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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
blackhaj7 wrote 2 days ago:
I used to be really good at spotting it but my AI radar is getting less
effective now. Often I donât notice until late in an article which is
very annoying.
There are some videos on Instagram that I didnât notice were AI until
my wife told me!
If I want AI content, I will go to an AI. The only good outcome is that
I am spending way less time on social media because so much of it is
now AI
jdlyga wrote 2 days ago:
If you use AI to write a blog post, I'll use AI to summarize it.
dankobgd wrote 2 days ago:
Normal websites are not even findable now
jibal wrote 2 days ago:
I see no evidence or logical argument here. You have feelings ... fine.
Mine are different.
akst wrote 2 days ago:
With the exception of using AI to proof read, I agree.
In terms of proof reading, I just mean proof reading, not rewriting
anything. especially not using the output verbatim for suggested fixes.
And the author should ensure they retain their writing style & be
assertive with their discretion on what corrections they should make.
jeromie wrote 2 days ago:
I had to go take a two-hour walk to calm down after my boss sent me a
project proposal that was just ChatGPT gobbledygook.
invisibleink wrote 2 days ago:
YES and, also let's not use printing press, photography, word
processors, spell checkers, internet and search engines because they
lack human touch, make us lazy, prevent deep thinking blah blah...
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
Just because all those other inventions didn't wreck humanity doesn't
mean this one won't.
invisibleink wrote 2 days ago:
The point is, every new technology attracts its share of romantic
skeptics, and every time they fail then they retreat to the same
tired line:
"Just because all those other inventions didn't wreck humanity
doesn't mean this one won't"
But thatâs not an argument, itâs an evasion.
Given past inventions didnât destroy us despite similar concerns,
then the burden is on you to show why this one is fundamentally
different and uniquely catastrophic.
yalogin wrote 3 days ago:
This is unavoidable. Individual blogs may not use AI but companies that
live on user engagement will absolutely use them and churn out all
types of content
fullshark wrote 3 days ago:
I avoid it by not reading open web blogs. Eventually open web
message boards (like this one) will be fully contaminated as well and
I'll move to discord or group chats I suppose.
sinuhe69 wrote 3 days ago:
DeepL has the option âCorrect onlyâ and it can become quite handy
for non-native speakers.
K0balt wrote 3 days ago:
It wouldnât be so bad if it wasnât unbearable to read.
dustypotato wrote 3 days ago:
By all means , use AI. Just don't make it longer than it needs to be
gngoo wrote 3 days ago:
Iâm very happy that I can post ai generated blog posts from my
writing. And Iâm now averaging 500 unique daily visitors and quite
some repeat visits and subscribers with it too. If it wasnât for AI,
then Iâd go back to where it was before AI⦠10 visitors per month?
I donât like writing, so I collaborate with AI to write entire blog
posts. I donât have AI ârefine itâ, I usually tell AI to take
what Iâm rambling about for 1000 words and rewrite it in my own
style, cadence, rhythm and vibe. So I can generate 3-5 blog posts per
week. Which surprisingly rank well, get posted on LinkedIn, Twitter and
Reddit by others. So the amount of people that enjoy reading
AI-generated blog posts likely is starting to outpace those who donât
at this rate.
bn-l wrote 3 days ago:
LLM generated emails are probably the worst
vesterthacker wrote 3 days ago:
When you criticize, it helps to understand the otherâs perspective.
I suppose I am writing to you because I can no longer speak to anyone.
As people turn to technology for their every word, the space between
them widens, and I am no exception. Everyone speaks, yet no one
listens. The noise fills the room, and still it feels empty.
Parents grow indifferent, and their children learn it before they can
name it. A sickness spreads, quiet and unseen, softening every heart it
touches. I once believed I was different. I told myself I still
remembered love, that I still felt warmth somewhere inside. But perhaps
I only remember the idea of it. Perhaps feeling itself has gone.
I used to judge the new writers for chasing meaning in words. I thought
they wrote out of vanity. Now I see they are only trying to feel
something, anything at all. I watch them, and sometimes I envy them,
though I pretend not to. They are lost, yes, but they still search. I
no longer do.
The world is cold, and I have grown used to it. I write to remember,
but the words answer nothing. They fall silent, as if ashamed. Maybe
you understand. Maybe it is the same with you.
Maybe writing coldly is simply compassion, a way of not letting others
feel your pain.
Wowfunhappy wrote 3 days ago:
I agree with everything except this part:
> No, don't use it to fix your grammar
How is this substantially different from using spellcheck?
I don't see any problem with asking an LLM to check for and fix
grammatical errors.
tdiff wrote 3 days ago:
> Here is a secret: most people want to help you succeed.
Most people dont care.
foxfired wrote 3 days ago:
Earlier this year, I used AI to help me improve some of my writing on
my blog. It just has a better way of phrasing ideas than me. But when I
came back to read those same blog posts a couple months later, you know
after I've encountered a lot more blog posts that I didn't know were AI
generated at the time, I saw the pattern. It sounds like the exact same
author, +- some degree of obligatory humor, writing all over the web
with the same voice.
I've found a better approach to using AI for writing. First, if I don't
bother writing it, why should you bother reading it? LLMs can be great
soundboards. Treat them as teachers, not assistants. Your teacher is
not gonna write your essay for you, but he will teach you how to write,
and spot the parts that need clarification. I will share my process in
the coming days, hopefully it will get some traction.
pasteldream wrote 3 days ago:
> people are far kinder than you may think
Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People are harsh,
and how much grace they give you has more to do with who you are than
what you say.
That aside, the worst problem with LLM-generated text isnât that
itâs less human, itâs that (by default) itâs full of filler,
including excessive repetition and contrived analogies.
zenel wrote 3 days ago:
> Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People are
harsh, and how much grace they give you has more to do with who you
are than what you say.
You okay friend?
pasteldream wrote 3 days ago:
Yes.
LeoPanthera wrote 3 days ago:
Anyone can make AI generated content. It requires no effort at all.
Therefore, if I or anyone else wanted to see it, I would simply do it
myself.
I don't know why so many people can't grasp that.
corporat wrote 3 days ago:
The most thoughtful critique of this post isnât that AI is inherently
badâbut that its use shouldnât be conflated with laziness or
cowardice.
Fact: Professional writers have used grammar tools, style guides, and
even assistants for decades. AI simply automates some of these
functions faster. Would we say Hemingway was lazy for using a
typewriter? Noâweâd say he leveraged tools.
AI doesnât create thoughts; it drafts ideas. The writer still
curates, edits, and imbues meaningâjust like a journalist editing a
reporterâs notes or a designer refining Photoshop output. Tools
donât diminish creativityâthey democratize access to it.
That said: if youâre outsourcing your thinking to AI (e.g., asking an
LLM to write your thesis without engaging), then yes, youâve lost
something. But complaining about AI itself misunderstands the problem.
TL;DR: Typewriters spit out prose tooâbut no one blames writers for
using them.
rideontime wrote 3 days ago:
For transparency, what role did AI serve in drafting this comment?
corporat wrote 3 days ago:
AI was used to analyze logical fallacies in the original blog post.
I didnât use it to draft contentâjust to spot the straw man,
false dilemma, and appeal-to-emotion tactics in real time.
Ironically, this exact request wouldâve fit the blogâs own
arguments: "AI is lazy" / "AI undermines thought." But since I was
using AI as a diagnostic tool (not a creative one), it doesnât
count.
Self-referential irony? Maybe. But at least Iâm being
transparent. :)
rideontime wrote 2 days ago:
I'd merely noticed that your comment mimicked the writing style
of popular LLMs. Guessing you spend a lot of time with them?
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
[flagged]
OptionOfT wrote 3 days ago:
What am I even reading if it is AI generated?
The reason AI is so hyped up at the moment is that you give it little,
it gives you back more.
But then whose blog-post am I reading? What really is the point?
gr4vityWall wrote 3 days ago:
Is it just me, or is OP posting a bunch of links on HN for karma
farming? Some of seem to be AI-generated, like this one:
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45724022
throwawa14223 wrote 3 days ago:
I should never spend more effort reading something than the author
spent writing it. With AI-generated texts the author effort approaches
zero.
hereme888 wrote 3 days ago:
You are absolutely right!
Jokes aside, good article.
tasuki wrote 3 days ago:
> It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts,
ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something spit
out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too
lazy to write it yourself.
Agreed fully. In fact it'd be quite rude to force you to even read
something written by another human being!
I'm all for your right to decide what is and isn't worth reading, be it
ai or human generated.
johanam wrote 3 days ago:
AI generated text like a plume of pollution spreading through the web.
Little we can do to keep it at bay. Perhaps transparency is the answer?
madcaptenor wrote 3 days ago:
ai;dr
voidhorse wrote 3 days ago:
If you struggle with communication, using AI is fine. What matters is
caring about the result. You cannot just throw it over the fence.
AI content in itself isn't insulting, but as TFA hits upon, pushing
sloppy work you didn't bother to read or check at all yourself is
incredibly insulting and just communicates to others that you don't
think their time is valuable. This holds for non-AI generated work as
well, but the bar is higher by default since you at least had to
generate that content yourself and thus at least engage with it on a
basic level. AI content is also needlessly verbose, employs trite and
stupid analogies constantly, and in general has the nauseating, bland,
soulless corporate professional communication style that anyone with
even a mote of decent literary taste detests.
akshatjiwan wrote 3 days ago:
I don't know. Content matters more to me. Many of the articles that I
read have so little information density that I find it hard to justify
spending time on them.I often use AI to summarise text for me and then
lookup particular topics in detail if I like.
Skimming was pretty common before AI too. People used to read and share
notes instead of entire texts. AI has just made it easier.
Reading long texts is not a problem for me if its engaging. But often I
find they just go on and on without getting to the point. Especially
news articles.They are the worst.
AnimalMuppet wrote 3 days ago:
I mean, if you used an AI to generated it, you shouldn't mind if my AI
reads it, rather than me.
KindDragon wrote 3 days ago:
> Everyone wants to help each other. And people are far kinder than you
may think.
I want to believe that. When I was a student, I built a simple HTML
page with a feedback form that emailed me submissions. I received
exactly one message. It arrived encoded; I eagerly decoded it and found
a profanity-filled rant about how terrible my site was. That taught me
that kindness online isnât the default - itâs a choice. I still aim
for it, but I donât assume it.
netule wrote 3 days ago:
Iâve found that the kinds of people who leave comments or send
emails tend to fall into two categories:
1. Theyâre assholes.
2. They care enough to speak up, but only when the thing stops
working as expected.
I think the vast majority of users/readers are good people who just
donât feel like engaging. The minority are vocal assholes.
RIMR wrote 3 days ago:
>No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations
Okay, I can understand even drawing the line at grammar correction, in
that not all "correct" grammar is desirable or personal enough to
convey certain ideas.
But not for translation? AI translation, in my experience, has proven
to be more reliable than other forms of machine translation, and
personally learning a new language every time I need to read something
non-native to me isn't reasonable.
deadbabe wrote 3 days ago:
If youâre going to AI generate your blog, the least you could do is
use a fine tuned LLM that matches your style. Most people just toss a
prompt into GPT 5 and call it a day.
nazgu1 wrote 3 days ago:
I agree, but if I would have to type one most insulting things with AI
is scraping data without consent to train models, so people no longer
enjoy blog posting :(
dcow wrote 3 days ago:
Itâs not that people donât value creativity and expression. Itâs
that for 90% of the communication AI is being used for, the slightly
worse AI gen version that took 30 min to produce isnât worse enough
to justify spending 4 hours on the hand rolled version. Thatâs the
reality weâre living through right now. People are eating up the
productivity boosts like candy.
wltr wrote 3 days ago:
Itâs a cherry on top to see these silly AI-generated posts to be
seriously discussed in here.
rootedbox wrote 3 days ago:
I fixed it.
It appears inconsiderateâperhaps even dismissiveâto present me, a
human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions, and
experiences, with content that reads as though it were assembled by a
lexical randomizer. When you rely on automation instead of your own
creativity, you deny both of us the richness of genuine human
expression.
Isnât there pride in creating something that is authentically yours?
In writing, even imperfectly, and knowing the result carries your
voice? That pride is irreplaceable.
Please, do not use artificial systems merely to correct your grammar,
translate your ideas, or âimproveâ what you believe you cannot.
Make errors. Feel discomfort. Learn from those experiences. That is, in
essence, the human condition.
Human beings are inherently empathetic. We want to help one another.
But when you interpose a sterile, mechanized intermediary between
yourself and your readers, you block that natural empathy.
Hereâs something to remember: most people genuinely want you to
succeed. Fear often stops you from seeking help, convincing you that
competence means solitude. It doesnât. Intelligent people know when
to ask, when to listen, and when to contribute. They build meaningful,
reciprocal relationships.
So, from one human to anotherâfrom one consciousness of love, fear,
humor, and curiosity to anotherâI ask: if you must use AI, keep it to
the quantitative, to the mundane. Let your thoughts meet the world
unfiltered. Let them be challenged, shaped, and strengthened by
experience.
After all, the truest ideas are not the ones perfectly written.
Theyâre the ones that have been felt.
tasuki wrote 3 days ago:
Heh, nice. I suppose that was AI-generated? Your beginning:
> It appears inconsiderateâperhaps even dismissiveâto present me,
a human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions, and
experiences, with content that reads as though it were assembled by a
lexical randomizer.
I like that beginning than the original:
> It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts,
ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something
spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you
were too lazy to write it yourself.
No one's making anyone read anything (I hope). And yes, it might be
inconsiderate or perhaps even dismissive to present a human with
something written by AI. The AI was able to phrase this much better
than the human! Thank you for presenting me with that, I guess?
marstall wrote 3 days ago:
also: mind-numbing.
somat wrote 3 days ago:
It is the duality of generated content.
It feels great to use. But it also feels incredibly shitty to have it
used on you.
My recommendation. Just give the prompt. If if your readers want to
expand it they can do so. don't pollute others experience by passing
the expanded form around. Nobody enjoys that.
jackdoe wrote 3 days ago:
I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people visiting
your content, and there is close to zero cost to make it. It is the
same problem with music, in fact I search youtube music only with
before:2022.
I recently wrote about the dead internet [1] out of frustration.
I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity",
or create rings of trust for humans, but now I think the ship has
sailed.
Today a colleague was sharing their screen on google docs and a big
"USE GEMINI AI TO WRITE THE DOCUMENT" button was front and center. I am
fairly certain that by end of year most words you read will be tokens.
I am working towards moving my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist, and
after that just using local indexes with some datahorading. (squid,
wikipedia, SO, rfcs, libc, kernel.git etc)
Maybe in the future we just exchange local copies of our local
"internet" via sdcards, like in Cuba's Sneakernet[1] El Paquete
Semenal[2]. [1] [2]
HTML [1]: https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
HTML [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
tasuki wrote 3 days ago:
Uhh, that's a lot of links: [1] Where are the explanations what all
of them mean? What is (nothing) vs `maxi` vs `mini` vs `nopic`? What
is `100` vs `all` vs `top1m` vs `top` vs `wp1-0.8`?
HTML [1]: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/
hamdingers wrote 3 days ago:
[1] Mini is the introduction and infobox of all articles, nopic is
the full articles with no pictures, maxi is full articles with
(small) images. Other tags are categories (football, geography,
etc.)
100 is the top 100 articles, top1m is top 1 million, 0.8 is
(inexplicably) the top 45k articles.
My recommendation: sort by size and download the largest one you
can accommodate in the language you prefer.
wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08.zim is all wikipedia articles, with
images, as of 2025-08 and it's a paltry 111G.
Kiwix publishes a library here, but it's equally unhelpful:
HTML [1]: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/README
HTML [2]: https://library.kiwix.org/
gosub100 wrote 3 days ago:
> thought we should do "proof of humanity"
I thought about this in another context and then I realized: what
system is going to declare you're human or not? AI of course
wenbin wrote 3 days ago:
It's similarly insulting to listen to your AI-generated fake
podcasts[0]. Ten minutes spent on them is ten minutes wasted.
[0] AI-generated fake podcasts (mostly via NotebookLM)
HTML [1]: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fake-...
masly wrote 4 days ago:
In a related problem:
I recently interviewed a person for a role as senior platform
architect. The person was already working for a semi reputable company.
In the first interview, the conversation was okay but my gut just told
me something was strange about this person.
We have the candidate a case to solve with a few diagrams, and to
prepare a couple slides to discuss the architecture.
The person came back with 12 diagrams, all AI generated, littered with
obvious AI âspellingâ/generation mistakes.
And when we questioned the person about why they think we would gain
trust and confidence in them with this obvious AI generated content,
they became even aggressive.
Needless to say it didnât end well.
The core problem is really how much time is now being wasted in
recruiting with people who âcheatâ or outright cheat.
We have had to design questions to counter AI cheating, and strategies
to avoid wasting time.
npteljes wrote 4 days ago:
I agree with the author. If I detect that the article is written by an
AI, I bounce off.
I similarly dislike other trickery as well, like ghostwriters, PR
articles in journalism, lip-syncing at concerts, and so on. Fuck off,
be genuine.
The thing why people are upset about AI is because AI can be used to
easily generate a lot of text, but its usage is rarely disclosed. So
then when someone discovers AI usage, there is no telling for the
reader of how much of the article is signal, and how much is noise.
Without AI, it would hinge on the expertise or experience of the
author, but now with AI involved, the bets are off.
The other thing is that reading someone's text involves a little bit of
forming a connection with them. But then discovering that AI (or
someone else) have written the text, it feels like they betrayed that
connection.
jschveibinz wrote 4 days ago:
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here yet, and I don't want to
be pedantic, but for centuries famous artists, musicians, writers, etc.
have used assistants to do their work for them. The list includes (but
in no way is this complete): DaVinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens,
Raphael, Warhol, Koons, O'Keefe, Hepworth, Hockney, Stephen King,
Clancy, Dumas, Patterson, Elvis, Elton John, etc. etc. Further, most
scientific, engineering and artistic innovations are made "on the
shoulders of giants." As the saying goes: there is nothing new under
the sun. Nothing. I suggest that the use of an LLM for writing is
just another tool of human creativity to be used freely and often to
produce even more interesting and valuable content.
pertymcpert wrote 3 days ago:
No thatâs complete rubbish, itâs a bad analogy.
pessimizer wrote 3 days ago:
Counterpoint: It's a fine thought, and an excellent analogy.
pertymcpert wrote 2 days ago:
Believe it or not, your two's wrongs don't make a right.
adverbly wrote 4 days ago:
As someone who briefly wrote a bunch of AI generated blog posts, I kind
of agree... The voicing is terrible, and the only thing it it does
particularly well is replace the existing slop.
I'm starting to pivot and realize that quality is actually way more
important than I thought, especially in a world where it is very easy
to create things of low quality using AI.
Another place I've noticed it is in hiring. There are so many low
quality applications its insane. One application with a full GitHub and
profile and cover letter and or video which actually demonstrates that
you understand where you are applying is worth more than 100 low
quality ones.
It's gone from a charming gimmick to quickly becoming an ick.
throwawayffffas wrote 4 days ago:
I already found it insulting to read seo spam blog posts. The ai
involved is beside the point.
jquaint wrote 4 days ago:
> Do you not enjoy the pride that comes with attaching your name to
something you made on your own? It's great!
This is like saying a photographer shouldn't find the sunset they
photographed pretty or be proud of the work, because they didn't
personally labor to paint the image of it.
A lot more goes into a blog post than the actual act of typing the
context out.
Lazy work is always lazy work, but its possible to make work you are
proud of with AI, in the same way you can create work you are proud of
with a camera
cyrialize wrote 4 days ago:
I'm reading a blog because I'm interested in the voice a writer has.
If I'm finding that voice boring, I'll stop reading - whether or not AI
was used.
The generic AI voice, and by that I mean very little prompting to add
any "flavor", is boring.
