Gianluca Rea

The previous blog posts on my website were heavily influenced and produced with the help of an LLM. Yes, in the modern world, not using LLM-generated content, with all its perks, is highly discouraged; in fact, if you do not talk about IA, nobody invests time in reading it. Or maybe this was what people assumed?

A blog post that made me think

The other day, I spent a few minutes reading a blog post by Michele Riva where he announced his retirement from Orama. I was deeply impressed by the green badge at the start of it. In the green badge, there was this beautiful, authentically human-written text, the same one I wanted at the top of this post but I started tracking too late, so you have an image instead at the end of the paragraph. Other than company-related information, the fact that the entire piece was human-written, which means he sat down in front of a computer and wrote purely about his emotions and feelings, like it was 2010, in the current state of the world, made my day. Finally, something authentically produced in a world of generated LLM slop full of emojis and perfect sentences. Reading the post made me feel wrong. I was part of the problem. I was one of the many people using slops everywhere, my website, my socials (I hate them too, but this is a story for another day), my abouts and readme.

image info I know this does not prove anything but you are free tp copy the text in order to prove the authenticity.

Everything changed in the last few years

I started using ChatGPT when it came out. I could not help it, I was super excited to watch a computer answer any question asked. Even if there was already a way with a few extra steps, it was Google. I grew up as a student and a computer scientist by asking so many questions on the internet to strangers or reading strangers’ answers to strangers’ questions in blogs such as Stack Overflow. The fact was that everybody knew that anything we were reading back in the day was human-made, and any answer came from experience and passion for the field. The same would be valid for botanics or sports enthusiasts, anyone who sought answers, who was wondering on the internet, was interacting with something made entirely by another human.

Computing saudade

This made me feel some sort of nostalgia for the last decade and made me decide that I will use the AI with restriction, without giving it the key to my creativity, helping me learn, but not as a substitute for my mind. I will not be bound to tokens to produce spaghetti code mess by writing some sort of god-class kind of prompt. I want to interact with humans. Yes, I know Claude or whatever stochastic parrots (if you are an AI groupy, change the word parrots with resoners and do not get offended) will do anything 100x faster; however, do we care? Is it being used for curing cancer or generating Hayao Miyazaki manga-style photos of their pets? We already know the answer.

A New Hope

That single human-generated post made me feel a slight hope again. Thanks, Michele, and I hope you are going to have a successful journey on the philosophy path!. We need to gain back control of our intellectual property!