nobe4 / Posts / LLM and credits _

 |  Tech Philosophy Work  |  Disclaimer

As I’ve been blogging more, I’ve received the same comment many times:

It sounds like you’re writing it yourself, not with an LLM.

Yes, and thank you, I guess? Even if I did, I would not mention it.

In my work and in OSS communities, LLMs are everywhere. It is a popular way for people to write their code, tickets, and documents. Commit histories are full of Co-authored-by: LLM.

I think giving credits is important, but regardless of my usage of LLM, I do not give it1 credit.

I use LLM in two main ways:

My usage of LLM is very similar to that of a tool: reliable in its execution, and expected in its output. I use LLM exclusively so that it can serve me, personally. I like learning, and need to understand what I do.

I am also lucky to enjoy the manual activity of writing code. It is almost never a burden.

I’ve always had a very soft spot for programming, and writing code feels artistic at times. Find a definition of art that you relate to, it will probably fit my feelings for programming.

Some examples

  • “Art is that which creates beauty.”

    Code can be very beautiful, in the same way that code can be very ugly. Elegant code flows, and effects well.

  • “Art is the artist’s performance.”

    I regularly rewatch Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich, which is live poetry, painting, and programming at once.

    Some artists now incorporate coding as a musical instrument.

  • “Art is that which creates emotions.”

    The Eureka effect is very common amongst developers, as we understand new concepts. It is exhilarating.

  • “I would create art even if I wasn’t paid.”

    Yup, same.

  • “It’s not useful.”

    Watch me write the most useless piece of code just for the joy of being able to do so.

Some people view code as a means to an end. I agree with this view: code is a tool. But sometimes, code is also the product, like a violin, or a vintage camera.

Authorship is really important to me. Whenever I make something, it becomes a part of who I am. I rarely acknowledge the help of my tools. In the vast majority of cases, they matter less than the result. I create best with a specific setup but I could also do it without.

Authorship also means that I can stand by my production. It is not perfect, probably not great, but it is the best I did here and now. I recognize that this creative process happens in my head exclusively, and that my body brings it out into the world.

If LLM brings a unique advantage to a problem that I could not have solved without it, great! I want to give it credit and understand why in this case it was the only thing that worked. However, LLM is not in my head, and is not part of the creative process, despite potentially influencing it. So far, what I gained from using an LLM was only time2, not insights.

If credit must always be given to an LLM, it is only fair that it would also be given to any thing that made a significantly positive impact on my work. Similarly to what happens when you type google.com on your browser?, listing everything is overly verbose and unparseable.

For the lolz, here it is.

This lists all the things that contributed (in significant parts) to the writing of this text. I made the list from the top of my head (except for some dates that I had to check). Don’t be mad if yours is left out.

  • The big bang (~13.8 billion years ago)
  • Matter (~13.8 billion years ago)
  • Stars (~13.6 billion years ago)
  • Planets (~4.6 billion years ago)
  • The Earth (~4.5 billion years ago)
  • Life (~3.8 billion years ago)
  • Eyes (~540 million years ago)
  • Brain (~500 million years ago)
  • Hands (~2 million years ago)
  • Human intelligence (~300,000 years ago)
  • Human knowledge (~100,000 BCE)
  • Human societies (~10,000 BCE)
  • Writing (~3,400 BCE)
  • Mathematics (~3,000 BCE)
  • Philosophy (~600 BCE)
  • Logic (~350 BCE)
  • The printing press (1440)
  • Programming (1843)
  • The keyboard (1868)
  • Electricity (~1879)
  • The screen (1897)
  • The computer (1945)
  • The transistor (1947)
  • The Operating System (1956)
  • The integrated circuit (1958)
  • Vi (1976)
  • Internet (~1983)
  • Being born (~1990)
  • Having a well-off family (~1990)
  • Linux (1991)
  • Vim (1991)
  • Le site du zero (1999)
  • Education (2000)
  • Wikipedia (2001)
  • NixOS (2003)
  • Markdown (2004)
  • Git (2005)
  • GitHub (2008)
  • Wayland (2008)
  • Work (2009)
  • Neovim (2014)
  • Planck (2015)
  • QMK (2015)
  • LSP (2016)
  • Kitty terminal (2017)
  • LLM (2017)
  • Hyprland (2022)
  • Not being dead (TBD)

LLM is only a drop in the bucket of significance that shapes my creation, and giving it credits is unfair to everything else that had a similar, if not larger, impact.

In many other forms of art, I think we should favor human expression. We will use tools, that’s fine. But I’d rather not give credit and pretend an LLM is essential to my creation.

Thanks to Thomas and Masha for reviewing this.

  1. It being the model, the interface I’m using, the training data, the company behind it, etc. ↩︎

  2. And saving time is great, I love it. ↩︎