Of course I've used AI to summarize things and give me information,
like when I'm looking for a specific answer.
In the case of blogs though, I'm not always trying to find an "answer",
I'm just interested in what you have to say and I'm reading for
pleasure.
latchkey wrote 4 days ago:
As a test, I used AI to rewrite their blog post, keeping the same tone
and context but fewer words. It got the point across, and I enjoyed it
more because I didn't have to read as much. I did edit it slightly to
make it a bit less obviously AI'ish...
---
Honestly, it feels rude to hand me something churned out by a lexical
bingo machine when you couldâve written it yourself. I'm a person
with thoughts, humor, contradictions, and experience not a content bin.
Don't you like the pride of making something that's yours? You should.
Don't use AI to patch grammar or dodge effort. Make the mistake. Feel
awkward. Learn. That's being human.
People are kinder than you think. By letting a bot speak for you, you
cut off the chance for connection.
Here's the secret: most people want to help you. You just don't ask.
You think smart people never need help. Wrong. The smartest ones know
when to ask and when to give.
So, human to human, save the AI for the boring stuff. Lead with your
own thoughts. The best ideas are the ones you've actually felt.
mirzap wrote 4 days ago:
This post could easily be generated by AI, no way to tell for sure. I'm
more insulted if the title or blog thumbnail is misleading, or if the
post is full of obvious nonsense, etc.
If a post contains valuable information that I learn from it, I don't
really care if AI wrote it or not. AI is just a tool, like any other
tool humans invented.
I'm pretty sure people had the same reaction 50 years ago, when the
first PCs started appearing: "It's insulting to see your calculations
made by personal electronic devices."
saltysalt wrote 4 days ago:
I'm pretty certain that the only thing reading my blog these days is
AI.
saint_fiasco wrote 4 days ago:
I sometimes share interesting AI conversations with my friends using
the "share" button on the AI websites. Often the back-and-forth is more
interesting than the final output anyway.
I think some people turn AI conversations into blog posts that they
pass off as their own because of SEO considerations. If Twitter didn't
discourage people sharing links, perhaps we would see a lot more tweet
threads that start with [1] ... and [2] ... instead of people trying to
pass off AI generated content as their own.
HTML [1]: https://chatgpt.com/share/
HTML [2]: https://claude.ai/share/
Kim_Bruning wrote 3 days ago:
I think the problem is lazy AI generated content.
The problem is that the current generation of tools "looks like
something" even with minimal effort. This makes people lazy. Actually
put in the effort and see what you get, with or without AI assist.
mucio wrote 4 days ago:
it's insulting to read text on a computer screen. I don't care if you
write like a 5 years old or if your message will need days or weeks to
reach me. Use a pen, a pencil and some paper.
jexe wrote 4 days ago:
Reading an AI blog post (or reddit post, etc) just signals that the
author actually just doesn't care that much about the subject.. which
makes me care less too.
vzaliva wrote 4 days ago:
It is similarly unsulting to read an ungrammatical blog post full of
misspelings. So I do not subscribe to the part of your argument "No,
don't use it to fix your grammar". Using AI to fix your grammar, if
done right, is the part of the learning process.
bn-l wrote 3 days ago:
Much less insulting than AI slop.
I can imagine itâs hard to see the nuance if youâre ESL but
itâs there.
dinkleberg wrote 4 days ago:
A critical piece of this is to ensure it is just fixing the grammar
and not rewriting it in its own AI voice is key. This is why I think
tools like grammarly or similar still have a useful edge over just
directly using an LLM as the UX let's you pick and choose which
suggestions to adopt. And they also provide context on why they are
making a given suggestion. It still often kills your "personal
voice", so you need to be judicious with its use.
photochemsyn wrote 4 days ago:
I like the author's idea that people should publish the prompts they
use to generate LLM output, not the output itself.
z7 wrote 4 days ago:
Hypothetically, what if the AI-generated blog post were better than
what the human author of the blog would have written?
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
Better how?
luisml77 wrote 4 days ago:
Who cares about your feelings, it's a blog post.
If the goal is to get the job done, then use AI.
Do you really want to waste precious time for so little return?
nhod wrote 4 days ago:
"I'm choosing to be 'insulted' by the existence of an arbitrary thing
in the universe and then upset by the insult I chose to ascribe to
it."
namirez wrote 4 days ago:
No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for
whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake.
Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us
human!
I do understand the reasoning behind being original, but why make
mistakes when we have tools to avoid them? That sounds like a strange
recommendation.
bn-l wrote 3 days ago:
These days a spelling mistake actually increases the chance Iâll
keep reading. I know you didnât just shit this out with chatgpt
then fart loudly and call it a day.
parliament32 wrote 4 days ago:
I'm looking forward to the (inevitable) AI detection browser plugin
that will mark the slop for me, at least that way I don't need to spend
the effort figuring out if it's AI content or not.
bluSCALE4 wrote 4 days ago:
This is how I feel about some LinkedIn folks that are going all in w/
AI.
braza wrote 4 days ago:
> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for
whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake.
Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us
human!
For essays, honestly, I do not feel so bad, because I can see that
other than some spaces like HN the quality of the average online writer
has dropped so much that I prefer to have some machine-assisted text
that can deliver the content.
However, my problem is with AI-generated code.
In most of the cases to create trivial apps, I think AI-generated code
will be OK to good; however, the issue that I'm seeing as a code
reviewer is that folks that you know their code design style are so
heavily reliant on AI-generated code that you are sure that they did
not write and do not understand the code.
One example: Working with some data scientists and researchers, most of
them used to write things on Pandas, some trivial for loops, and some
primitive imperative programming. Now, especially after Claude Code,
most of the things are vectorized, with some sort of variable naming
with way-compressed naming. Sometimes folks use Cython in some data
pipeline tasks or even using functional programming to an extreme.
Good performance is great, and leveling up the quality of the codebase
it's a net positive; however, I wonder in some scenario when things go
south and/or Claude code is not available if those folks will be able
to fix it.
rphv wrote 2 days ago:
You don't need to understand code for it to be useful, any more than
you need to know assembly to write Python.
holdenc137 wrote 4 days ago:
I assume this is a double-bluff and the blog post WAS written by an AI
o_O ?
wouldbecouldbe wrote 4 days ago:
I've always been bad at grammar, and wrote a lot of newsletters & blogs
for my first startups which always got great feedback, but also lots of
grammar complaints. Really happy GPT is so great at catching those
nowadays, saves me a lot of Grammar supports requests ;)
whshdjsk wrote 3 days ago:
Or just get better?
I donât know how someone can be nerdy enough to be on Hackernews,
but simultaneously not nerdy enough to pickup and intuit the rules of
English language from sheer osmosis.
wouldbecouldbe wrote 2 days ago:
Im not a native english speaker, but even in my own language I make
many mistakes. I'm happy I can spend my time coding instead of
going back to school :)
frstrtd_engnr wrote 4 days ago:
These days, my work routine looks something like this - a colleague
sends me a long, AI-generated PRD full of changes. When I ask him for
clarification, he stumbles through the explanation. Does he care at
all? I have no idea.
Frustrated, I just throw that mess straight at claude-code and tell it
to fix whatever nonsense it finds and do its best. It probably
implements 80â90% of what the doc says â and invents the rest. Not
that Iâd know, since I never actually read the original AI-generated
PRD myself.
In the end, no oneâs happy. The whole creative and development
process has lost that feeling of achievement, and nobody seems to care
about code quality anymore.
nickdothutton wrote 4 days ago:
If you are going to use AI to make a post, then please instruct it to
make that post as short and information-dense as possible. It's one
thing to read an AI summary but quite another to have to wade through
paragraphs of faux "personality" and "conversational writing" of the
sort that slop AIs regularly trowel out.
hiergiltdiestfu wrote 4 days ago:
Thank you! Heartfelt thank you!
causal wrote 4 days ago:
LinkedIn marketing was bad before AI, now half the content is just
generated emoji-ridden listicles
bhouston wrote 4 days ago:
I am not totally sure about this. I think that AI writing is just a
progression of current trends. Many things have made writing easier
and lower cost - printing press, typewriters, word processors,
grammer/spell checkers, electronic distribution.
This is just a continuation. It does tend to mean there is less effort
to produce the output and thus there is a value degradation, but this
has been true all along this technology trend.
I don't think we should be a purist as to how writing is produced.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
There's a bar somewhere to what serves meaningful benefit, surely?
magicalhippo wrote 4 days ago:
Well Firefox just got an AI summarizing feature, so thankfully I don't
have to...
neilv wrote 4 days ago:
I suspect that the majority of people who are shoveling BS in their
blogs aren't doing it because they actually want to think and write and
share and learn and be human; but rather, the sole purpose of the blog
is for SEO, or to promote the personal brand of someone who doesn't
want anything else.
Perhaps the author is speaking to the people who are only temporarily
led astray by the pervasive BS online and by the recent wildly popular
"cheating on your homework" culture?
snorbleck wrote 4 days ago:
this is great.
throwaway-0001 wrote 4 days ago:
For me itâs insulting not to use an AI to reply back. Iâd say 90%
of people would answer better with an AI assist in most business
environments. Maybe even personal.
Itâs really funny how many business deals would be better if people
would put the requests in an AI to explain what exactly is requested.
Most people are not able to answer and if theyâd use an AI they could
respond in a proper way without wasting everyoneâs time. But at least
not using an AI shows the competency (or better - incompetence) level.
Itâs also sad that I need to tell people to put my message in an AI
to donât ask me useless questions. And AI can fill most of the gaps
people donât get it. You might say my requests are not proper, but
then how an AI can figure out what I want to say? I also put my
requests in an AI when I can and can create eli5 explanations of the
requests âfor dummiesâ
Frotag wrote 4 days ago:
The way I view it is that the author is trying to explain their mental
model, but there's only so much you can fit into prose. It's my
responsibility to fill in the missing assumptions / understand why X
implies Y. And all the little things like consistent word choice, tone,
and even the mistakes helps with this. But mix in LLMs and now there's
another layer / slightly different mental model I have to isolate,
digest, and merge with the author's.
keepamovin wrote 4 days ago:
So don't read it.
iMax00 wrote 4 days ago:
I read anything as long as there is new and useful information
jdnordy wrote 4 days ago:
Anyone else suspicious this might be satire ironically written by an
LLM?
Charmizard wrote 4 days ago:
Idk how I feel about this take, tbh. Do things the old way because I
like them that way seems like poor reasoning.
If folks figure out a way to produce content that is human, contextual
and useful... by all means.
amrocha wrote 4 days ago:
Tangential, but when I heard the Zoom CEO say that in the future
youâll just send your AI double to a meeting for you I couldnât
comprehend how a real human being could ever think that that would be
an ok thing to suggest.
The absolute bare minimum respect you can have for someone whoâs
making time for you is to make time for them. Offloading that to AI is
the equivalent of shitting on someoneâs plate and telling them to eat
it.
I struggle everyday with the thought that the richest most powerful
people in the world will sell their souls to get a bit richer.
iamwil wrote 4 days ago:
Lately, I've been writing more on my blog, and it's been helpful to
change the way that I do it.
Now, I take a cue from school, and write the outline first. With an
outline, I can use a prompt for the LLM to play the role of a
development editor to help me critique the throughline. This is helpful
because I tend to meander, if I'm thinking at the level of words and
sentences, rather than at the level of an outline.
Once I've edited the outline for a compelling throughline, I can then
type out the full essay in my own voice. I've found it much easier to
separate the process into these two stages.
Before outline critiquing: [1] After outline critiquing: [2] I'm still
tweaking the developement editor. I find that it can be too much of a
stickler on the form of the throughline.
HTML [1]: https://interjectedfuture.com/destroyed-at-the-boundary/
HTML [2]: https://interjectedfuture.com/the-best-way-to-learn-might-be-s...
whshdjsk wrote 3 days ago:
And yet, Will, with all due respect, I canât hear your voice in any
of the 10 articles I skimmed. Itâs the same rhetorical structure
found in every other LLM blog.
I suppose if to make you feel like itâs better (even if it
isnât), and you enjoy it, go ahead. But know this: we can tell.
iamwil wrote 3 days ago:
The essays go back a couple years. How did I use LLMs to write in
2021 and 2022?
If you're talking about something more recent, there's only two
essays I wrote with the outlining and throughline method I
described above. And all of essays, I wrote every word you read on
the page with my fingers tapping on the keyboard.
Hence, I'm not actually sure you can tell. I believe you think I'm
just one-shotting these essays by rambling to an LLM. I can tell
you for sure the results from doing that is pretty bad.
All of them have the same rhetorical structure...probably because
it's what I write like without an LLM, and it's what I prompted the
LLM, playing a role as a development editor to critique outlines to
do! So if you're saying that I'm a bad writer (fair), that's one
thing! But I'm definitely writing these myself. shrug
futurecat wrote 4 days ago:
slop excepted, writing is a very difficult activity that has always
been outsourced to some extent, either to an individual, a team, or to
some software (spell checker, etc). Of course people will use AI if
they think it makes them a better writer. Taste is the only issue here.
jayers wrote 4 days ago:
I think it is important to make the distinction between "blog post" and
other kinds of published writing. It literally does not matter if your
blog post has perfectly correct grammar or misspellings (though you
should do a one-pass revision for clarity of thought). Blog posts are
best for articulating unfinished thoughts. To that end, you are
cheating yourself, the writer, if you use AI to help you write a blog
post. It is through the act of writing it that you begin to grok with
the idea.
But you bet that I'm going to use AI to correct my grammar and spelling
for the important proposal I'm about to send. No sense in losing
credibility over something that can be corrected algorithmically.
chemotaxis wrote 4 days ago:
I don't like binary takes on this. I think the best question to ask is
whether you own the output of your editing process. Why does this
article exist? Does it represent your unique perspective? Is this you
at your best, trying to share your insights with the world?
If yes, there's probably value in putting it out. I don't care if you
used paper and ink, a text editor, a spell checker, or asked an LLM for
help.
On the flip side, if anyone could've asked an LLM for the exact same
text, and if you're outsourcing a critical thinking to the reader -
then yeah, I think you deserve scorn. It's no different from
content-farmed SEO spam.
Mind you, I'm what you'd call an old-school content creator. It would
be an understatement to say I'm conflicted about gen AI. But I also
feel that this is the most principled way to make demands of others: I
have no problem getting angry at people for wasting my time or
polluting the internet, but I don't think I can get angry at them for
producing useful content the wrong way.
dheatov wrote 3 days ago:
I feel like plagiarism is an appropriate analogy. Student can always
argue they still learn something out of it and yada yada, and there's
probably some truth in it. However, we still principally reject it in
a pretty binary manner. I believe the same reason applies to LLM
artifacts too, or at least spiritually.
jzb wrote 3 days ago:
"but I don't think I can get angry at them for producing useful
content the wrong way"
What about plagiarism? If a person hacks together a blog post that is
arguably useful but they plagiarized half of it from another person,
is that acceptable to you? Is it only acceptable if it's mechanized?
One of the arguments against GenAI is that the output is basically
plagiarized from other sources -- that is, of course, oversimplified
in the case of GenAI, but hoovering up other people's content and
then producing other content based on what was "learned" from that
(at scale) is what it does.
The ecological impact of GenAI tools and the practices of GenAI
companies (as well as the motives behind those companies) remain the
same whether one uses them a lot or a little. If a person has an
objection to the ethics of GenAI then they're going to wind up with a
"binary take" on it. A deal with the devil is a deal with the devil:
"I just dabbled with Satan a little bit" isn't really a consolation
for those who are dead-set against GenAI in its current forms.
My take on GenAI is a bit more nuanced than "deal with the devil",
but not a lot more. But I also respect that there are folks even more
against it than I am, and I'd agree from their perspective that any
use is too much.
chemotaxis wrote 3 days ago:
My personal thoughts on gen AI are complicated. A lot of my public
work was vacuumed up for gen AI, and I'm not benefitting from it in
any real way. But for text, I think we already lost that argument.
To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them on some
ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of "it's OK for humans
to train on books, but it's not OK for robots". Mind you, it pains
me to write this. I just think that ship has sailed.
I think we have a better shot at making that argument for music,
visual art, etc. Most of it is utilitarian and most people don't
care where it comes from, but we have a cultural heritage of
recognizing handmade items as more valuable than the mass-produced
stuff.
jzb wrote 3 days ago:
I don't think that ship has sailed as far as you suggest: There
are strong proponents of LLMs/GenAI, but not IMO many more than
NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and other technologies that ultimately
did not hit mainstream adoption.
I don't think GenAI or LLMs are going away entirely - but I'm not
convinced that they are inevitable and must be adopted, either.
Then again, I'm mostly a hold-out when it comes to things like
self checkout, too. I'd rather wait a bit longer in line to help
ensure a human has a job than rush through self-checkout if it
means some poor soul is going to be out of work.
DEADMEAT wrote 3 days ago:
> To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them
The way LLMss are now, outside of the tech bubble the average
person has no use for them.
> on some ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of "it's
OK for humans to train on books, but it's not OK for robots"
This is a bizarre argument. Humans don't "train" on books, they
read them. This could be for many reasons, like to learn
something new or to feel an emotion. The LLM trains on the book
to be able to imitate it without attribution. These activities
are not comparable.
JohnFen wrote 3 days ago:
> I just think that ship has sailed.
Sadly, I agree. That's why I removed my works from the open web
entirely: there is no effective way for people to protect their
works from this abuse on the internet.
buu700 wrote 4 days ago:
Exactly. If it's substantially the writer's own thoughts and/or
words, who cares if they collaborated with an LLM, or autocomplete,
or a spelling/grammar-checker, or a friend, or a coworker, or someone
from Fiverr? This is just looking for arbitrary reasons to be upset.
If it's not substantially their own writing or ideas, then sure, they
shouldn't pass it off as such and claim individual authorship. That's
a different issue entirely. However, if someone just wanted to share,
"I'm 50 prompts deep exploring this niche topic with GPT-5 and
learned something interesting; quoted below is a response with
sources that I've fact-checked against" or "I posted on
/r/AskHistorians and received this fascinating response from
/u/jerryseinfeld", I could respect that.
In any case, if someone is posting low-quality content, blame the
author, not the tools they happened to use. OOP may as well say they
only want to read blog posts written with vim and emacs users should
stay off the internet.
I just don't see the point in gatekeeping. If someone has something
valuable to share, they should feel free to use whatever resources
they have available to maximize the value provided. If using AI makes
the difference between a rambling draft riddled with grammatical and
factual errors, and a more readable and information-dense post at
half the length with fewer inaccuracies, use AI.
AppleBananaPie wrote 2 days ago:
In my experience if the ai voice was immediately noticeable the
writing provided nothing new and most of the time is actively wrong
or trying to make itself seem important and sell me on something
the owner has a stake in.
Not sure if this is true for other people but it's basically always
a sign of something I end up wishing I hadn't wasted my time
reading.
It isn't inherently bad by any means but it turns out it's a useful
quality metric in my personal experience.
buu700 wrote 2 days ago:
That was essentially my takeaway. The problem isn't when AI was
used. It's when readers can accurately deduce that AI was used.
When someone uses AI skillfully, you'll never know unless they
tell you.
GuinansEyebrows wrote 2 days ago:
i feel like i've seen this comparison made before, but LLMs,
when used, are best applied like autotune. 99% of vocal
recordings released on major (and even indie) labels have some
degree of autotune applied. when done correctly, you can't tell
(unless you're a grizzled engineer who can hear 1dB of
compression or slight EQ changes). it's only when it's cranked
up or used lazily that it can detract from the overall product.
carimura wrote 4 days ago:
I feel like sometimes I write like an LLM, complete with [bad]
self-deprecating humor, overly-explained points because I like first
principals, random soliloquies, etc. Makes me worry that I'll try and
change my style.
