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Vaniver comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong Discussion

46 Post author: Vaniver 03 February 2016 05:34AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 05 February 2016 03:37:37PM 1 point [-]

This is such a technologically good idea that it must happen within a few years.

So, early on people were excited about machine translation--yeah, it wasn't great, but you could just have human translators start from the machine translation and fix the mess.

The human translators hated it, because it moved from engaging intellectual work to painful copyediting. I think a similar thing will be true for article writers.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 05 February 2016 05:54:06PM 1 point [-]

The human translators hated it, because it moved from engaging intellectual work to painful copyediting. I think a similar thing will be true for article writers.

The talented ones, yes, but there will be a lot of temptation for the also rans. You've got a blogging deadline and nothing is coming together, why not fire up the bot and get topical article ideas? "It's just supplying facts and links, and the way it weaves them into a coherent structure, well I could have done that, of course I could, but why keep a dog and bark myself? The real creative work is in the writing." That's how I see the slippery slope starting, into the Faustian pact.

Comment author: Vaniver 05 February 2016 09:53:13PM 5 points [-]

why keep a dog and bark myself?

I... have never heard this idiom before, and now want to use it all the time.