeare and pass a test. I was made to read shakespeare so that i would appreciate language in the hope that i would strive to improve my own. That still counts.

I am a soldier and language is vital in every day of my job. Tone, word choice, cadence ... all of it conveys meaning in a way that an LLM simply cannot. Soldiers will not follow an AI up a hill, nor will they follow those they know use AI to pretend they understand a subject.

Want to sound smart? Watch blackadder. Want to win no-win aguements through wit? Watch Archer. Want to inspire your troops to do somthing unpleasant? read and watch shakespeare. An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.

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None of this is relevant to the argument above. There is no reason to believe these archives are equivalent to Shakespeare even if one were to agree with you that Shakespeare is that important to read.

> An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.

Nothing you wrote supports that argument.

None of us can read everything. None of us can even read every novel published in a single month. So we filter. One way an LLM can teach you is as an excellent way of filtering information and give you a chance to read what really counts.

Ya. Try reading a few hundred pages of historical documents. Expertise does not come from the facts that an LLM can so easily integrate. It comes from understanding the mindset of the people who wrote those pages. Do it properly and you should start to speak and write like those people. The path to becoming an expert on the East India cannot be shortcuted via an LLM.

LLMs actually do a very fine job of understanding the "mindset" embodied in historical sources, because historical documents themselves are a valuable source of highly diverse LLM training data. You can easily point pretty much any model to any random historical text, no matter how obscure (probably not an archival log entry, though) and ask "what is this text about in modern language, how might it be of interest or relevant today and what points would be considered especially outdated?" you will generally get very helpful answers. Even the thinking output is instructive.

You don't need to go this far. Just ask it to explain the meaning of some song lyrics. The bullshit it comes up with can be absolutely incredible.

example?

This is nonsense. For every amount of pages you have the time to read, an LLM provides a means to filter the set of pages you choose to read to a set that is more likely to be useful. It does not need to be perfect at it, or even particularly good. It just needs to do better than if you were to pick them without context yourself.

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