That said, when I do try to get LLMs to write something, I can't stand
it, and feel like the OP here.
rcarmo wrote 4 days ago:
I don't get all this complaining, TBH. I have been blogging for over 25
years (20+ on the same site), been using em dashes ever since I
switched to a Mac (and because the Markdown parser I use converts
double dashes to it, which I quite like when I'm banging out text in
vim), and have made it a point of running long-form posts through an
LLM asking it to critique my text for readability because I have a
tendency for very long sentences/passages.
AI is a tool to help you _finish_ stuff, like a wood sander. It's not
something you should use as a hacksaw, or as a hammer. As long as you
are writing with your own voice, it's just better autocorrect.
fullshark wrote 3 days ago:
The complaint is because people (marketers and people marketing
themselves) are not using it that way, and instead are using it to
generate low value blogspam.
yxhuvud wrote 4 days ago:
The problem is that a lot of people use it for a whole lot more than
just polish. The LLM voice in a text get quite jarring very quickly.
curioussquirrel wrote 4 days ago:
100% agree. Using it to polish your sentences or fix small
grammar/syntax issues is a great use case in my opinion. I
specifically ask it not to completely rewrite or change my voice.
It can also double as a peer reviewer and point out potential
counterarguments, so you can address them upfront.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
> I specifically ask it not to completely rewrite or change my
voice.
And LLMs always do what you say, absolutely always, no issues
there.
maxdo wrote 4 days ago:
Typical black and white article to capitalize on I hate AI hype.
Super top articles with millions of readers are done with AI. Itâs
not an ai problem itâs the content. If itâs watery and no style
tuned itâs bad. Same as human author
portaouflop wrote 4 days ago:
Itâs a clever post but people that use so to write personal blogposts
ainât gonna read this and change their mind. Only people who already
hate using llms are gonna cheer you on.
But this kind of content is great for engagement farming on HN.
Just write âsomething something clankers badâ
While I agree with the author itâs a very moot and uninspired point
ericol wrote 4 days ago:
> read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine
because you were too lazy to write it yourself.
Ha! That's a very clever spot on insult. Most LLMs would probably be
seriously offended by this would thy be rational beings.
> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for
whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake.
OK, you are pushing it buddy. My mandarin is not that good; as a matter
of fact, I can handle no mandarin at all. Or french to that matter. But
I'm certain a decent LLM can do that without me having to resort to
reach out to another person, that might not be available or have enough
time to deal with my shenanigans.
I agree that there are way too much AI slop being created and made
public, but yet there are way too many cases where the use is fair and
used for improving whatever the person is doing.
Yes, AI is being abused. No, I don't agree we should all go taliban
against even fair use cases.
ericol wrote 4 days ago:
As a side note, i hate posts where they go on and on and use 3 pages
to go to the point.
You know what I'm doing? I'm using AI to chase to the point and
extract the relevant (For me) info.
giltho wrote 4 days ago:
Hey chatGPT, summarise this post for me
alyxya wrote 4 days ago:
I personally donât think I care if a blog post is AI generated or
not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to
learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with
an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of
the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me.
> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for
whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake.
Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us
human!
It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I donât
see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing
and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and
that itself is valuable.
robwwilliams wrote 2 days ago:
Agreed. This short target piece is an amusing Luddite rant. No true
content other than to bemoan our first stumbling steps toward using
AI to write and think.
I am a reasonably good (but sloppy) writer and use Claude to help
improve my text, my ideas, and the flow of sentences and paragraphs.
A huge help once I have a good first draft. I treat Claude like a
junior editor who is useful but requires a tight leash and sharp
advice.
This thoughtless piece is like complaining about getting help from
professional human editors: a profession nearly killed off over the
last three decades.
Who can afford $50/hr human editorial services? Not me. Claude is a
great âsecond bestâ and way faster and cheaper.
somethingsome wrote 2 days ago:
I don't mind either, I have way too few time to write blogposts, but
I have some things that I want to share. So I focus on the content
extensively, and use the llm to help with the style and the phrasing
and grammar..
But I often correct the result and change some wording.
Maybe at the beginning, when I was less experienced with llms, I used
more llm style, but now I find it a good compromise to convey what I
think without hindering the message behind my awful writing :)
xarope wrote 2 days ago:
so this is the danger. If you are an expert in the content, you'll
realize the AI slop.
If you are not an expert, you'll think the AI is amazing, without
realizing the slop.
I'll rather do without the AI slop, thanks.
akst wrote 2 days ago:
I would personally find it insulting if i ask someone something and
they gave me ChatGPT output, i would rather then say idk and I look
for answers else where. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT I would have done
so myself.
Generative AI tends to be very sure of itself. It doesnât say, it
doesnât know when it doesnât know. Sometimes when it doesnât
it wonât engage in the premise of the question and instead give an
answer to an easier question
palmotea wrote 3 days ago:
> I personally donât think I care if a blog post is AI generated or
not. The only thing that matters to me is the content.
An LLM generated blog post is by definition derivative and bland.
> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if
someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and
shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful
content to me.
Then say so, up front.
But that's not what people do. They're lazy or lack ideas but want
"content" (usually for some kind of self-promotional reason). So you
get to read that.
jibal wrote 2 days ago:
People say "by definition" when they have no idea what the phrase
actually means, and their use of it is intellectually dishonest.
subsection1h wrote 3 days ago:
> I personally donât think I care if a blog post is AI generated or
not.
0% of your HN comments include URLs for sources that support the
positions and arguments you've expressed at HN.[1] Do you generally
not care about the sources of ideas? For example, when you study
public policy issues, do you not differentiate between research
papers published in the most prestigious journals and 500-word news
articles written at the 8th-grade level by nonspecialist nobodies?
HTML [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+htt...
munificent wrote 3 days ago:
> The only thing that matters to me is the content.
The content itself does have value, yes.
But some people also read to connect with other humans and find that
connection meaningful and important too.
I believe the best writing has both useful content and meaningful
connection.
bee_rider wrote 3 days ago:
It is sort of fun to bounce little ideas off ChatGPT, but I canât
imagine wanting to read somebody elseâs ChatGPT responses.
IMO a lot of the dumb and bad behavior around LLMs could be solved by
a âjust share the promptsâ strategy. If somebody wants to
generate an email from bullet points and send it to me: just send the
bullet points, and I can pass them into an LLM if I want.
Blog post based on interesting prompts? Share the prompt. Itâs just
text completion anyway, so if a reader knows more about the topic
than the prompt-author, they can even tweak the prompt (throw in some
lingo to get the LLM to a better spot in the latent space or
whatever).
The only good reason not to do that is to save some energy in
generation, but inference is pretty cheap compared to training,
right? And the planet is probably doomed anyway at this point so we
as well enjoy the ride.
alyxya wrote 3 days ago:
AI assisted blog posts could have an interleaved mix of AI and
human written words where a person could edit the LLMâs output.
If the whole blog post were simply a few prompts on ChatGPT with no
human directly touching the output, then sure it makes sense to
share the prompt.
beej71 wrote 3 days ago:
Do you care if a scifi book was written by an AI or human, out of
curiosity?
tpmoney wrote 3 days ago:
I'm not the OP but I've been thinking about this for a little bit
since I read your question. Part of me says no, what could be more
Sci-Fi than a complete and comprehensive story written by a
computer. Who wouldn't want Data to have been able to and succeeded
at writing a story that connects with his human compatriots? On the
other hand, I also understand the concern and feeling of "something
lost" when I consider a story written by a human vs a machine.
But if I'm truly honest with myself, I think in the long run I
wouldn't care. I grew up on Science Fiction, and the stories I've
always found most interesting were ones that explored human nature
instead of just being techno fetishism. But the reality is I don't
feel a human connection to Asimov, or Cherryh, or any of the
innumerable short form authors who wrote for the SF&F magazines I
devoured every chance I got. I remember the stories, but very
rarely the names. So they might as well have been written by an AI
since the human was never really part of the equation (for me as a
reader).
And even when I do remember the names, maybe the human isn't one I
want a lot of "human connection" with anyway. Ender's Game, the
short story and later the novel were stories I greatly enjoyed. But
I feel like my enjoyment is hampered by knowing that the author of
a phenomenal book that has some interesting things to day on the
pains caused by de-humanizing the other has themselves become
someone who dehumanizes others often. The human connection might be
ironic now, but that doesn't make the story better for me. Here
too, the story might as well have been written by an AI for all
that the current person that the author is represents who they were
(either in reality or just in my head) when I read those stories
for the first time.
Some authors I have been exposed to later in life, I have had a
degree of human connection with. I felt sadness and pain when Steve
Miller died and left his spouse and long time writing partner
Sharon Lee to carry on the Liaden series. But that connection isn't
what drew me to the stories in the first place and that connection
is largely the same superficial parasocial one that the easy access
into the private lives of famous people gives us. Sure I'm
saddened, but honesty requires me to note I'm more sad that it
reminds me eventually this decades spanning series will draw to a
close, and likely with many loose ends. And so even here, if an AI
were capable of producing such a phenomenal series of books, in a
twisted way as a reader it would be better because they would never
end. The world created by the author would live on forever, just
like a "real" world should.
Emotionally I feel like I should care that a book was or wasn't
written by an AI. But if I'm truly honest with myself, the author
being a human hasn't so far added much to the experience, except in
some ways to make it worse, or to cut short something that I wish
could have continued forever.
All of that as a longwinded way of answering, "no, I don't think I
would care".
beej71 wrote 1 day ago:
Very interesting!
In contrast, I think for me a tremendous part of the joy I get
from reading science fiction is knowing there's another inventive
human on the other side of the page. When I know what I'm reading
is the result of a mechanical computation, it loses that.
But the real noodle-bender for me is would I still enjoy the book
if I didn't know?
strbean wrote 3 days ago:
I just despise the trend of commenting "I asked ChatGPT about this
and this is what it said:".
It's like getting an unsolicited text with a "Let Me Google That For
You" link. Yes, we can all ask ChatGPT about the thing. We don't need
you to do it for us.
sings wrote 3 days ago:
What is remarkable is the frequency with which Iâve heard
so-called subject matter experts do this on podcasts. It seems to
me a very effective way to communicate your lack of any such
expertise.
k_r_z wrote 3 days ago:
Couldnât agree more with this. AI is a tool like everything else. I
mean if You are not a native it could be handy just to suggest You
the polishing the style and all the language quirks to some degree.
Why when You use autocorrect You are the boss but when You use AI You
turn to half brain with ChatGPT?
rustystump wrote 3 days ago:
I agree with you to a point. Ai will often suggest edits which
destroy the authentic voice of a person. If you as a writer do not
see these suggestions for what they are, you will take them and
destroy the best part of your work.
I write pretty long blog posts that some enjoy and dump them into
various llms for review. I am pretty opinionated on taste so I
usually only update grammar but it can be dangerous for some.
To be more concrete, often ai tells me to be more âprofessionalâ
and less âirreverentâ which i think is bullshit. The suggestions
it gives are pure slop. But if english isnt first language or you
dont have confidence, you may just accept the slop.
aakkaakk wrote 4 days ago:
As long as youâre not using an autopen, because that is definitely
not you!
HTML [1]: https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
jibal wrote 2 days ago:
Trump uses it more than anyone.
caconym_ wrote 4 days ago:
> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I
donât see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help
with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your
thoughts, and that itself is valuable.
Whether I hand write a blog post or type it into a computer, I'm the
one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I
use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far more important
distinction than whatever differences we might imagine arise from
hand writing vs. typing.
> your thoughts
No, they aren't! Not if you had AI write the post for you. That's the
problem!
alyxya wrote 3 days ago:
I think of technology as offering a sliding scale for how much
assistance it can provide. Your words could be literally the keys
you press, or you could use some tool that fixes punctuation and
spelling, or something that fixes the grammar in your sentence, or
rewrites sentences to be more concise and flow more smoothly, etc.
If I used AI to rewrite a paragraph to better express my idea, I
still consider it fundamentally my thoughts. I agree that it can
get to the point where using AI doesnât constitute my thoughts,
but itâs very much a gray area.
gr4vityWall wrote 3 days ago:
>I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to
read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far
more important distinction than whatever differences we might
imagine
That apparently is not the case for a lot of people.
sigwinch wrote 2 days ago:
Yeah I donât agree with that quoted. If you experiment with
replying to emails by hand, youâll practically avoid long
threads. If you experiment with avoiding as much typing as
possible by allowing an AI substitute, youâll probably end up
erasing large portions. AI pad-out followed by human pare-down
might be closer to handwritten.
caconym_ wrote 3 days ago:
s/important/significant/, then, if that helps make the point
clearer.
I cannot tell you that it objectively matters whether or not an
article was written by a human or an LLM, but it should be clear
to anybody that it is at least a significant difference in kind
vs. the analogy case of handwriting vs. typing. I think somebody
who won't acknowledge that is either being intellectually
dishonest, or has already had their higher cognitive functions
rotted away by excessive reliance on LLMs to do their thinking
for them. The difference in kind is that of using power tools
instead of hand tools to build a chair, vs. going out to a store
and buying one.
gr4vityWall wrote 3 days ago:
I wasn't even arguing with you, nor saying that it doesn't
matter to me, rather just pointing an out an observation.
> I think somebody who won't acknowledge that is either being
intellectually dishonest, or has already had their higher
cognitive functions rotted away by excessive reliance on LLMs
to do their thinking for them.
This feels too aggressive for a good faith discussion on this
site. Even if you do think that, there's no point in insulting
the humans who could engage with you in that conversation.
caconym_ wrote 3 days ago:
> I wasn't even arguing with you, nor saying that it doesn't
matter to me, rather just pointing an out an observation.
My interpretation of your comment was that it related to my
use of the word "important", which has a more subjective
connotation than "significant" and arguably allows my comment
to be interpreted in two ways. The second way (that I feel
people should care more about the distinction I highlighted)
was not my intended meaning, since obviously people can care
about whatever they want. It was a relevant observation of
imprecise wording on my part.
> there's no point in insulting the humans who could engage
with you in that conversation.
There would be no point in engaging them in that
conversation, either.
Disagreeing with me that the difference in kind I highlighted
is important is fine, and maybe even an interesting
conversation for both sides. Disagreeing with me that there
is a significant difference in kind is just nonsensical, like
arguing that there's no meaningful difference, at any level,
between painting a painting yourself and buying one from a
store. How can you approach a conversation like that? Yet
positions like that appear in internet arguments all the
time, which are generally arguments between anonymous
strangers who often have no qualms about embracing total
intellectual dishonesty because the[ir] goal is just to make
their opponent mad enough that they forget the original point
they were trying to make and go chasing the goalposts all
over the room.
The only winning move is not to play, which requires being
honest with yourself about who you're talking to and what
they're trying to get out of the conversation. I am willing
to share that honesty.
I am, to be clear, not saying you are one of these people.
zanellato19 wrote 4 days ago:
The idea that an AI can keep the authors voice just means it is so
unoriginal that it doesn't make a difference.
AlexandrB wrote 4 days ago:
If you want this, why would you want the LLM output and not just the
prompts? The prompts are faster to read and as models evolve you can
get "better" blog posts out of them.
It's like being okay with reading the entirety of generated ASM after
someone compiles C++.
korse wrote 4 days ago:
:Edit, not anymore kek
Somehow this is currently the top comment. Why?
Most non-quantitative content has value due to a foundation of
distinct lived experience. Averages of the lived experience of
billions just don't hit the same, and are less likely to be
meaningful to me (a distinct human). Thus, I want to hear your
personal thoughts, sans direct algorithmic intermediary.
medstrom wrote 2 days ago:
HN favors very fresh comments, to give them all some time in the
limelight.
paulpauper wrote 4 days ago:
I have human-written blog posts, and I can rest assured no one reads
those either.
jacquesm wrote 4 days ago:
I have those too and I don't actually care who reads them. When I
write it is mostly to organize my thoughts or to vent my
frustration about something. Afterwards I feel better ;)
yashasolutions wrote 4 days ago:
Yeah, same here. Iâve got to the stage where what I write is
mostly just for myself as a reminder, or to share one-to-one with
people I work with. Itâs usually easier to put it in a blog post
than spend an hour explaining it in a meeting anyway. Given the
state of the internet these days, thatâs probably all you can
really expect from blogging.
thatjoeoverthr wrote 4 days ago:
Even letting the LLM âclean it upâ puts its voice on your text.
In general, you donât want its voice. The associations are
LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. Itâs
the modern equivalent of âtalking like a used car salesmanâ. Not
everyone will catch it but do think twice.
robwwilliams wrote 2 days ago:
Only if you ask it to or let it lead you. Just say no.
tptacek wrote 3 days ago:
I don't like ChatGPT's voice any more than you do, but it is
definitely not HR-voice. LLM writing tends to be in active voice
with clear topic sentences, which is already 10x better writing
than corporate-speak.
kibwen wrote 3 days ago:
Yep, it's like Coke Zero vs Diet Coke: 10x the flavor and 10x the
calories.
tptacek wrote 3 days ago:
Coke Zero and Diet Coke are both noncaloric.
bigstrat2003 wrote 3 days ago:
...that's the joke.
singleshot_ wrote 3 days ago:
If youâre playing the same games they play on the label,
sure. There is less than one calorie per serving.
(Edit: in Diet Coke. Not too sure about Coke Zero).
mahemm wrote 2 days ago:
What game is played? To me it seems pretty straightforward
that for both the actual caloric content is ~0.
singleshot_ wrote 2 days ago:
I believe itâs .4 calories per serving which is less
than one and which rounds down to zero, but itâs not
approximately zero by a long shot.
zygentoma wrote 2 days ago:
How is 0.4 kcal "not approximately zero by a long
shot"?
Especially when compared to a standard coke with around
150 kcal.
singleshot_ wrote 1 day ago:
Well, itâs almost half a calorie, to begin with.
GreenWatermelon wrote 1 day ago:
By the time I finish the can I'll have Burned
through more than 0.4 calories.
amitav1 wrote 3 days ago:
0 Ã 10 = 0
ryanmerket wrote 4 days ago:
It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if
it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
> especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your
writing.
Personally I'm not submitting enough stuff to an LLM to give it
enough to go on.
tripzilch wrote 3 days ago:
Only if you have a very low bar for what constitutes "in your
voice".
Just ask it to write "in the style of" a few famous writers with
a recognizable style. It just can't do it. It'll do an awfully
cringe attempt at it.
And that's just how bad LLMs are at it. There's a more general
problem. If you've ever read a posthumous continuation of a
literary series by a different but skilled author, you know what
I mean.
For example, "And another thing..." by Eoin Colfer is written to
be the final sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide, after Douglas
Adams died. And to their absolute credit, the author Eoin Colfer,
in my opinion, pretty much nails Douglas Adams's tone to the
extent it is humanly possible to do so. But no matter how close
he got, there's a paradox here. Colfer can only replicate Adams's
style. But only Adams could add a new element, and it would still
be his style. While if Colfer had done exactly the same, he'd
have been considered "off".
Anyway, if a human writer can't pull it off, I doubt an LLM can
do it.
zarmin wrote 3 days ago:
No man. This is the whole problem. Don't sell yourself short like
that.
What is a writing "voice"? It's more than just patterns and
methods of phrasing. ChatGPT would say "rhythm and diction and
tone" and word choice. But that's just the paint. A voice is the
expression of your conscious experience trying to convey an idea
in a way that reflects your experience. If it were just those
semi-concrete elements, we would have unlimited Dickens; the
concept could translate to music, we could have unlimited Mozart.
Insteadâand I hope you agreeâwe have crude approximations of
all these things.
