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 [...]
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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.
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First published:
April 6th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aFo8M9KPRJAnY3csR/don-t-write-for-llms-just-record-everything
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
