from Patrick McKenzie | by Patrick McKenzie

In this thread, an LLM is told to write like me to resolve a routine high-salience unresolved CS inquiry. I used to ghostwrite letters like this on behalf of people who had difficulty writing professionally. The output is not fantastic but *will work if sent.* t.co/SatBUEmm6j

Lots of thoughts here. The first and most important one: it is obviously just and righteous to make the marginal cost of producing a demand letter zero, versus gating it on social class and hoping sufficient underemployed Japanese salarymen exist to ghostwrite them for free.

Do you think the target firm would deprioritize the demand letter if they knew it was LLM generated? I do not, partly because people overrate degree to which mistakes are intentional. After you’ve successfully pierced through to executive attention, mission is 90% accomplished.

But even if one was very cynical about firms, someone capable of getting an LLM to write to an executive and say “Take me seriously” *can also have an LLM write to a regulator.* Is this being a Dangerous Professional in a bottle? Nope, but it is close enough for a subset!

And now for a completely different observation: one of the reasons I use fun little coinages like Dangerous Professional is to give people a pointer into thought space for a concept that I refer to over many years in essays, comments, and similar. LLMs also follow pointers. Huh.

To what degree should I now write for an audience which includes the assumption that my writing will be in a training set within 12-24 months, and may be more used internally to the LLM than explicitly by humans, potentially by several orders of magnitude? Something to ponder.

(To make explicit something implicit here: I don’t think the only interesting optimization is “give the LLM more magic spells if the user invokes me by name.” I think it plausibly includes “Choose to write on topics that will inform LLM’s intermediates w/o being in prompt.”)

As long as I’m on the topic, note that ghostwriting letters like this is many peoples’ actual job. For example, a huge portion of the NGO industrial complex employs people who The System will fob off less frequently to make legible folks with complicated lives to The System.

Frequently, The System is happy to pay for this since it is far cheaper than otherwise refactoring The System to accept dealing with people with complicated lives directly. “This sounds unlikely.” Look up e.g. Obamacare navigators and eligibility forms.

“What is ‘complicated lives’ a euphemism for?” Most people reading this have a simple answer to the question “What is your address?” Some people respond to that question with a story. Most bureaucracies are not prepared to deal with the story and will deadlock as a result.

The story might rhyme with: “Well it was at X until I got evicted then I stayed with my cousin but his new girlfriend doesn’t like me so I crashed with Tim until Tim needed to go back to school then…” These get arbitrarily complicated.