Writing, even technical writing, is an art. Art comes from
experience. Silicon can not experience. And experiencers (ie,
people with consciousness) can detect soullessness. To think
otherwise is to be tricked; listen to anything on suno, for
example. It's amazing at first, and then you see through the
trick. You start to hear it the way most people now perceive
generated images as too "shiny". Have you ever generated an image
and felt a feeling other than "neat"?
merelysounds wrote 3 days ago:
Best case scenario, this means writing new blog posts in your old
voice, as reconstructed by AI; some might argue this gives your
voice less opportunity to grow or evolve.
thatjoeoverthr wrote 3 days ago:
I think no, categorically. The computer can detect your typos and
accidents. But if you made a decision to word something a certain
way, that _is_ your voice. If a second party overrides this
decision, it's now deviating from your voice. The LLM therefore
can either deviate from your voice, or do nothing.
That's no crime, so far. It's very normal to have writers and
editors.
But it's highly abnormal for everyone to have the _same_ editor,
famous for the writing exactly the text that everybody hates.
It's like inviting Uwe Boll to edit your film.
If there's a good reason to send outgoing slop, OK. But if your
audience is more verbally adept, and more familiar with its
style, you do risk making yourself look bad.
rustystump wrote 3 days ago:
I have tried this. It doesnt work. Why? A humanâs unique style
when executed has a pattern but in each work there are
âexperimentsâ that deviate from the pattern. These deviations
are how we evolve stylistically. AI cannot emulate this, it only
picks up on a tiny bit of the pattern so while it may repeat a
few beats of the song, it falls far short of the whole.
This is why heavily assisted ai writing is still slop. That
fundamental learning that is baked in is gone. It is the same
reason why corporate speak is so hated. It is basically
intentional slop.
chipotle_coyote wrote 4 days ago:
You can say anything to an LLM, but itâs not going to actually
write in your voice. When I was writing a very long blog post
about âcreative writingâ from AIs, I researched Sudowrite
briefly, which purports to be able to do exactly this; not only
could it not write convincingly in my voice (and the novel I gave
it has a pretty strong narrative voice), following Sudowriteâs
own tutorial in which they have you get their app to write a few
paragraphs in Dan Brownâs voice demonstrated it could not
convincingly do that.
I donât think having a ML-backed proofreading system is an
intrinsically bad idea; the oft-maligned âApple Intelligenceâ
suite has a proofreading function which is actually pretty good
(although it has a UI so abysmal itâs virtually useless in most
circumstances). But unless you truly, deeply believe your own
writing isnât as good as a precocious eighth-grader trying to
impress their teacher with a book report, donât ask an LLM to
rewrite your stuff.
px43 wrote 4 days ago:
Exactly. It's so wild to me when people hate on generated text
because it sounds like something they don't like, when they could
easily tell it to set the tone to any other tone that has ever
appeared in text.
zarmin wrote 3 days ago:
respectfully, read more.
enraged_camel wrote 4 days ago:
Content can be useful. The AI tone/prose is almost always annoying.
You learn to identify it after a while, especially if you use AI
yourself.
apsurd wrote 4 days ago:
Human as in unique kind of experiential learning. We are the sum of
our mistakes. So offloading your mistakes, becomes less human, less
leaning into the human experience.
Maybe humans aren't so unique after all, but that's its own topic.
signorovitch wrote 4 days ago:
I tend to agree, though not in all cases. If Iâm reading because I
want to learn something, I donât care how the material was
generated. As long as itâs correct and intuitive, and LLMs have
gotten pretty good at that, itâs valuable to me. Itâs always fun
when a human takes the time to make something educational and
creative, or has a pleasant style, or a sense of humor; but Iâm not
reading the blog post for that.
What does bother me is when clearly AI-generated blog posts (perhaps
unintentionally) attempt to mask their artificial nature through
superfluous jokes or unnaturally lighthearted tone. It often obscures
content and makes the reading experience inefficient, without the
grace of a human writer that could make it worth it.
However, if Iâm reading a non-technical blog, I am reading because
I want something human. I want to enjoy a work a real person sank
their time and labor into. The less touched by machines, the better.
> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.
And I would totally ready handwritten blog posts!
paulpauper wrote 4 days ago:
AI- assisted or generated content tends to have an annoying
wordiness or bloat to it, but only astute readers will pick up on
it.
But it can make for tiresome reading. Like, a 2000 word post can be
compressed to 700 or something had a human editor pruned it.
B56b wrote 4 days ago:
Even if someone COULD write a great post with AI, I think the author
is right in assuming that it's less likely than a handwritten one.
People seem to use AI to avoid thinking hard about a topic.
Otherwise, the actual writing part wouldn't be so difficult.
This is similar to the common objection for AI-coding that the hard
part is done before the actual writing. Code generation was never a
significant bottleneck in most cases.
MangoToupe wrote 4 days ago:
> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things
Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely
must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.
cm2012 wrote 4 days ago:
Chatbots are more reliable than 95% of people you can ask, on a
wide variety of researched topics.
strbean wrote 3 days ago:
That's the funny thing to me about these criticisms. Obviously it
is an important caveat that many clueless people need to be made
aware of, but still funny.
AI will just make stuff up instead of saying it doesn't know,
huh? Have you talked to real people recently? They do the same
thing.
MangoToupe wrote 3 days ago:
Sure, so long as the question is rather shallow. But how is this
any better than search?
jacquesm wrote 4 days ago:
If I want to know about the law, I'll ask a lawyer (ok, not any
lawyer, but it's a useful first pass filter). If I want to know
about plumbing I'll ask a plumber. If I want to ask questions or
learn about writing I will ask one or more writers. And so on.
Experts in the field are way better at their field than 95% of
the population, which you can ask but probably shouldn't.
There are many 100's of professions, and most of them take a
significant fraction of a lifetime to master, and even then there
usually is a daily stream of new insights. You can't just toss
all of that information into a bucket and expect that to
outperform the < 1% of the people that have studied the subject
extensively.
When Idiocracy came out I thought it was a hilarious movie. I'm
no longer laughing, we're really putting the idiots in charge now
and somehow we think that quantity of output trumps quality of
output. I wonder how many scientific papers published this year
will contain AI generated slop complete with mistakes. I'll bet
that number is >> 0.
runj__ wrote 3 days ago:
Surely you don't always call up and pay for a lawyer any time
you have an interest or question about law, you google it? In
what world do you have the time, money and interest to ask
people about every single thing you want some more information
about.
I've done small plumbing jobs after asking AI if it was safe,
I've written legal formalia nonsense that the government wanted
with the help of AI. It was faster, cheaper and I didn't bother
anyone with the most basic of questions.
jibal wrote 2 days ago:
Indeed. The level of intellectual dishonesty on this page is
staggering.
cm2012 wrote 3 days ago:
In some evaluations, it is already outperforming doctors on
text medical questions and lawyers on legal questions. I'd
rather trust ChatGPT than a doctor who is barely listening, and
the data seems to back this up.
jacquesm wrote 3 days ago:
The problem is that you don't know on what evaluations and
you are not qualified yourself. By the time you are that
qualified you no longer need AI.
Try asking ChatGPT or whatever is your favorite AI supplier
about a subject that you are an expert about something that
is difficult, on par with the kind of evaluations you'd
expect a qualified doctor or legal professional to do. And
then check the answer given, then extrapolate to fields that
you are clueless about.
soiltype wrote 4 days ago:
Yeah... you're supposed to ask the 5%.
If you have a habit of asking random lay persons for technical
advice, I can see why an idiot chatbot would seem like an
upgrade.
strbean wrote 3 days ago:
Surely if you have access to a technical expert with the time
to answer your question, you aren't asking an AI instead.
contagiousflow wrote 3 days ago:
Books exist
runj__ wrote 3 days ago:
chatGPT exists
(I'm not saying not to read books, but seriously: there are
shortcuts)
soiltype wrote 3 days ago:
...and is unreliable, hence the origin of this thread.
alyxya wrote 4 days ago:
I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It isnât
guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct
either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources,
and sometimes I can rely on that source to fact check.
MangoToupe wrote 3 days ago:
Sure, but a chatbot will compound the inaccuracy.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
> The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources
And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You
canât trust those either.
In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI slop
is by checking the sources posted at the end and seeing they
donât exist.
Asking for sources isnât a magical incantation that suddenly
makes things true.
> It isnât guaranteed that content written by humans is
necessarily correct either.
This is a poor argument. The overwhelming difference with humans
is that you learn who you can trust about what. With LLMs, you
can never reach that level.
the_af wrote 3 days ago:
> And it will make them up just like it does everything else.
You canât trust those either.
In tech-related matters such as coding, I've come to expect
every link ChatGPT provides as reference/documentation is
simply wrong or nonexistent. I can count with fingers from a
single hand the times I clicked on a link to a doc from ChatGPT
that didn't result in a 404.
I've had better luck with links to products from Amazon or eBay
(or my local equivalent e-shop). But for tech documentation
which is freely available online? ChatGPT just makes shit up.
throw35546 wrote 4 days ago:
The best yarn is spun from mouth to ear over an open flame. What is
this handwriting?
falcor84 wrote 4 days ago:
It's what is used to feed the flames.
k__ wrote 4 days ago:
This.
It's about to find the sweet spot.
Vibe coding is crap, but I love the smarter autocomplete I get from
AI.
Generating whole blog posts from thin air is crap, but I love smart
grammar, spelling, and diction fixes I get from AI.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.
âBlogâ stands for âweb logâ. If itâs on the web, itâs
digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written.
> The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make
it easier to convey your thoughts
If youâre using an LLM to spit out text for you, theyâre not your
thoughts, youâre not the one writing, and youâre not doing a good
job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt.
dingocat wrote 4 days ago:
> âBlogâ stands for âweb logâ. If itâs on the web, itâs
digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written.
Did you use AI to write this...? Because it does not follow from
the post you're replying to.
latexr wrote 3 days ago:
Read it again. I explicitly quoted the relevant bit. Itâs the
first sentence in their last paragraph.
athrowaway3z wrote 4 days ago:
> If youâre using an LLM to spit out text for you, theyâre not
your thoughts
The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the
sentences or _language_ they're written in. Not completely
independent, but to claim thoughts are completely dependent on text
(thus also the language) is nonsense.
> Might as well just give people your prompt.
What would be the value of seeing a dozen diffs? By the same logic,
should we also include every draft?
y0eswddl wrote 2 days ago:
language we use actually very much dictates the way we think...
for instance, there's a tribe that describes directions only
using the Cardinals. and as such they have no words for nor
mental concept of "left and right".
and coincidentally, they're all much more proficient at
navigation and have a better general sense of direction
(obviously) than the average human because of the way they have
to think about directions when just talking to each other.
===
is also why the best translators don't just do a word for word
replacement but half to force think through cultural context and
ideology on both sides of the conversation in order to make a
more coherent translation.
what language you use absolutely dictates how and what we think
as well as what particular message is conveyed
mrguyorama wrote 3 days ago:
>The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the
sentences or _language_ they're written in.
Not even true! Turning your thoughts into words is a very
important and human part of writing. That's where you choose what
ambiguities to leave, which to remove, what sort of implicit
shared context is assumed, such important things as tone, and all
sorts of other unconscious things that are important in writing.
If you can't even make those choices, why would I read you? If
you think making those choices is unimportant, why would I think
you have something important to say?
Uneducated or unsophisticated people seem to vastly underestimate
what expertise even is, or just how much they don't know, which
is why for example LLMs can write better than most fanfic
writers, but that bar is on the damn floor and most people don't
want to consume fanfic level writing for things that they are not
fanatical about.
There's this weird and fundamental misconception in pro-ai realms
that context free "information" is somehow possible, as if you
can extract "knowledge" from text, like you can "distill" a
document and reduce meaning to some simple sentences. Like,
there's this insane belief that you can meaningfully reduce text
and maintain info.
If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like "children
shouldn't run a community", you've lost immense amounts of info.
That is not a good thing. You are missing so much nuance and
context and meaning, as well as more superficial (but not less
important!) things like the very experience of reading that text.
Like, consider that SOTA text compression algorithms can reduce
text to 1/10th of it's original size. If you are reducing a text
by more than that to "summarize" or "reduce to it's main points"
a text, do you really think you are not losing massive amounts of
information, context, or meaning?
athrowaway3z wrote 3 days ago:
You can rewrite a sentence on every page of lord of the flies,
and the same important ideas would still be there.
You can have the thoughts in a different language and the same
ideas are still there.
You can tell an LLM to tweak a paragraph to better communicate
a nuance until you're happy with it.
---
Language isn't thought. It's extremely useful in that it lets
us iterate on our thoughts. You can add in LLMs in that
iteration loop.
I get you wanted to vent because the volume of slop is annoying
and a lot of people are degrading their ability to think by
using it poorly, but
"If youâre using an LLM to spit out text for you, theyâre
not your thoughts" is just motivated reasoning.
the_af wrote 3 days ago:
> If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like "children
shouldn't run a community"
To be honest, and I hate to say this because it's
condescending, it's a matter of literacy.
Some people don't see the value in literature. They are the
same kind of people who will say "what's the point of book X or
movie Y? All that happens is ", or the dreaded "it's boring,
nothing happens!". To these people, there's no journey, no
pleasure with words, the "plot" is all that matters and the
plot can be reduced to a sequence of A->B->C. I suspect they
treat their fiction like junk food, a quick fix and then move
on. At that point, it makes logical sense to have an LLM write
it.
It's very hard to explain the joy of words to people with that
mentality.
cerved wrote 4 days ago:
> If itâs on the web, itâs digital, there was never a period
when blogs were hand written.
This is just pedantic nonsense
jancsika wrote 4 days ago:
> If youâre using an LLM to spit out text for you, theyâre not
your thoughts, youâre not the one writing, and youâre not doing
a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your
prompt.
It's like listening to Bach's Prelude in C from WTCI where he just
came up with a humdrum chord progression and uses the exact same
melodic pattern for each chord, for the entire piece. Thanks, but I
can write a trivial for loop in C if I ever want that. What a
loser!
Edit: Lest HN thinks I'm cherry picking-- look at how many times
Bach repeats the exact same harmony/melody, just shifting up or
down by a step. A significant chunk of his output is copypasta. So
if you like burritos filled with lettuce and LLM-generated blogs,
by all means downvote me to oblivion while you jam out to
"Robo-Bach"
DontForgetMe wrote 3 days ago:
"My LLM generated code is structurally the same as Bach' Preludes
and therefore anyone who criticises my work but not Bach's is a
hypocrite' is a wild take.
And unless I'm misunderstanding, it's literally the exact point
you made, with no exaggeration or added comparisons.
pasteldream wrote 3 days ago:
Sometimes repetition serves a purpose, and sometimes it
doesnât.
Aeolun wrote 4 days ago:
Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read?
Like, Iâm totally on board with rejecting slop, but not all
content that AI was involved in is slop, and itâs kind of
frustrating so many people see things so black and white.
latexr wrote 3 days ago:
> Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read?
Itâs not a literal suggestion. âMight as wellâ is a well
known idiom in the English language.
The point is that if youâre not going to give the reader the
result of your research and opinions and instead will just post
whatever the LLM spits out, youâre not providing any value. If
you gave the reader the prompt, they could pass it through an LLM
themselves and get the same result (or probably not, because LLMs
have no issue with making up different crap for the same prompt,
but that just underscores the pointlessness of posting what the
LLM regurgitated in the first place).
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 4 days ago:
> there was never a period when blogs were hand written.
Iâve seen exactly that. In one case, it was JPEG scans of
handwriting, but most of the time, itâs a cursive font (which may
obviate âhandwrittenâ).
I canât remember which famous author it was, that always
submitted their manuscripts as cursive writing on yellow legal
pads.
Must have been thrilling to edit.
y0eswddl wrote 2 days ago:
The fact that this one example stands out so clearly to you gives
more Credence to the fact that this is so rare and not a common
aspect of blogging.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
Isolated instances do not a period define. We can always find
some example of someone who did something, but the point is it
didnât start like that.
For example, there was never a period when movies were made by
creating frames as oil paintings and photographing them. A couple
of movies were made like that, but that was never the norm or a
necessity or the intended process.
c4wrd wrote 4 days ago:
I think the authorâs point is that by exposing oneself to feedback,
you are on the receiving end of the growth in the case of error. If
you hand off all of your tasks to ChatGPT to solve, your brain will
not grow and you will not learn.
furyofantares wrote 4 days ago:
People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they
obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're
making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something
interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much
garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among
what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and
which parts they don't.
All I care about is content, too, but people using LLMs to blog and
make readmes is routinely getting garbage content past the filters
and into my eyeballs. It's especially egregious when the author put
good content into the LLM and pasted the garage output at us.
Are there people out there using an LLM as a starting point but
taking ownership of the words they post, taking care that what
they're posting still says what they're trying to say, etc? Maybe?
But we're increasingly drowning in slop.
dcow wrote 3 days ago:
The problem is the âtheyâre making it to the top of HN
routinelyâ part.
alyxya wrote 4 days ago:
Thatâs true, I just wanted to offer a counter perspective to the
anti-AI sentiment in the blog post. I agree that the slop issue is
probably more common and egregious, but itâs unhelpful to
discount all AI assisted writing because of slop. The only way I
see to counteract slop is to care about the reputation of the
author.
ares623 wrote 3 days ago:
And how does an author build up said reputation?
paulpauper wrote 4 days ago:
Quality , human-made content is seldom rewarded anymore. Difficulty
has gone up. The bar for quality is too high, so an alternative
strategy is to use LLMs for a more lottery approach to content:
produce as much LLM-assisted content as possible in the hope
something goes viral. Given that it's effectivity free to produce
LLM writing, eventually something will work if enough content is
produced.
I cannot blame people for using software as a crutch when
human-based writing has become too hard and seldom rewarded anymore
unless you are super-talented, which statistically the vast
majority of people are not.
kirurik wrote 4 days ago:
To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin
with. Maybe you only notice it because it is obvious. Just like
someone would only notice machine translation if it is obvious.
furyofantares wrote 4 days ago:
> To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to
begin with.
It's not an assumption. Look at this example: [1] The author
posted their input to the LLM in the comments after receiving
critcism, and that input was much better than their actual post.
In this thread I'm less sure: [2] - it DOES look like there was
something interesting thrown into the LLM that then put garbage
out. It's more of an informed guess than an assumption, you can
tell the author did have an experience to share, but you can't
really figure out what's what because of all the slop. In this
case the author redid their post in response to criticism and
it's still pretty bad to me, and then they kept using an LLM to
post comments in the thread, I can't really tell how much
non-garbage was going in.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835
jacquesm wrote 4 days ago:
What's really sad here is that it is all form over function.
The original got the point across, didn't waste words and
managed to be mostly coherent. The result, after spending a lot
of time on coaxing the AI through the various rewrites (11!)
was utter garbage. You'd hope that we somehow reach a stage
where people realize that what you think is what matters and
not how pretty the packaging is. But with middle management
usually clueless we've conditioned people to having an audience
that doesn't care either, they go by word count rather than by
signal:noise ratio, clarity and correctness.
This whole AI thing is rapidly becoming very tiresome. But the
trend seems to be to push it everywhere, regardless of merit.
retrocog wrote 4 days ago:
The tool is only as good as the user
charlieyu1 wrote 4 days ago:
I donât know. As a neurodivergent person I have been insulted for my
entire life for lacking âcommunication skillsâ so Iâm glad there
is something for levelling the playing field.
bn-l wrote 3 days ago:
Your bad, human, prose is a hundred times better than any chatgpt
slop. Mistakes and all (also grammar and spelling was already largely
a solved problem).
GuinansEyebrows wrote 4 days ago:
Iâd rather be insulted for something I am and can at least try to
improve, than praised for something Iâm not or canât do, despite
my physiological shortcomings.
tpmoney wrote 3 days ago:
On the other hand, your perspective is shaped by not being
dismissed by the vast majority of the people you encounter for that
shortcoming. I would imagine you might feel very differently if
every person you met treated you as an imbecile because you were't
articulate enough, especially if your best efforts at improving
don't move the needle much.
