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0 pointssuperamit11mo ago0 comments

Wow, so many assumptions here that don't make sense to me, but I realize we all have different perspectives on this stuff. Thank you for sharing yours! I really do appreciate it.

I won't go line-by-line here defending the cutesy copy and all that since it's not my job to argue with people on the internet either… but on a few key points that interested me:

- language support: I don't believe we're being disingenuous. Sudowrite works well in many languages. We have authors teaching classes on using Sudowrite in multiple languages. In fact, there's one on German tomorrow and one on French next week: https://lu.ma/sudowrite Our community runs classes nearly every day.

- student usage - We do sometimes offer a student discount when people write in to ask for it, and we've had multiple collage and high school classes use sudowrite in writing classes. We'll often give free accounts to the class when professors reach out. I don't believe AI use in education is unethical. I think AI as copilot is the future of most creative work, and it will seem silly for teachers not to incorporate these tools in the future. Many already are! All that said, we do not market to students as you claim. Not because we think it's immoral -- we do not -- but because we think they have better options. ChatGPT is free, students are cheap. We make a professional tool for professional authors and it is not free nor cheap. It would not make sense for our business to market to students.

- press quotes -- Yes, we quote journalists because they're the ones who've written articles about us. You can google "New Yorker sudowrite" etc and see the articles. Some of those journalists also write fiction -- that one who wrote the New Yorker feature had a book he co-wrote with AI reviewed in The New York Times.

> I then noticed it was last updated in 2020? I highly doubt you guys have been around for that long

So many of these objections feel bizarre to me because they're trivial to fact-check. Here's a New York Times article that mentions us, written in 2020. We were one of the first companies to use LLMs in this wave and sought and gained access to GPT-3 prior to public API availability. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intell...

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creesch11mo ago

> Wow, so many assumptions here that don't make sense to me, but I realize we all have different perspectives on this stuff.

I realize they don't make sense to you, otherwise the website would contain different information. If I had to try to frame it more clearly I'd say that for a company whose core product revolves around clear writing, your website's information is surprisingly vague and evasive in some areas. I simply think it would make for a stronger and confident message if that information was just there. Which, might I remind you, I have said is true for many companies selling LLM based services and products.

> language support: I don't believe we're being disingenuous. Sudowrite works well in many languages.

I am sure it does, those languages with the highest presence in the training data. French and German doing well doesn't surprise me given the numbers I have seen there. I think this FAQ section could be much clearer here.

> we do not market to students as you claim.

I guess that your pricing page specifically has a "Hobby & Student" tier which mentions "Perfect for people who write for fun or for school" doesn't count as marketing to students?

> I don't believe AI use in education is unethical.

Neither do I, if it is part of the curriculum and the goal. For many language related course including writing using assistive tooling, certainly tooling that highly impacts style defeats the didactic purpose.

> So many of these objections feel bizarre to me because they're trivial to fact-check. Here's a New York Times article that mentions us, written in 2020. We were one of the first companies to use LLMs in this wave and sought and gained access to GPT-3 prior to public API availability.

Okay, I already went out of my way to go over the entire website because you asked. I am not doing a hit piece on you guys specifically as I specifically said you just happened to be linked by the other person. It was an assumption on my side, but reasonable given the age of most LLM companies. More importantly, that is not the main point I am making there anyway.

Since 2020 the landscape around LLMs changed drastically. Including the way privacy is being handled and looked at. You would think that this would result in changes to the policy in that period. In fact, I would think that the introduction of your own model would at the very least warrant some changes there. Not to mention that using copy pasted boilerplate for 5 years to me does not give a confident signal about how seriously you are taking privacy.

While you are not obligated to respond to me as I am just one random stranger on the internet. I would be remiss if I didn't make it clear that it is the overall tone and combined points that make me critical. Not just the ones that piqued your interest.

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