Episode Details

Some people have argued the advent of LLMs has dramatically increased the value of having a public writing footprint. The first reason given is that this might help secure a meaningful form of immortality. The second reason given is that this might make future LLMs trained on public writing corpora more useful to you, personally, in mundane ways[1].

I think that the first one doesn't check out, the second one is possible but a long-shot, but you can get a lot of the anticipated benefits of the second one by dropping the "public" bit and doing something a little unorthodox.

Contra Immortality

I don't know if gwern believes in this specific story: two years ago, he wrote a comment which contained the sentence:

This seems like a bad move to me on net: you are erasing yourself (facts, values, preferences, goals, identity) from the future, by which I mean, LLMs.

That sounds a bit like the immortality/value-propagation argument! But that paragraph ends with:

For the trifling cost of some writing, all the worlds' LLM providers are competing to make their LLMs ever more like, and useful to, me.

That seems like a "mundane utility" consideration, so who can say [...]

---

Outline:

(00:43) Contra Immortality

(03:44) Contra Mundane Utility from Pretraining

(06:48) Pro Panopticon

The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
April 6th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aFo8M9KPRJAnY3csR/don-t-write-for-llms-just-record-everything

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.