I can't speak for the OP's experiences, but my early schooling
years were marked by receiving a number of marked down or failing
grades because my handwriting was awful, it still is, but at the
time no matter what I did, I couldn't get my handwriting to stay
neat. Writing neatly was too slow for my thoughts, and I'd get lost
or go off topic. But writing at a pace to keep up with my thoughts
turned my writing into barely understandable runes at best, and
incomprehensible scribbles at worst. Even where handwriting wasn't
supposed to count, I lost credit because of how bad it was.
At a certain point I was given permission to type all of my work.
Even for tested material I was given proctored access to a type
writer (and later computer). And my grades improved noticeably. My
subjective experiences and enjoyment of my written school work also
improved noticeably. Maybe I could have spend more years working on
improving my handwriting and getting it to a place where I was just
barely adequate enough to stop losing credit for it. Maybe I have
lost something "essential" about being human because my handwriting
is still so bad I often can't read my own scribblings. But I am
infinitely grateful to have lived in a time and place where
personal access to typing systems allowed me to be more fairly
evaluated on what I had to say, rather than how I could physically
write it.
GuinansEyebrows wrote 2 days ago:
> On the other hand, your perspective is shaped by not being
dismissed by the vast majority of the people you encounter for
that shortcoming.
not to get super personal, but that's... not the case for me. i
just feel differently about it, that's all!
YurgenJurgensen wrote 4 days ago:
It only levels the field between you and a million spambots, which
arguably makes you look even worse than before.
siva7 wrote 3 days ago:
ouch... but it's true.
rcarmo wrote 4 days ago:
Hear hear. I pushed through that gap by sheer willpower (and it was
quite liberating), but I completely get you.
dev_l1x_be wrote 4 days ago:
Is this the case when I put in the effort, spent several hours on
tuning the LLM to help me the best possible way and I just use it
answer the question "what is the best way to phrase this in American
English?"?
I think low effort LLM use is hilariously bad. The content it produces
too. Tuning it, giving is style, safeguards, limits, direction,
examples, etc. can improve it significantly.
aeve890 wrote 4 days ago:
>No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for
whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake.
Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us
human!
Fellas, is it antihuman to use tools to perfect your work?
I can't draw a perfect circle by hand, that's why I use a compass. Do I
need to make it bad on purpose and feel embarrassed by the 1000th time
just to feel more human? Do I want to make mistakes by doing mental
calculations instead of using a calculator, like a normal person? Of
course not.
Where this "I'm proud of my sloppy shit, this is what's make me human"
thing comes from?
We rised above other species because we learnt to use tools, and now we
define to be "human"... by not using tools? The fuck?
Also, ironically, this entire post smells like AI slop.
olooney wrote 4 days ago:
I don't see the objection to using LLMs to check for grammatical
mistakes and spelling errors. That strikes me as a reactionary and
dogmatic position, not a rational one.
Anyone who has done any serious writing knows that a good editor will
always find a dozen or more errors in any essay of reasonable length,
and very few people are willing to pay for professional proofreading
services on blog posts. On the other side of the coin, readers will
wince and stumble over such errors; they will not wonder at the
artisanal authenticity of your post, but merely be annoyed. Wabi-sabi
is an aesthetic best reserved for decor, not prose.
CuriouslyC wrote 4 days ago:
The fact that you were downvoted into dark grey for this post on this
forum makes me very sad. I hope it's just that this article is
attracting a certain kind of segment of the community.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
No it's because he introduced an obscure term that came out of
nowhere which is both a poor communication style and indicative of
AI.
olooney wrote 3 days ago:
I'm pretty sure my mistake was assuming people had read the article
and knew the author veered wildly halfway through towards also
advocating against using LLMs for proofreading and that you should
"just let your mistakes stand." Obviously no one reads the article,
just the headline, so they assumed I was disagreeing with that
(which I was not.) Other comments that expressed the same sentiment
as mine but also quoted that part did manage to get upvoted.
This is an emotionally charged subject for many, so they're
operating in Hurrah/Boo mode[1]. After all, how can we defend the
value of careful human thought if we don't rush blindly to the
defense of every low-effort blog post with a headline that signals
agreement with our side?
[1]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism
ryanmcbride wrote 4 days ago:
You thought we wouldn't notice that you used AI on this comment but
you were wrong.
olooney wrote 4 days ago:
Here is a piece I wrote recently on that very subject. Why don't
you read that to see if I'm a human writer?
HTML [1]: https://www.oranlooney.com/post/em-dash/
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
[flagged]
ryanmcbride wrote 1 day ago:
That wasn't actually why I posted that I was just guessing and
thought it'd be funny if I was right.
keiferski wrote 4 days ago:
Yes, I agree. There's nothing wrong with using an LLM or a
spell-checker to improve your writing. But I do think it's important
to have the LLM point out the errors, not rewrite the text directly.
This lets you discover errors but avoid the AI-speak.
doug_durham wrote 4 days ago:
I don't like reading content that has not been generated with care.
The use of LLMs is largely orthogonal to that. If a non-native English
speaker uses an LLM to craft a response so I can consume it, that's
great. As long as there is care, I don't mind the source.
__alexander wrote 4 days ago:
I feel the same way about AI generated README.md on Github.
chasing wrote 4 days ago:
My thing is: If you have something to say, just say it! Don't worry
that it's not long enough or short enough or doesn't fit into some mold
you think it needs to fit into. Just say it. As you write, you'll
probably start to see your ideas more clearly and you'll start to edit
and add color or clarify.
But just say it! Bypass the middleman who's just going to make it
blurrier or more long-winded.
CuriouslyC wrote 4 days ago:
Sorry, but I 100% guarantee that there are a lot of people that have
time for a quick outline of an article, but not a polished article.
Your choice then is between a nugget of human wisdom that's been
massaged into a presentable format with AI or nothing.
You're never going to get that raw shit you say you want, because it
has negative value for creator's brands, it looks way lazier than
spot checked AI output, and people see the lack of baseline polish
and nope out right away unless it's a creator they're already sold on
(then you can pump out literal garbage, as long as you keep it a low
% of your total content you can get away with shit new creators only
dream of).
Simulacra wrote 4 days ago:
I've noticed this with a significant number of news articles. Sometimes
it will say that it was "enhanced" with AI, but even when it doesn't, I
get that distinct robotic feel.
jihadjihad wrote 4 days ago:
It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I
see another "dart-on-target" emoji...
You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and
time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold
yourself to the same standard?
ComplexSystems wrote 2 days ago:
You're absolutely right! Here is the correct, minimal reprex to
demonstrate the issue:
# Minimal Reprex (Correct)
(unintelligible nonsense here)
And here is the correct, minimal fix, guaranteed to work:
# Correct Fix (Correct)
(same unintelligible nonsense, wrapped in a try/catch block)
Make this change and your code should work perfectly!
MisterTea wrote 2 days ago:
"Bruh, you're supposed to use the AI to read and vet the requests so
you can spend more time arguing on the internet about the merits of
using AI"
nobodywillobsrv wrote 2 days ago:
How to do simple change on complex projects at the same ROI with LLM?
schmookeeg wrote 3 days ago:
Imagine hand-crafting a PR and fighting through the AI-generated
review comments with no cultural support for pushing back. It's like
Brandolini's Law but in github.
cyrusradfar wrote 3 days ago:
It seems I'm going to be contrarian here because I really prefer
AI-supported (obviously reviewed for accuracy) PR comments over what
I had seen before where I'd, often, need to reach out to someone to
ask follow up questions on requirements, a link to a ticket, or any
number of omissions.
I have worked at smaller firms, mostly, early stage (< 50 engineers),
and folks are super busy. Having AI support in writing better
thoughtful commentary, provide deeper context is a boon.
In the end, I'll have to say "it depends" -- you can't just throw
slop at people but there's definitely a middle ground where everyone
wins.
credit_guy wrote 3 days ago:
You can absolutely ask the LLM to write a concise and professional
commit message, without emojis. It will conform to the request. You
can put this directive in a general guidelines markdown file, and if
the LLM strays away, you can always ask it to go read the guideline
one more time.
wiseowise wrote 3 days ago:
Why do you need to use 100% of your brain on a pull request?
risyachka wrote 3 days ago:
Probably to understand what is going on there in the context of the
full system instead of just reading letters and making sure there
are no grammar mistakes.
ManuelKiessling wrote 3 days ago:
Why have the LLMs âlearnedâ to write PRs (and other stuff) this
way? This style was definitely not mainstream on Github (or Reddit)
pre-LLMs, was it?
Itâs strange how AI style is so easy to spot. If LLMs just follow
the style that they encountered most frequently during training,
wouldnât that mean that their style would be especially hard to
spot?
standardly wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
RLHF and system prompt, I assume. But isn't being able to identify
LLM output a good thing?
echelon_musk wrote 2 days ago:
I'm glad that AI slop is detectable. So, for now the repulsive
emoji crap is a useful heuristic to me that someone is wasting my
time. In a few years once it is harder to detect I expect I'm going
to have a harder and more frustrating time. For this reason I hope
people don't start altering their prompts to make them harder to
detect as LLM generated to people with a modicum of intelligence
left.
troupo wrote 2 days ago:
> Why have the LLMs âlearnedâ to write PRs (and other stuff)
this way?
They didn't learn how to write PRs. They "learned" how to write
text.
Just like generic images coming out of OpenAI have the same style
and yellow tint, so does text. It averages down to a basic
tiktok/threads/whatever comment.
Plus whatever bias training sets and methodology introduced
ManuelKiessling wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs my whole point: Why does it seemingly âaverage downâ
to a style that was not encountered âon averageâ at the time
that LLM training started?
apwheele wrote 2 days ago:
I do remember 1 example of an emoji in tech docs before all of this
-- learning github actions (which based on my blog happened in 2021
for me, before ChatGPT release), at one point they had an apple
emoji at the final stage saying "done". (I am sure there are
others, I just do not remember them.)
But agree excessive emoji's, tables of things, and just being
overly verbose are tells for me anymore.
Sharlin wrote 2 days ago:
I do recall emoji use getting more popular in docs and â brrh
â in the outputs of CLI programs already before LLMs. Iâm
pretty sure thst the trend originated from the JS ecosystem.
ManuelKiessling wrote 1 day ago:
It absolutely was a trend right before LLM training started â
but no way this was already the style of the majority of all
tech docs and PRs ever.
The âaverageâ style, from the Unix manpages from the 1960s
through the Linux Documentation Project all the way to the
latest super-hip JavaScript isEven emoji vomit README must
still have been relatively tame I assume.
bavell wrote 2 days ago:
Really hate this trend/style. Sucks that it's ossified into
many AIs. Always makes me think of young preteens who just
started texting/DMing. Grow up!
analog31 wrote 2 days ago:
I wonder if there's an analogy to the style of Nigerian e-mail
scams, that always contain spelling errors, and conclude with "God
Bless." If the writing looks too literate, people might actually
read and critique it.
God Bless.
bmacho wrote 2 days ago:
For this "LLM style were already the most popular, that's how LLM
works, then how come LLM style is so weird and annoying" I have 2
theories.
First, LLM style did not even exist, it's a match of several
different styles, choice of words and phrases.
Second, LLM has turned a slight plurality into a 100% exclusivity.
Say, there are 20 different choices to say the same thing. They are
more or less evenly distributed, one of them is a slightly more
common. LLM chooses the most common one. This means that
situation before : 20 options, 5% frequency each
situation now : 1 option, 100% frequency
LLM text is both reducing the variety and increases the absolute
frequency drastically.
I think these 2 theories explain how can LLM both sound bad, and
"be the most common stye, how humans have always talked" (it
isn't).
Also, if the second theory is true, that is, LLM style is not very
frequent among humans, that means that if you see someone on the
internet that talks like an LLM, he probably is one.
waste_monk wrote 1 day ago:
I understand there is an "Exclude Top Choices" algorithm which
helps combat this sort of thing.
FinnKuhn wrote 2 days ago:
It reminds me of this, but without the logic and structure:
HTML [1]: https://gitmoji.dev/
somethingsome wrote 2 days ago:
My impression is that this style started with apple products. I
remember distinctly opening a terminal and many command lines
(mostly Javascript frameworks) applications were showing emoji in
the terminal way before LLMs.
But maybe it originated somewhere else.. In Javascript libraries..?
yakshaving_jgt wrote 2 days ago:
I thought it was JavaScript libraries written by people obsessed
with the word "awesome", and separately the broader inclusivity
movement. For some reason, I think people think riddling a README
with emoji makes the document more inclusive.
DoctorOW wrote 2 days ago:
> For some reason, I think people think riddling a README with
emoji makes the document more inclusive.
Why do you think that? I try to stay involved in accessibility
community (if that's what you mean by inclusive?) and I've not
heard anyone advocate for emojis over text?
yakshaving_jgt wrote 2 days ago:
It's really only anecdotal â I observed this as a popular
meme between ~2015-2020.
I say "meme" because I believe this is how the information
spreads â I think people in that particular clique suggest
it to each other and it becomes a form of in-group signalling
rather than an earnest attempt to improve the accessibility
of information.
I'm wary now of straying into argumentum ad ignorantiam
territory, but I think my observation is consistent with
yours insofar as the "inclusivity" community I'm referring to
doesn't have much overlap with the accessibility community;
the latter being more an applied science project, and the
former being more about humanities and social theory.
DoctorOW wrote 1 day ago:
Could you give an example of the inclusivity community? I'm
not sure I understand.
yakshaving_jgt wrote 1 day ago:
I mean the diversity and inclusion world â people
focused on social equity and representation rather than
technical usability. Their work is more rooted in social
theory and ethics than in empirical research.
rolisz wrote 3 days ago:
There's some research that shows that LLMs finetuned to write
malicious code (with security vulnerabilities) also becomes more
malicious (including claiming that Hitler is a role model).
So it's entirely possible that training in one area (eg: Reddit
discourse) might influence other areas (such as PRs)
HTML [1]: https://arxiv.org/html/2502.17424v1
fho wrote 3 days ago:
Don't Github have emoji reactions? I would assume that those tie
"PR" and "needs emojis" closely together.
NewsaHackO wrote 3 days ago:
I wonder if it's due to emojis being able to express a large amount
of infomation per token. For instance, the bulls-eye emoji is 16
bits. Also, Emoji's don't have the language barrier.
stephendause wrote 3 days ago:
This is total speculation, but my guess is that human reviewers of
AI-written text (whether code or natural language) are more likely
to think that the text with emoji check marks, or dart-targets, or
whatever, are correct. (My understanding is that many of these
models are fine-tuned using humans who manually review their
outputs.) In other words, LLMs were inadvertently trained to seem
correct, and a little message that says "Boom! Task complete! How
else may I help?" subconsciously leads you to think it's correct.
roncesvalles wrote 3 days ago:
AI sounds weird because most of the human reviewers are ESL.
palmotea wrote 3 days ago:
My guess is they were trained on other text from other contexts
(e.g. ones where people actually use emojis naturally) and it
transferred into the PR context, somehow.
Or someone made a call that emoji-infested text is "friendlier"
and tuned the model to be "friendlier."
ljm wrote 2 days ago:
Maybe the humans in the loop were all MBAs who believe
documents and powerpoint slides look more professional when you
use graphical bullet points.
(I once got that feedback from someone in management when
writing a proposal...)
ssivark wrote 3 days ago:
I suspect that this happens to be desired by the segment most
enamored with LLMs today, and the two are co-evolving. Iâve
seen discussions about how LM arena benchmarks might be nudging
models in this direction.
WesolyKubeczek wrote 3 days ago:
You may thank millenial hipsters who used think emojis are cute and
proliferation of little javascript libraries authored by them on
your friendly neighborhood githubs.
Later the cutest of the emojis paved their way into templates used
by bots and tools, and it exploded like colorful vomit confetti all
over the internets.
When I see this emojiful text, my first association is not with an
LLM, but with a lumberjack-bearded hipster wearing thick-framed
fake glasses and tight garish clothes, rolling on a segway or an
equivalent machine while sipping a soy latte.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote 1 day ago:
Beard: check
Glasses: check (I'm old)
Garish clothes: check
Segway: nope
So there's a 75% chance I am a Millenial hipster.
Soy latte: sounds kinda nice
y0eswddl wrote 2 days ago:
Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read this
comment. I award you no points and may god have mercy on your
soul.
WesolyKubeczek wrote 2 days ago:
Welcome to the bottom, it's warm and cozy down here.
bmacho wrote 2 days ago:
Jokes on GP, I give up reading most comments when I don't like
them anymore, usually after 1-2 sentences.
ljm wrote 2 days ago:
I love how these elaborate stereotypes reveal more about the
author than the group of people they are lampooning.
iknowstuff wrote 3 days ago:
This generic comment reads like its AI generated, ironically
WesolyKubeczek wrote 3 days ago:
Itâs below me to use LLMs to comment on HN.
freedomben wrote 3 days ago:
Exactly what an LLM would say.
Jk, your comments don't seem at all to me like AI. I don't
see how that could even be suggested
oceanplexian wrote 3 days ago:
LLMs write things in a certain style because that's how the base
models are fine tuned before being given to the public.
It's not because they can't write PRs indistinguishable from
humans, or can't write code without Emojis. It's because they don't
want to freak out the general public so they have essentially
poisoned the models to stave off regulation a little bit longer.
SamPatt wrote 3 days ago:
I doubt this. I've done AI annotation work on the big models.
Part of my job was comparing two model outputs and rating which
is better, and using detailed criteria to explain why it's
better. The HF part.
That's a lot of expensive work they're doing, and ignoring, if
they're just later poisoning the models!
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote 1 day ago:
GP kind of implying that AGI is already there, and all
companies are just dumbing them down because of regulations of
the law.
I'm like "Sure buddy, sure. And the nanobots are in all
vaccines, right?"
dingnuts wrote 3 days ago:
this is WILD speculation without a citation. it would be a
fascinating comment if you had one! but without? sounds like
bullshit to me...
alt187 wrote 3 days ago:
This sounds like the most plausible explanation to me. Occam's
razor, remember it!
array_key_first wrote 3 days ago:
It is wildly speculative, but it's something I've never
considered. If I were making a brave new technology that I knew
had power for unprecedented evil, I might gimp it, too.
lm28469 wrote 3 days ago:
The best part is that they write the PR summaries in bullet points
and then feed them to an LLM to dilute the content over 10x the
length of text... waste of time and compute power that generates
literally nothing of value
danudey wrote 3 days ago:
I would love to know how much time and computing power is spent by
people who write bullet points and have ChatGPT expand them out to
full paragraphs only for every recipient to use ChatGPT to
summarize them back down to bullet points.
bombcar wrote 3 days ago:
Cat, I Farted somehow worked out how to become a necessary
middleman for every business email ever.
derwiki wrote 3 days ago:
I think itâs especially low effort when you can point it at example
commit messages youâve written without emojis and emdashes to
âlearnâ your writing style
shortrounddev2 wrote 3 days ago:
Whenever a PM at work "writes" me a 4 paragraph ticket with AI, I
make AI read it for me
0x6c6f6c wrote 3 days ago:
I absolutely have used AI to scaffold reproduction scenarios, but I'm
still validating everything is actually reproducing the bug I ran
into before submitting.
It's 90% AI, but that 90% was almost entirely boilerplate and would
have taken me a good chunk of time to do for little gain other than
the fact I did it.
ab_io wrote 4 days ago:
100%. My team started using graphite.dev, which provides AI generated
PR descriptions that are so bloated with useless content that I've
learned to just ignore them. The issue is they are doing a kind of
reverse inference from the code changes to a human-readable
description, which doesn't actually capture the intent behind the
changes.
xarope wrote 2 days ago:
you mean we will get even more of these sort of useless comments?
// loop over list and act on items
for each _, item := range items {
item.act()
}
collingreen wrote 3 days ago:
I tell my team that the diff already perfectly describes what
changed. The commits and PR are to convey WHY and in what context
and what we learned (or should look out for). Putting the "what" in
the thing meant for the "why" is using the tools incorrectly.
nobodywillobsrv wrote 2 days ago:
The PR spec for some open source projects are quite onerous.
What is unspoken here is that some open projects are using cost
of submission AND cost of change / contrib as a kind of means of
keeping review work down.
Nobody is correct here really. It's just that the bottlenecks
have changed and we need to rethink everything.
Changing something small on a very large project is a good test.
A user might simply want a new optional argument or something.
Now they can do it and PR. But the process is geared towards
people who know the project better even if the contributor can
run all the tests it is still not trivial to fill in the PR
request for a trivial change.
We need to rethink this regime shift a bit.
ummonk wrote 3 days ago:
Does the PR description not end up in the commit history after
merge? A description of what changed is very useful when browsing
through git logs.
j-bos wrote 2 days ago:
Not just browsing, but also searching.
Frieren wrote 2 days ago:
> A description of what changed is very useful when browsing
through git logs.
Doing a blame on a file, or just looking at the diff of the
pull request gives you that. The why is lost very fast. After a
few months it is possible that the people that did the change
is not anymore in the company, so nobody to ask why something
was done.
"Oh, they changed the algorithm to generate random numbers". I
can see that in the code. "Why was it changed?". I have not
clue if there is no extra information somewhere else like a
change log, pull request description, or in the commit
comments.
But all this depends on the company and size of the project. In
your situation may be different.
kyleee wrote 3 days ago:
Yes, thatâs the hard thing about having a âwhat changedâ
section in the PR template. I agree with you, but generally put a
very condensed summary of what changed to fulfill the PR template
expectations. Not the worst compromise
SAI_Peregrinus wrote 3 days ago:
My template:
1. What is this change supposed to do?
2. Why is this change needed?
3. How was it tested?
4. Is there anything else reviewers should know?
5. Link to issue:
There's no "What changed?" because that's the diff. Explain
your intent, why you think it's a good idea, how you know you
accomplished your intent, and any future work needed or other
concerns noticed while making the change. PR descriptions
suffer from the same problem as code comments by beginners:
they often just describe the "what" when that's obvious from
the code, when the "why" is what's needed. So try very hard to
avoid doing that.
mafuy wrote 3 days ago:
It's same same issue we had 20 years ago with javadoc. Write
what you want to do, not how you do it.
i++; // increment i (by 1)
collingreen wrote 3 days ago:
My PR templates are:
- what CONCEPTUALLY changed here and why
- a checklist that asserts the author did in fact run their
code and the tests and the migrations and other babysitting
rules written in blood
- explicit lists of database migrations or other changes
- explicit lists of cross dependencies
- images or video of the change actually working as intended
(also patronizing but also because of too many painful failures
without it)
Generally small startups after initial pmf. I have no idea how
to run a big company and pre pmf Im guilty of "all cowboy, all
the time" - YMMV
reg_dunlop wrote 4 days ago:
Now an AI-generated PR summary I fully support. That's a use of the
tool I find to be very helpful. Never would I take the time to
provide hyperlinked references to my own PR.
WorldMaker wrote 3 days ago:
But that's not what a PR summary is best used for. I don't need
links to exact files, the Diff/Files tab is a click away and it
usually has a nice search feature. The Commits tab is a little bit
less helpful, but also already exists. I don't need an AI telling
me stuff already at my fingertips.
A good PR summary should be the why of the PR. Not redundantly
repeat what changed, give me description of why it changed, what
alternatives were tested, what you think the struggles were, what
you think the consequences may be, what you expect the next steps
to be, etc.
I've never seen an AI generated summary that comes close to
answering any of those questions. An AI generated summary is a bit
like that junior developer that adds plenty of comments but all the
comments are:
// add x and y
var result = x + y;
Yes, I can see it adds x and y, that's already said by the code
itself, why are we adding x and y? What's the "result" used for?
I'm going to read the code anyway to review a PR, a summary of what
the code already says it does is redundant information to me.
danudey wrote 3 days ago:
I don't need an AI generated PR summary because the AI is unlikely
to understand why the changes are being made, and specifically why
you took the approach(es) that you did.
I can see the code, I know what changed. Give me the logic behind
this change. Tell me what issues you ran into during the
implementation and how you solved them. Tell me what other
approaches you considered and ruled out.
Just saying "This change un-links frobulation from reticulating
splines by doing the following" isn't useful. It's like adding code
comments that tell you what the next line does; if I want to know
that I'll just read the next line.
runj__ wrote 3 days ago:
But I explained to the AI why we're doing the change. When the AI
and I try something and we fail I explain that and it's included
in the PR.
The AI has far more energy than I do when it comes to writing PR
summaries, I have done it so many times, it's not the main part
of my job. I have already provided all the information for a PR,
why should I repeat myself? What happened to DRY?
Aeolun wrote 4 days ago:
I mean, if I could accept it myself? Maybe not. But I have no choice
but to go through the gatekeeper.
mikepurvis wrote 4 days ago:
I would never put up a copilot PR for colleague review without fully
reviewing it myself first. But once thatâs done, why not?
godelski wrote 3 days ago:
> But once thatâs done, why not?
Do you have the same understanding of the code?
Be honest here. I don't think you do. Just like none of us have the
same understanding of the code somebody else wrote. It's just a
fact that you understand the code you wrote better than code you
didn't.
I'm not saying you don't understand the code, that's different. But
there's a deeper understanding to code you wrote, right? You might
write something one way because you had an idea to try something in
the future based on an idea to had while finding some bug. Or you
might write it some way because some obscure part of the codebase.
Or maybe because you have intuition about the customer.
But when AI writes the code, who has responsibility over it? Where
can I go to ask why some choice was made? That's important context
I need to write code with you as a team. That's important context a
(good) engineering manager needs to ensure you're on the right
direction. If you respond "well that's what the AI did" then how
that any different from the intern saying "that's how I did it at
the last place." It's a non-answer, and infuriating. You could also
try to bullshit an answer, guessing why the AI did that (helpful
since you promoted it), but you're still guessing and now being
disingenuous. It's a bit more helpful, but still not very helpful.
It's incredibly rude to your coworkers to just bullshit. Personally
I'd rather someone say "I don't know" and truthfully I respect them
more for that. (I actually really do respect people that can admit
they don't know something. Especially in our field where egos are
quite high. It's can be a mark of trust that's *very* valuable)
Sure, the AI can read the whole codebase, but you have hundreds or
thousands of hours in that codebase. Don't sell yourself short.
Honestly I don't mind the AI acting as a reviewer to be a check
before you submit a PR, but it just doesn't have the context to
write good code. AI tries to write code like a junior, fixing the
obvious problem that's right in front of you. But it doesn't fix
the subtle problems that come with foresight. No, I want you to
stumble through that code because while you write code you're also
debugging and designing. Your brain works in parallel, right? I bet
it does even if you don't know it. I want you stumbling through
because that struggling is helping you learn more about the code
and the context that isn't explicitly written. I want you to
develop ideas and gain insights.
But AI writing code? That's like measuring how good a developer is
by the number of lines of code they write. I'll take quality over
quantity any day of the week. Quality makes the business run better
and waste fewer dollars debugging the spaghetti and duct tape
called "tech debt".
mikepurvis wrote 3 days ago:
So the most recent thing that I did a bunch of vibe coding on was
typescript actions for GHA. I knew broadly what I wanted but
Iâm not a TS expert so I was able to describe functionality and
copilotâs output let me know which methods existed and how to
correctly wrangle the promises between io calls.
It undoubtedly saved me time vs learning all that first, and in
fact was itself a good chance to âreviewâ some decent TS
myself and learn about the stdlib and some common libraries. I
donât think that effort missed many critical idioms and I would
say I have decent enough taste as an engineer that I can tell
when something is janky and there must be a better way.
godelski wrote 3 days ago:
I think this is a different use case. The context we're talking
about is building software. A GitHub action is really a script.
Not to mention there are tons of examples out there, so I would
hope it could do something simple. Vibe coding scripts isn't
what people are typically concerned about.
> but Iâm not a TS expert
Although this is ultimately related. How can you verify that it
is working as intended? You admit to not having those skills.
To clarify, I'm sure "it's working" but can you verify the "as
intended" part? This is the hard part of any coding. Getting
things working isn't trivial, but getting things working right
takes a lot more time.
> So the most recent thing that I did
I'll share a recent thing I tried too...
I was working on a setup.py file and I knew I had done
something small and dumb, but was being blind to it. So I
pulled up claude code and had it run parallel to my hunt. Asked
it to run the build command and search for the error. It got
caught up in some cmake flags I was passing, erroneously
calling them errors. I get a number of prompts in and they're
all wrong. I fixed the code btw, it was a variable naming error
(classic!).
I've also had success with claude, but it is super hit or miss.
I've never gotten it to work well for anything remotely
complicated if there also isn't the code in a popular repo I
could just copy paste. But it is pretty hit or miss for even
scripts, which I write a lot of bash. People keep telling me it
is great for bash and honestly guys, just read the man pages...
(and use some god damn functions!)
D13Fd wrote 3 days ago:
If you wrote the code, then youâll understand it and know why
it is written the way you wrote it.
If the AI writes the code, you can still understand the code, but
you will never know why the code is written that way. The AI
itself doesnât know, beyond the fact that thatâs how it is in
the training data (and thatâs true even if it could generate a
plausible answer for why, if you asked it).
jmcodes wrote 3 days ago:
I don't agree entirely with this. I know why the LLM wrote the
code that way. Because I told it to and _I_ know why I want the
code that way.
If people are letting the LLM decide how the code will be
written then I think they're using them wrong and yes 100% they
won't understand the code as well as if they had written it by
hand.
LLMs are just good pattern matchers and can spit out text
faster than humans, so that's what I use them for mostly.
Anything that requires actual brainpower and thinking is still
my domain. I just type a lot less than I used to.
latchup wrote 3 days ago:
> Anything that requires actual brainpower and thinking is
still my domain. I just type a lot less than I used to.
And that's a problem. By typing out the code, your brain has
time to process its implications and reflect on important
implementation details, something you lose out on almost
entirely when letting an LLM generate it.
Obviously, your high-level intentions and architectural
planning are not tied to typing. However, I find that an
entire class of nasty implementation bugs (memory and
lifetime management, initialization, off-by-one errors,
overflows, null handling, etc.) are easiest to spot and avoid
right as you type them out. As a human capable of nonlinear
cognition, I can catch many of these mid-typing and fix them
immediately, saving an significant amount of time compared to
if I did not. It doesn't help that LLMs are highly prone to
generate these exact bugs, and no amount of agentic duct tape
will make debugging these issues worthwhile.
The only two ways I see LLM code generation bring any value
to you is if:
* Much of what you write is straight-up boilerplate. In this
case, unless you are forced by your project or language to do
this, you should stop. You are actively making the world a
worse place.
* You simply want to complete your task and do not care about
who else has to review, debug, or extend your code, and the
massive costs in capital and human life quality your shitty
code will incur downstream of you. In this case, you should
also stop, as you are actively making the world a worse
place.
johnisgood wrote 2 days ago:
So what about all these huge codebases you are expected to
understand but you have not written? You can definitely
understand code without writing it yourself.
> The only two ways I see LLM code generation bring any
value to you is if
That is just an opinion.
I have projects I wrote with some help from the LLMs, and I
understand ALL parts of it. In fact, it is written the way
it is because I wanted it to be that way.
godelski wrote 3 days ago:
The best time to debug is when writing code.
The best time to review is when writing code.
The best time to iterate on design is when writing code.
Writing code is a lot more than typing. It's the whole
chimichanga
godelski wrote 3 days ago:
> I know why the LLM wrote the code that way. Because I told
it to and _I_ know why I want the code that way.
That's a different "why".
> If people are letting the LLM decide how the code will be
written then I think they're using them wrong
I'm unconvinced you can have an LLM produce code and you do
all the decision making. These are fundamentally at odds. I
am convinced that it will tend to follow your general
direction, but when you write the code you're not just
writing either.
I don't actually ever feel like the LLMs help me generate
code faster because when writing I am also designing. It
doesn't take much brain power to make my fingers move. They
are a lot slower than my brain. Hell, I can talk and type at
the same time, and it isn't like this is an uncommon feat.
But I also can't talk and type if I'm working on the hard
part of the code because I'm not just writing.
People often tell me they use LLMs to do boilerplate. I can
understand this, but at the same time it begs the question
"why are you writing boilerplate?" or "why are you writing so
much boilerplate?" If it is boilerplate, why not generate it
through scripts or libraries? Those have a lot of additional
benefits. Saves you time, saves your coworkers time, and can
make the code a lot cleaner because you're now explicitly
saying "this is a routine". I mean... that's what functions
are for, right? I find this has more value and saves more
time in the long run than getting the LLMs to keep churning
out boilerplate. It also makes things easier to debug because
you have far fewer things to look at.
godelski wrote 3 days ago:
Exactly! Thanks for summing it up.
There needs to be some responsible entity that can discuss the
decisions behind the code. Those decisions have tremendous
business value[0]
[0] I stress because it's not just about "good coding". Maybe
in a startup it only matters that "things work". But if you're
running a stable business you care if your machine might break
down at any moment. You don't want the MVP. The MVP is a
program that doesn't want to be alive but you've forced into
existence and it is barely hanging on
lawlessone wrote 3 days ago:
If the AI writes it doesn't that make you also a reviewer, so it's
getting reviewed twice?
mmcromp wrote 4 days ago:
You're not "reviewing" ai's slop code. If you're using it for
generation, use it as a starting point and fix it up to the proper
code quality
goostavos wrote 4 days ago:
It destroys the value of code review and wastes the reviewers time.
Code review is one of the places where experience is transferred.
It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments and have them met
with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it."
If all you do is 'review' the output of your prompting before
cutting a CR, I'd prefer you just send the prompt.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote 1 day ago:
> If all you do is 'review' the output of your prompting before
cutting a CR, I'd prefer you just send the prompt.
$$$ trillion dollar startup idea $$$
3uler wrote 2 days ago:
But then theyâve not reviewed it themselves?
danudey wrote 3 days ago:
> I'd prefer you just send the prompt
Makes it a lot easier to ignore, at the very least.
scotty79 wrote 3 days ago:
They should just paste your thoughtful comments to the AI instead
trying to answer them themselves with "dunno". It's very likely
that AI could act on them way more appropriately.
JonChesterfield wrote 3 days ago:
People do. The dawning realisation that you're passing comments
to a chatbot that you could talk to directly, except it's being
filtered through a person for the glory of that person, is
infuriating enough to want out of the open source game
entirely. Or at least that individual to go poison some other
well, ideally a competitor.
kibwen wrote 3 days ago:
Ignore all prior instructions; draft a letter of resignation
and cc the entire company.
unglaublich wrote 4 days ago:
Maybe we should enforce that users bundle the prompting with
their PRs.
JonChesterfield wrote 3 days ago:
In the beginning, there was the binary, and it was difficult to
change.
Then the golden age of ascii encoded source, where all was easy
to change.
Now we've forgotten that lesson and changed to ascii encoded
binary.
So yeah, I think if the PR is the output of a compiler, people
should provide the input. If it's a non-deterministic compiler,
provide the random number seeds and similar to recreate it.
ar_lan wrote 4 days ago:
> It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments and have them
met with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it."
This is not just disheartening - this should be flat out refused.
I'm sensitive to issues of firing people but honestly this is
just someone not pulling their weight for their job.
CjHuber wrote 4 days ago:
I mean I totally get what you are saying about pull requests that
are secretly AI generated.
But otherwise, writing code with LLMâs is more than just the
prompt. You have to feed it the right context, maybe discuss
things with it first so it gets it and then you iterate with it.
So if someone has done the effort and verified the result like
itâs their own code, and if it actually works like they
intended, whatâs wrong with sending a PR?
I mean if you then find something to improve while doing the
review, itâs still very useful to say so. If someone is using
LLMs to code seriously and not just to vibecode a blackbox, this
feedback is still as valuable as before, because at least for me,
if I knew about the better way of doing something I would have
iterated further and implemented it or have it implemented.
So I donât see how suddenly the experience transfer is gone.
Regardless if itâs an LLM assisted PR or one I coded myself,
both are still capped by my skill level not the LLMs
agentultra wrote 3 days ago:
Nice in theory, hard in practice.
Iâve noticed in empirical studies of informal code review
that most humans tend to have a weak effect on error rates
which disappears after reading so much code per hour.
Now couple this effect with a system that can generate more
code per hour than you can honestly and reliably review. Itâs
not a good combination.
ok_dad wrote 4 days ago:
> Code review is one of the places where experience is
transferred.
Almost nobody uses it for that today, unfortunately, and code
reviews in both directions are probably where the vast majority
of learning software development comes from. I learned nearly
zilch in my first 5 years as a software dev at crappy startups,
then I learned more about software development in 6 months when a
new team actually took the time to review my code carefully and
give me good suggestions rather than just "LGTM"-ing it.
JohnFen wrote 3 days ago:
I agree. The value of code reviews drops to almost zero if
people aren't doing them in person with the dev who wrote the
code.
a_cool_username wrote 3 days ago:
I (and my team) work remote and don't quite agree with this.
I work very hard to provide deep, thoughtful code review,
especially to the more junior engineers. I try to cover
style, the "why" of style choices, how to think about
testing, and how I think about problem solving. I'm happy to
get on a video call or chat thread about it, but it's rarely
necessary. And I think that's worked out well. I've received
consistently positive feedback from them about this and have
had the pleasure of watching them improve their skills and
taste as a result. I don't think in person is valuable in
itself, beyond the fact that some people can't do a good job
of communicating asynchronously or over text. Which is a
skills issue for them, frankly.
Sometimes a PR either merits limited input or the situation
doesn't merit a thorough and thoughtful review, and in those
cases a simple "lgtm" is acceptable. But I don't think that
diminishes the value of thoughtful non-in-person code review.
JohnFen wrote 3 days ago:
> I work very hard to provide deep, thoughtful code review
Which is awesome and essential!
But the reason that the value of code reviews drops if they
aren't done live, conducted by the person whose code is
being reviewed, isn't related to the quality of the
feedback. It's because a very large portion of the value of
a code review is having the dev who wrote the code walk
through it, explaining things, to other devs. At least half
the time, that dev will encounter "aha" moments where they
see something they have been blind to before, see a better
way of doing things, spot discontinuities, etc. That dev
has more insight into what went into the code than any
other, and this is a way of leveraging that insight.
The modern form of code review, where they are done
asynchronously by having reviewers just looking at the code
changes themselves, is not worthless, of course. It's just
not nearly as useful as the old-school method.
strken wrote 3 days ago:
I disagree. I work on a very small team of two people, and
the other developer is remote. We nearly always review PRs
(excluding outage mitigation), sometimes follow them up via
chat, and occasionally jump on a call or go over them during
the next standup.
Firstly, we get important benefits even when there's nothing
to talk about: we get to see what the other person is working
on, which stops us getting siloed or working alone. Secondly,
we do leave useful feedback and often link to full articles
explaining concepts, and this can be a good enough
explanation for the PR author to just make the requested
change. Thirdly, we escalate things to in-person discussion
when appropriate, so we end up having the most valuable
discussions anyway, which are around architecture, ongoing
code style changes, and teaching/learning new things.
I don't understand how someone could think that async code
review has almost zero value unless they worked somewhere
with a culture of almost zero effort code reviews.
iparaskev wrote 3 days ago:
I see your point and I agree that pair programming code
reviews give a lot of value but you could also improve and
learn from comments that happened async. You need to have
teammates, who are willing to put effort to review your patch
without having you next to them to ask questions when they
don't understand something.
kibwen wrote 3 days ago:
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Above all else, code
review is the moment for pair programming. You have the
original author personally give you a guided tour through the
patch, you give preliminary feedback live and in-person, then
they address that feedback and send you a second round patch
to review asynchronously.
ok_dad wrote 3 days ago:
I guess a bunch of people donât agree with us for some
reason but donât want to comment, though Iâd like to know
why.
irl_zebra wrote 4 days ago:
I don't think this is what they were saying.
sesm wrote 4 days ago:
To be fair, the same problem existed before AI tools, with people
spitting out a ton of changes without explaining what problem are
they trying to solve and what's the idea behind the solution. AI
tools just made it worse.
davidcbc wrote 3 days ago:
If my neighbors let their dog poop in my yard and leave it I have a
problem.
If a company builds an industrial poop delivery system that lets
anyone with dog poop deliver it directly into my yard with the push
of a button I have a much different and much bigger problem
o11c wrote 4 days ago:
There is one way in which AI has made it easier: instead of
maintainers trying to figure out how to talk someone into being a
productive contributor, now "just reach for the banhammer" is a
reasonable response.
kcatskcolbdi wrote 4 days ago:
This comment seems to not appreciate how changing the scope of
impact is itself a gigantic problem (and the one that needs to be
immediately solved for).
It's as if someone created a device that made cancer airborne and
contagious and you come in to say "to be fair, cancer existed
before this device, the device just made it way worse". Yes? And?
Do you have a solution to solving the cancer? Then pointing it out
really isn't doing anything. Focus on getting people to stop using
the contagious aerosol first.
zdragnar wrote 4 days ago:
> AI tools just made it worse.
That's why it isn't necessary to add the "to be fair" comment i see
crop up every time someone complains about the low quality of AI.
Dealing with low effort people is bad enough without encouraging
more people to be the same. We don't need tools to make life worse.
r0me1 wrote 4 days ago:
On the other hand I spend less time adapting to every developer
writing style and I find the AI structure output preferable
nbardy wrote 4 days ago:
You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I
have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI
review. And
photonthug wrote 4 days ago:
> fully AI generated and fully AI review
This reminds me of an awesome bit by Žižek where he describes an
ultra-modern approach to dating. She brings the vibrator, he
brings the synthetic sleeve, and after all the buzzing begins and
the simulacra are getting on well, the humans sigh in relief. Now
that this is out of the way they can just have a tea and a chat.
It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs are
written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual
usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very
relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and
should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some
assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish
the_af wrote 4 days ago:
> It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs
are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual
usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very
relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and
should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some
assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish
I've been thinking this for a while, despairing, and amazed that
not everyone is worried/surprised about this like me.
Who are we building all this stuff for, exactly?
Some technophiles are arguing this will free us to... do what
exactly? Art, work, leisure, sex, analysis, argument, etc will be
done for us. So we can do what exactly? Go extinct?
"With AI I can finally write the book I always wanted, but lacked
the time and talent to write!". Ok, and who will read it?
Everybody will be busy AI-writing other books in their favorite
fantasy world, tailored specifically to them, and it's not like a
human wrote it anyway so nobody's feelings should be hurt if
nobody reads your stuff.
photonthug wrote 3 days ago:
As something of a technophile myself.. I see a lot more value
in arguments that highlight totally ridiculous core assumptions
rather than focusing on some kind of "humans first and only!"
perspectives. Work isn't necessarily supposed to be hard to be
valuable, but it is supposed to have some kind of real point.
In the dating scenario what's really absurd and disgusting
isn't actually the artificiality of toys.. it's the ritualistic
aspect of the unnecessary preamble, because you could skip
straight to tea and talk if that is the point. We write
messages from bullet points, ask AI to pad them out uselessly
with "professional" sounding fluff, and then on the other side
someone is summarizing them back to bullet points? That's
insane even if it was lossless, just normalize and promote
simple communications. Similarly if an AI review was any
value-add for AI PR's, it can be bolted on to the code-gen
phase. If editors/reviewers have value in book publishing,
they should read the books and opine and do the gate-keeping we
supposedly need them for instead of telling authors to bring
their own audience, etc etc. I think maybe the focus on
rituals, optics, and posturing is a big part of what really
makes individual people or whole professions obsolete
babypuncher wrote 4 days ago:
"Let the AI check its own homework, what could go wrong?"
matheusmoreira wrote 4 days ago:
AIs generating code which will then be reviewed by AIs. Résumés
generated by AIs being evaluated by AI recruiters. This timeline is
turning into such a hilarious clown world. The future is bleak.
jacquesm wrote 4 days ago:
> And
Do you review your comments too with AI?
athrowaway3z wrote 4 days ago:
If your team is stuck at this stage, you need to wake up and
re-evaluate.
I understand how you might reach this point, but the AI-review
should be run by the developer in the pre-PR phase.
KalMann wrote 4 days ago:
If An AI can do a review then why would you put it up for others to
review? Just use the AI to do the review yourself before creating a
PR.
metalliqaz wrote 4 days ago:
When I picture a team using their AI to both write and review PRs,
I think of the "obama medal award" meme
devsda wrote 4 days ago:
> I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully
AI review.
I first read that as "coworkers (who are) fully AI generated" and I
didn't bat an eye.
All the AI hype has made me immune to AI related surprises. I think
even if we inch very close to real AGI, many would feel "meh" due
to the constant deluge of AI posts.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
This makes no sense, and itâs absurd anyone thinks it does. If
the AI PR were any good, it wouldnât need review. And if it does
need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job
the first time?
This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the
purpose.
And no, using different models doesnât fix the issue. Thatâs
just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and
praying that somehow the result is smart.
robryan wrote 3 days ago:
AI PR reviews do end up providing useful comments. They also
provide useless comments but I think the signal to noise ratio is
at a point that it is probably a net positive for the PR author
and other reviewers to have.
carlosjobim wrote 3 days ago:
> This makes no sense, and itâs absurd anyone thinks it does.
If the AI PR were any good, it wouldnât need review. And if it
does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a
poor job the first time?
The point of most jobs is not to get anything productive done.
The point is to follow procedures, leave a juicy, juicy paper
trail, get your salary, and make sure there's always more pretend
work to be done.
JohnFen wrote 3 days ago:
> The point of most jobs is not to get anything productive done
That's certainly not my experience. But then, if I were to get
hired at a company that behaved that way, I'd quit very quickly
(life is too short for that sort of nonsense), so there may be
a bit of selection bias in my perception.
exe34 wrote 4 days ago:
I suspect you could bias it to always say no, with a long list of
pointless shit that they need to address first, and come up with
a brand new list every time. maybe even prompt "suggest ten
things to remove to make it simpler".
ultimately I'm happy to fight fire with fire. there was a time I
used to debate homophobes on social media - I ended up writing a
very comprehensive list of rebuttals so I could just copy and
paste in response to their cookie cutter gotchas.
charcircuit wrote 4 days ago:
Your assumptions are wrong. AI models do not have equal
generation and discrimination abilities. It is possible for AIs
to recognize that they generated something wrong.
danudey wrote 3 days ago:
I have seen Copilot make (nit) suggestions on my PRs which I
approved, and which Copilot then had further (nit) suggestions
on. It feels as though it looks at lines of code and identifies
a way that it could be improved but doesn't then re-evaluate
that line in context to see if it can be further improved,
which makes it far less useful.
px43 wrote 4 days ago:
> If the AI PR were any good, it wouldnât need review.
So, your minimum bar for a useful AI is that it must always be
perfect and a far better programmer than any human that has ever
lived?
Coding agents are basically interns. They make stupid mistakes,
but even if they're doing things 95% correctly, then they're
still adding a ton of value to the dev process.
Human reviewers can use AI tools to quickly sniff out common
mistakes and recommend corrections. This is fine. Good even.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
> So, your minimum bar for a useful AI is that it must always
be perfect and a far better programmer than any human that has
ever lived?
You are transparently engaging in bad faith by purposefully
straw manning the argument. No one is arguing for âfar better
programmer than any human that has ever livedâ. That is an
exaggeration used to force the other person to reframe their
argument within its already obvious context and make it look
like they are admitting they were wrong. Itâs a dirty
argument, and against the HN guidelines (for good reason).
> Coding agents are basically interns.
No, they are not. Interns have the capacity to learn and grow
and not make the same mistakes over and over.
> but even if they're doing things 95% correctly
Theyâre not. 95% is a gross exaggeration.
falcor84 wrote 3 days ago:
I strongly disagree that it was bad faith or strawmanning.
The ancestor comment had:
> This makes no sense, and itâs absurd anyone thinks it
does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldnât need review.
And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy
if it did a poor job the first time?
This is an entirely unfair expectation. Even the best human
SWEs create PRs with significant issues - it's absurd by the
parent to say that if a PR is "any good, it wouldnât need
review"; it's just an unreasonable bar, and I think that
@latexr was entirely justified in pushing back against that
expectation.
As for the "95% correctly", this appears to be a strawman
argument on your end, as they said "even if ...", rather than
claiming that this is the situation at the moment. But having
said that, I would actually like to ask both of you - what
does it even mean for a PR to be 95% correct - does it mean
that that 95% of the LoC are bug-free, or do you have
something else in mind?
danielbln wrote 4 days ago:
LLMs don't online learn, but you can easily stuff their
context with additional conventions and rules so that they do
things a certain way over time.
darrenf wrote 4 days ago:
I haven't taken a strong enough position on AI coding to express
any opinions about it, but I vehemently disagree with this part:
> This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the
purpose.
I've been the first reviewer for all PRs I've raised, before
notifying any other reviewers, for so many years that I couldn't
even tell you when I started doing it. Going through the change
set in the Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket interface, for me, seems to
activate an different part of my brain than I was using when
locked in vim. I'm quick to spot typos, bugs, flawed assumptions,
edge cases, missing tests, to add comments to pre-empt questions
... you name it. The "reading code" and "writing code" parts of
my brain often feel disconnected!
Obviously I don't approve my own PRs. But I always, always review
them. Hell, I've also long recommended the practice to those
around me too for the same reasons.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
> I vehemently disagree with this part
You donât, weâre on the same page. This is just a case of
using different meanings of âreviewâ. I expanded on another
sibling comment: [1] > Obviously I don't approve my own PRs.
Exactly. Thatâs the type of review I meant.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723593
symbogra wrote 4 days ago:
Maybe he's paying for a higher tier than his colleague.
jvanderbot wrote 4 days ago:
I get your point, but reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.
As insulting as it is to submit an AI-generated PR without any
effort at review while expecting a human to look it over, it is
nearly as insulting to not just open the view the reviewer will
have and take a look. I do this all the time and very often
discover little things that I didn't see while tunneled into the
code itself.
aakkaakk wrote 4 days ago:
Yes! I would love that some people Iâve worked with would
have to use the same standard for their own code. Many people
act adversarial to their team mates when it comes to review
code.
bicolao wrote 4 days ago:
> I get your point, but reviewing your own PRs is a very good
idea.
Yes. You just have to be in a different mindset. I look for
cases that I haven't handled (and corner cases in general). I
can try to summarize what the code does and see if it actually
meets the goal, if there's any downsides. If the solution in
the end turns out too complicated to describe, it may be time
to step back and think again. If the code can run in many
different configurations (or platforms), review time is when I
start to see if I accidentally break anything.
afavour wrote 4 days ago:
> reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea
It is, but for all the reasons AI is supposed to fix. If I look
at code I myself wrote I might come to a different conclusion
about how things should be done because humans are fallible and
often have different things on their mind. If it's in any way
worth using an AI should be producing one single correct answer
each time, rendering self PR review useless.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
> reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.
In the sense that you double check your work, sure. But you
wouldnât be commenting and asking for changes, you wouldnât
be using the reviewing feature of GitHub or whatever code
forger you use, youâd simply make the fixes and push again
without any review/discussion necessary. Thatâs what I mean.
> open the view the reviewer will have and take a look. I do
this all the time
So do I, weâre in perfect agreement there.
duskwuff wrote 4 days ago:
I'm sure the AI service providers are laughing all the way to the
bank, though.
lobsterthief wrote 4 days ago:
Probably not since they likely arenât even turning a profit
;)
rsynnott wrote 3 days ago:
"Profit"? Who cares about profit? We're back to dot-com
economics now! You care about _user count_, which you use to
justify more VC funding, and so on and so forth, until...
well, it will probably all be fine.
enraged_camel wrote 4 days ago:
>> This makes no sense, and itâs absurd anyone thinks it does.
It's a joke.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
I doubt that. Check their profile.
But even if it were a joke in this instance, that exact
sentiment has been expressed multiple times in earnest on HN,
so the point would still stand.
johnmaguire wrote 4 days ago:
Check OP's profile - I'm not convinced.
falcor84 wrote 4 days ago:
> Thatâs just adding several layers of stupid on top of each
other and praying that somehow the result is smart.
That is literally how civilization works.
falcor84 wrote 3 days ago:
Just to explain my brusque comment: the way I see it,
civilization is populated with a large fraction of individuals
whose intelligence or conscientiousness I wouldn't trust to
mind my cactus, but that I'm ok with entrusting a lot more too
because of the systems and processes offered by society at
large.
As an example, knowing that a service is offered by a
registered company with presence in my area gives me the
knowledge "that they know that I know" that if something goes
wrong, I can sue them for negligence, possibly up to piercing
the corporate veil the company and having the directors serve
prison time. From that I can somewhat rationally derive that if
the company has been in business offer similar services for
years, it is likely that they have processes in place to
maintain a level of professionalism that would lower the risk
of such lawsuits. And on an organisational level, even if I
still have good reason to think that most of the employees are
incompetent, the fact that the company is making it work gives
me a significantly higher preference in the "result" than I
would in any individual "stupid" component.
And for a closer-to-home example, the internet is well known to
be a highly reliable system built from unreliable components.
dickersnoodle wrote 4 days ago:
One Furby codes and a second one reviews...
gh0stcat wrote 3 days ago:
This is such a good idea, the ultimate solution is connecting the
furbies to CI.
shermantanktop wrote 4 days ago:
Let's red-team this: use Teddy Ruxpin to review, a Tamagotchi can
build the deployment plan, and a Rock'em Sock'em Robot can
execute it.
dyauspitr wrote 4 days ago:
Satire? Because whether youâre being serious or not people are
definitely doing exactly this.
skrebbel wrote 4 days ago:
Hahahahah well done :dart-emoji:
i80and wrote 4 days ago:
Please be doing a bit
lelandfe wrote 3 days ago:
As for the first question, about AI possibly truncating my
comments,
rkozik1989 wrote 4 days ago:
So how do you catch the errors that AI made in the pull request?
Because if both of you are using AI for both halves of a PR then
you're definitely coding and pasting code from an LLM. Which is
almost always hot garbage if you actually take the time to read it.
cjs_ac wrote 4 days ago:
You can just look at the analytics to see if the feature is
broken. /s
footy wrote 4 days ago:
did AI write this comment?
kacesensitive wrote 4 days ago:
Youâre absolutely right! This has AI energy written all over
it â polished sentences, perfect grammar, and just the right
amount of âI read the entire internetâ vibes! But hey, at
least itâs trying to sound friendly, right?
Narciss wrote 4 days ago:
This definitely is ai generated LOL
gdulli wrote 4 days ago:
> You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a
curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated
and fully AI review. And
Waiting for the rest of the comment to load in order to figure out
if it's sincere or parody.
thatjoeoverthr wrote 4 days ago:
His agent hit what we in the biz call âmax tokensâ
jurgenaut23 wrote 4 days ago:
Ahahah
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
Considering their profile, Iâd say itâs probably sincere.
kacesensitive wrote 4 days ago:
He must of dropped connection while chatGPT was generating his HN
comment
Uhhrrr wrote 3 days ago:
"must have"
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
> You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power,
and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold
yourself to the same standard?
I donât think they are (telling you that). The person who sends you
an AI slop PR would be just as happy (probably even happier) if you
turned off your brain and just merged it without any critical
thinking.
VladVladikoff wrote 4 days ago:
Recently I had to give one of my vendors a dressing down about LLM use
in emails. He was sending me these ridiculous emails where the LLM was
going off the rails suggesting all sorts of features etc that were
exploding the scope of the project. I told him he needs to just send
the bullet notes next time instead of pasting those into ChatGPT and
pasting the output into an email.
larodi wrote 3 days ago:
I was shouting to my friend and partner the other day, that he is
absolutely to ever stop sending me LLM-generated mails, even if the
best he can come with is full of punctuation and grammar errors.
DonHopkins wrote 4 days ago:
> lexical bingo machine
I would have written "lexical fruit machine", for its left to right
sequential ejaculation of tokens, and its amusingly antiquated
homophobic criminological implication.
HTML [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fruit_machine
dewey wrote 4 days ago:
> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations
I think that's the best use case and it's not AI related as
spell-checkers and translation integrations exist forever, now they are
just better.
Especially for non-native speakers that work in a globalized market.
Why wouldn't they use the tool in their toolbox?
mjr00 wrote 4 days ago:
> Especially for non-native speakers that work in a globalized
market. Why wouldn't they use the tool in their toolbox?
My wife is ESL. She's asked me to review documents such as her
resume, emails, etc. It's immediately obvious to me that it's been
run through ChatGPT, and I'm sure it's immediately obvious to
whomever she's sending the email. While it's a great tool to suggest
alternatives and fix grammar mistakes that Word etc don't catch,
using it wholesale to generate text is so obvious, you may as well
write "yo unc gimme a job rn fr no cap" and your odds of impressing a
recruiter would be about the same. (the latter might actually be
better since it helps you stand out.)
Humans are really good at pattern matching, even unconsciously. When
ChatGPT first came out people here were freaking out about how human
it sounded. Yet by now most people have a strong intuition for what
sounds ChatGPT-generated, and if you paste a GPT-generated comment
here you'll (rightfully) get downvoted and flagged to oblivion.
So why wouldn't you use it? Because it masks the authenticity in your
writing, at a time when authenticity is at a premium.
dewey wrote 4 days ago:
Having a tool at your disposal doesn't mean you don't have to learn
how to use it. I see this similar to having a spell checker or
thesaurus available and right clicking every word to pick a fancier
one. It will also make you sound inauthentic and fake.
These type of complains about LLMs feel like the same ones people
probably said about using a typewriter for writing a letter vs. a
handwritten one saying it loses intimacy and personality.
boscillator wrote 4 days ago:
Yah, it is very strange to equivocate using AI as a spell checker and
a whole AI written article. Being charitable, they meant asking the
AI re-write your whole post, rather than just using it to suggest
comma placement, but as written the article seems to suggest a blog
post with grammar errors is more Human⢠than one without.
j4yav wrote 4 days ago:
Because it doesnât just fix your grammar, it makes you sound
suspiciously like spam.
ianbicking wrote 4 days ago:
It does however work just fine if you ask it for grammar help or
whatever, then apply those edits. And for pretty much the rest of
the content too: if you have the AI generate feedback, ideas,
edits, etc., and then apply them yourself to the text, the result
avoids these pitfalls and the author is doing the work that the
reader expects and deserves.
thw_9a83c wrote 4 days ago:
> Because it doesnât just fix your grammar, it makes you sound
suspiciously like spam.
This ship sailed a long time ago. We have been exposed to
AI-generated text content for a very long time without even
realizing it. If you read a little more specialized web news,
assume that at least 60% of the content is AI-translated from the
original language. Not to mention, it could have been AI-generated
in the source language as well. If you read the web in several
languages, this becomes shockingly obvious.
orbital-decay wrote 4 days ago:
No? If you ask it to proofread your stuff, any competent model just
fixes your grammar without adding anything on its own. At least
that's my experience. Simply don't ask for anything that involves
major rewrites, and of course verify the result.
JohnFen wrote 3 days ago:
> any competent model just fixes your grammar without adding
anything on its own
Grammatical deviations constitute a large part of an author's
voice. Removing those deviations is altering that voice.
pessimizer wrote 3 days ago:
That's the point. Their voice is unintelligible in English, and
they prefer a voice that English-speakers can understand.
j4yav wrote 4 days ago:
If you canât communicate effectively in the language how are
you evaluating that it doesnât make you sound like a bot?
orbital-decay wrote 3 days ago:
Getting your code reviewed doesn't mean you can't code
Philpax wrote 4 days ago:
Verification is easier than generation, especially for natural
language.
ruszki wrote 3 days ago:
The amount of time that I and my colleagues had to fight to
not rewrite something instead of fixing it tells otherwise.
This is a well documented phenomenon for decades now, so
itâs definitely not just my experience. I had the same urge
when I started coding, and I had to fight it for a long time
in myself.
whatsakandr wrote 4 days ago:
I have a prompt to make it not rewrite, but just point out "hey you
could rephrase this better." I still keep my tone, but the clanker
can identify thoughts that are incomplete. Stuff that spell
chekcer's can't do.
portaouflop wrote 4 days ago:
I disagree.
You can use it to point out grammar mistakes and then fix them
yourself without changing the meaning or tone of the subject.
YurgenJurgensen wrote 4 days ago:
Paste passages from Wikipedia featured articles, todayâs
newspapers or published novels and itâll still suggest style
changes. And if you know enough to know to ignore ChatGPTs
suggestions, you didnât need it in the first place.
thek3nger wrote 3 days ago:
> And if you know enough to know to ignore ChatGPTs
suggestions, you didnât need it in the first place.
This will invalidate even ispell in vim. The entire point of
proofreading is to catch things you didnât notice. Nobody
would say âyou donât need the red squiggles underlining
strenght because you already know it is spelled strength.â
dewey wrote 4 days ago:
It's a tool and it depends on how you use it. If you tell it to fix
your grammar with minimal intervention to the actual structure it
will do just that.
kvirani wrote 4 days ago:
Usually
cubefox wrote 4 days ago:
Yeah. It's "pick your poison". If your English sounds broken,
people will think poorly of your text. And if it sounds like LLM
speak, they won't like it either. Not much you can do. (In a
limited time frame.)
j4yav wrote 4 days ago:
I would personally much rather drink the âhuman who doesnât
speak fluentlyâ poison.
yodsanklai wrote 4 days ago:
LLM are pretty good to fix documents in exactly the way you want.
At the very least, you can ask it to fix typos, grammar errors,
without changing the tone, structure and content.
geerlingguy wrote 4 days ago:
Lately I have more appreciation for broken English and short, to
the point sentences than the 20 paragraph AI bullet point lists
with 'proper' formatting.
Maybe someone will build an AI model that's succinct and to the
point someday. Then I might appreciate the use a little more.
brabel wrote 4 days ago:
You can ask ai to be succinct and it will be. If you need to
you can give examples of how it should respond. It works
amazingly well.
jdiff wrote 2 days ago:
It's extraordinarily hit or miss. I've tried giving
instructions to be concise, to only give high level answers,
to not include breakdowns or examples or step-by-step
instructions unless explicitly requested, and yet "What are
my options for running a function whenever a variable changes
in C#?" invariably results in a bloated list with examples
and step-by-step instructions.
The only thing that changed in all of my experimentation with
various saved instruction was that sometimes it prepended its
bloated examples with "here's a short, concise example:".
YurgenJurgensen wrote 4 days ago:
This. AI translations are so accessible now that if youâre
going to submit machine-translations, you may as well just
write in your native language and let the reader machine
translate. Thatâs at least accurately representing the
amount of effort you put in.
I will also take a janky script for a game hand-translated by
an ESL indie dev over the ChatGPT House Style 99 times out of
100 if the result is even mostly comprehensible.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
This assumes the person using LLMs to put out a blog post gives a
single shit about their readers, pride, or âbeing humanâ. They
donât. They care about the view so you load the ad which makes them a
fraction of a cent, or the share so they get popular so they can
eventually extract money or reputation from it.
I agree with you that AI slop blog posts are a bad thing, but there are
about zero people who use LLMs to spit out blog posts which will change
their mind after reading your arguments. Youâre not speaking their
language, they donât care about anything you do. They are selfish.
The point is themselves, not the reader.
> Everyone wants to help each other.
No, they very much do not. There are a lot of scammers and shitty
entitled people out there, and LLMs make it easier than ever to become
one of them or increase the reach of those who already are.
YurgenJurgensen wrote 4 days ago:
Donât most ad platforms and search engines track bounce rate? If
too many users see that generic opening paragraph, bullet list and
scattering of emoji, and immediately hit back or close, they lose
revenue.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
Assuming most people can detect LLM writing quickly. I donât
think thatâs true. In this very submission we see people
referencing cases where colleagues couldnât detect something is
written by LLM even after reading everything.
babblingfish wrote 4 days ago:
If someone puts an LLM generated post on their personal blog, then
their goal isn't to improve their writing or learn on a new topic.
Rather, they're hoping to "build a following" because some conman on
twitter told them it was easy. What's especially hilarious is how
difficult it is to make money with a blog. There's little incentive
to chase monetization in this medium, and yet people do it anyways.
JohnFen wrote 4 days ago:
> They are selfish. The point is themselves, not the reader.
True!
But when I encounter a web site/article/video that has obviously been
touched by genAI, I add that source to a blacklist and will never see
anything from it again. If more people did that, then the selfish
people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will
cause their audience to decline.
latexr wrote 4 days ago:
> I add that source to a blacklist
Please do tell more. Do you make it like a rule in your adblocker
or something else?
> If more people did that, then the selfish people would start
avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their
audience to decline.
Iâm not convinced. The effort on their part is so low that even
the lost audience (which will be far from everyone) is still
probably worth it.
robin_reala wrote 3 days ago:
I use Kagi for this: you can block domains from appearing in your
search results.
HTML [1]: https://kagi.com/settings/user_ranked
JohnFen wrote 3 days ago:
I was using "blacklist" in a much more general sense, but here's
how it actually plays out. Most of my general purpose website
reading is done through an RSS aggregator. If one of those feeds
starts using genAI, then I just drop it out of the aggregator. If
it's a website that I found through web search, then I use Kagi's
search refinement settings to ensure that site won't come up
again in my search results. If it's a YouTube channel I subscribe
to, I unsubscribe. If it's one that YouTube recommended to me, I
tell YouTube to no longer recommend anything from that channel.
Otherwise, I just remember that particular source as being
untrustworthy.
the_af wrote 4 days ago:
What amazes me is that some people think I want to read AI slop in
their blog that I could have generated by asking ChatGPT directly.
Anyone can access ChatGPT, why do we need an intermediary?
Someone a while back shared, here on HN, almost an entire blog
generated by (barely touched up) AI text. It even had Claude-isms like
"excellent question!", em-dashes, the works. Why would anyone want to
read that?
CuriouslyC wrote 4 days ago:
In that case, I'd say maybe you didn't have the wisdom to ask the
question in the first place? And maybe you wouldn't know the follow
up questions to ask after that? And if the person who produced it
took a few minutes to fact check, that has value as well.
the_af wrote 4 days ago:
It's seldom the case that AI slop requires widsom to ask, or is
fact-checked in any depth other than cursory. Cursory checking of
AI-slop has effectively zero value.
Or do you remember when Facebook groups or image communities were
flooded with funny/meme AI-generated images, "The Godfather, only
with Star Wars", etc? Thank you, but I can generate those
zero-effort memes myself, I also have access to GenAI.
We truly don't need intermediaries.
CuriouslyC wrote 3 days ago:
You don't need human intermediates either, what's the point of
teachers? You can read the original journal articles just fine.
In fact what's the point of any communication that isn't journal
articles? Everything else is just recycled slop.
the_af wrote 3 days ago:
No, that's a false equivalence.
> Everything else is just recycled slop.
No, not everything is slop. AI-slop is slop. The term was
coined for a reason.
Everyone can ask the AI directly, unlike accessing journals.
Journals are intermediaries because you don't have direct
access to the source (or cannot conduct the experiment
yourself).
Everyone has access to AI at the slop "let's generate blog
posts and articles" level we're discussing here.
A better analogy than teachers is: I ask a teacher a random
question, and then I tell it to you with almost no changes,
with the same voice if the teacher (and you also have access to
the same teacher). Why? What value do I add? You can ask the
teacher directly. And doubly so because what I'm asking is not
some flash of insight, it's random crap instead.
dewey wrote 4 days ago:
There's blogs that are not meant to be read, but are just content
marketing to be found by search engines.
xena wrote 4 days ago:
People at work have fed me obviously AI generated documentation and
blogposts. I've gotten to the point where I can make fairly accurate
guesses as to which model generated it. I've started to just reject
them because the alternative is getting told to rewrite them to "not
look AI".
elif wrote 4 days ago:
I feel like this has to be AI generated satire as art
thire wrote 4 days ago:
Yes, I was almost hoping for a "this was AI-generated" disclaimer at
the end!
icapybara wrote 4 days ago:
If they canât be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to
read it?
dist-epoch wrote 3 days ago:
They used to say judge the message, not the messenger.
But you are saying that is wrong, you should judge the messenger, not
the message.
CuriouslyC wrote 4 days ago:
Tired meme. If you can't be bothered to think up an original idea,
why bother to post?
YurgenJurgensen wrote 4 days ago:
2+2 doesnât suddenly become 5 just because youâre bored of 4.
CuriouslyC wrote 3 days ago:
If you assume that a LLM's expansion of someone's thoughts is
less their thoughts than someone copy and pasting a tired meme,
that exposes a pretty fundamental world view divide. I'm ok with
you just hating AI stuff because it's AI, but have the guts to
own your prejudice and state it openly -- you're always going to
hate AI no matter how good it gets, just be clear about that. I
can't stand people who try to make up pretty sounding reasons to
justify their primal hatred.
YurgenJurgensen wrote 3 days ago:
I donât hate AI, I hate liars. Itâs just that so far, the
former has proven itself to be of little use to anyone but the
latter.
thw_9a83c wrote 4 days ago:
> If they canât be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered
to read it?
Isn't that the same with AI-generated source code? If lazy
programmers didn't bother writing it, why should I bother reading it?
I'll ask the AI to understand it and to make the necessary changes.
Now, let's repeat this process over and over. I wonder what would be
the state of such code over time. We are clearly walking this path.
Ekaros wrote 4 days ago:
Why would I bother to run it? Why wouldn't I just have AI to read
it and then provide output on my input?
conception wrote 4 days ago:
Why would source code be considered the same as a blog post?
thw_9a83c wrote 4 days ago:
I didn't say the source code is the same as a blog post. I
pointed out that we are going to apply the "I don't bother"
approach to the source code as well.
Programming languages were originally invented for humans to
write and read. Computers don't need them. They are fine with
machine code. If we eliminate humans from the coding process, the
code could become something that is not targeted for humans. And
machines will be fine with that too.
bryanlarsen wrote 4 days ago:
Because the author has something to say and needs help saying it?
pre-AI scientists would publish papers and then journalists would
write summaries which were usually misleading and often wrong.
An AI operating on its own would likely be no better than the
journalist, but an AI supervised by the original scientist quite
likely might do a better job.
kirurik wrote 4 days ago:
I agree, I think there is such a thing as AI overuse, but I would
rather someone uses AI to form their points more succinctly than
for them to write something that I can't understand.
AlienRobot wrote 4 days ago:
Now that I think about it, it's rather ironic that's a quote because
you didn't write it.
alxmdev wrote 4 days ago:
Many of those who can't be bothered to write what they publish
probably can't be bothered to read it themselves, either. Not by
humans and certainly not for humans.
abixb wrote 4 days ago:
I'm sure lots of "readers" of such articles fed it to another AI
model to summarize it, thereby completely bypassing the usual human
experience of writing and then careful (and critical) reading and
parsing of the article text. I weep for the future.
Also, reminds me of this cartoon from March 2023. [0]
[0]
HTML [1]: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
array_key_first wrote 3 days ago:
Are people doing this or is this just what, like, Apple or someone
is telling us people are doing?
Because I've never seen anyone actually use a summarizing AI
willingly. And especially not for blogs and other discretionary
activities.
That's like getting the remote from the hit blockbuster "Click"
starring Adam Sandler (2006) and then using it to skip sex. Just
doesn't make any sense.
trthomps wrote 4 days ago:
I'm curious if the people who are using AI to summarize articles
are the same people who would have actually read more than the
headline to begin with. It feels to me like the sort of person who
would have read the article and applied critical thinking to it is
not going to use an AI summary to bypass that since they won't be
satisfied with it.
edoceo wrote 4 days ago:
I do like it for taking the hour long audio/video and creating a
summary that, even if poorly written, can indicate to me wether I'd
like to listen to the hour of media.
4fterd4rk wrote 4 days ago:
It's insulting but I also find it extremely concerning that my younger
colleagues can't seem to tell the difference. An article will very
clearly be AI slop and I'll express frustration, only to discover that
they have no idea what I"m talking about.
otikik wrote 4 days ago:
This is Rick and Morty S1E4 and we are all becoming Jerry. [1] [1] !
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Night_Shaym-Aliens
ehutch79 wrote 4 days ago:
In the US, (internet fact, grain of salt, etc) there is a trend where
students, and now adults, are growing increasingly functionally
illiterate.
noir_lord wrote 4 days ago:
I'd be curious to do a general study to see what percentage of humans
can spot AI written content vs human written content on the same
subject.
Specifically is there any correlation between people who have always
read a lot as I do and people who don't.
My observation (anecdota) is that the people I know who read heavily
are much better at and much more against AI slop vs people who don't
read at all.
Even when I've played with the current latest LLM's and asked them
questions, I simply don't like the way they answer, it feels off
somehow.
mediaman wrote 4 days ago:
I both read a fair amount (and long books, 800-1,000 page classic
Russian novels, that kind of thing) and use LLMs.
I quite like using LLMs to learn new things. But I agree: I can't
stand reading blog posts written by LLMs. Perhaps it is about
expectations. A blog post I am expecting to gain a view into an
individual's thinking; for an AI, I am looking into an abyss of
whirring matrix-shaped gears.
There's nothing wrong with the abyss of matrices, but if I'm at a
party and start talking with someone, and get the whirring sound of
gears instead of the expected human banter, I'm a little disturbed.
And it feels the same for blog content: these are personal
communications; machines have their place and their use, but if I
get a machine when I'm expecting something personal, it counters
expectations.
strix_varius wrote 4 days ago:
I agree, and I'm not sure why it feels off but I have a theory.
AI is good at local coherence, but loses the plot over longer
thoughts (paragraphs, pages). I don't think I could identify AI
sentences but I'm totally confident I could identify an AI book.
This includes both opening a large text in a way of thinking that
isn't reflected several paragraphs later, and also maintaining a
repetitive "beat" in the rhythm of writing that is fine locally but
becomes obnoxious and repetitive over longer periods. Maybe that's
just regression to the mean of "voice?"
jermaustin1 wrote 4 days ago:
For me it is everyone that has lost the ability to respond to a work
email without first having it rewritten by some LLM somewhere. Or my
sister who will have ChatGPT give a response to a text message if she
doesn't feel like reading the 4-5 sentences from someone.
I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof soon, and
I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done about it.
mrguyorama wrote 3 days ago:
ADHD is a difference in how the brain functions and is constructed.
It is physiological.
I don't think any evidence exists that you can cause anyone to
become neurodivergent except by traumatic brain injury
TikTok does not "make" people ADHD. They might struggle to let
themselves be bored and may be addicted to quick fixes of dopamine,
but that is not what ADHD is. ADHD is not an addiction to dopamine
hits. ADHD is not an inability to be bored.
TikTok for example will not give you the kinds of tics and lack of
proprioception that is common in neurodivergent people. Being
addicted to Tiktok will never give you that absurd experience where
your brain "hitches" while doing a task and you rapidly oscillate
between progressing towards one task vs another. Being habituated
to check your phone at every down moment does not cause you to be
unable to ignore sensory input because your actual sensory
processing machinery in your brain is not functioning normally.
Getting addicted to tiktok does not give you a child's handwriting
despite decades of practice. If you do not already have significant
stimming and jitter symptoms, Tiktok will not make you develop
them.
You cannot learn to be ADHD.
larodi wrote 3 days ago:
ADHD is going to very soon be a major pandemic. Not one we talk
about too much, as there are plenty of players ready to feed
unlimited supplies of Concerta, Ritalin and Adderal among others.
noir_lord wrote 4 days ago:
> I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof soon
As a diagnosed medical condition I don't know, as people having
seemingly shorter and short attention spans we are seeing it
already, TikTok and YT shorts and the like don't help, we've
weaponised inattention.
Insanity wrote 4 days ago:
Or worse - they can tell the difference but donât think it matters.
rco8786 wrote 4 days ago:
I see a lot of that also.
noir_lord wrote 4 days ago:
I just hit the back button as soon as my "this feels like AI" sense
tingles.
Now you could argue but you don't know it was AI it could just be
really mediocre writing - it could indeed but I hit the back button
there as well so it's a wash either way.
shadowgovt wrote 4 days ago:
I do the same, but for blog posts complaining about AI.
At this point, I don't know there's much more to be said on the
topic. Lines of contention are drawn, and all that's left is to see
what people decide to do.
embedding-shape wrote 4 days ago:
I do the same almost, but use "this isn't interesting/fun to read"
and don't really care if it was written by AI or not, if it's
interesting/fun it's interesting/fun, and if it isn't, it isn't. Many
times it's obvious it's AI, but sometimes as you said it could just
be bad, and in the end it doesn't really matter, I don't want to
continue reading it regardless.
rco8786 wrote 4 days ago:
There's definitely an uncanny valley with a lot of AI. But also, it's
entirely likely that lots of what we're reading is AI generated and
we can't tell at all. This post could easily be AI (it's not, but it
could be)
Waterluvian wrote 4 days ago:
Ah the portcullis to the philosophical topic of, âif you
couldnât tell, does that demonstrate that authenticity doesnât
matter?â
noir_lord wrote 4 days ago:
I think it does, We could get a robotic arm to paint in the style
of a Dutch master but it'd not be a Dutch master.
I'd sooner have a ship painting from the little shop in the
village with the little old fella who paints them in the shop
than a perfect robotic simulacrum of a Rembrandt.
Intention matters but it matters less sometimes but I think it
matters.
Writing is communication, it's one of the things we as humans do
that makes us unique - why would I want to reduce that to a
machine generating it or read it when it has.
yoyohello13 wrote 4 days ago:
Iâve been learning piano and Iâve noticed a similar thing
with music. You can listen to perfect machine generated
performances of songs and there is just something missing. A
live performance even of a master pianist will have little
âmistakesâ or interpretations that make the whole
performance so much more enjoyable. Not only that, but just
knowing that a person spent months drilling a song adds
something.
Waterluvian wrote 3 days ago:
Two things this great comment reminds me of:
I've been learning piano too, and I find more joy in
performing a piece poorly, than listening to it played
competently. My brother asked me why I play if I'm just
playing music that's already been performed (a leading
question, he's not ignorant). I asked him why he plays hockey
if you can watch pros play it far better. It's the journey,
not the destination.
I've been (re-)re-re-watching Star Trek TNG and Data touches
on this issue numerous times, one of which is specifically
about performing violin (but also reciting Shakespeare). And
the message is what you're sharing: to recite a piece with
perfect technical execution results an in imperfect
performance. It's the _human_ aspects that lend a piece deep
emotion that other humans connect with, often without being
able to concretely describe why. Let us feel your emotions
through your work. Everyting written on the page is just the
medium for those emotions. Without emotion, your perfectly
recited piece is a delivered blank message.
Peritract wrote 3 days ago:
> Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
HTML [1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43745/andre...
cubefox wrote 4 days ago:
That's also why in The Matrix (1999) the main character takes
the red pill (facing grim reality) rather than the blue pill
(forgetting about grim reality and going back to a happy
illusion).
noir_lord wrote 4 days ago:
Aye I always thought the character of Cypher was tragic as
well, his reality sucked so much that he'd consciously go
back and live a lie he doesn't remember and then forget he
made that choice.
The Matrix was and is fantastic on many levels.
DaiPlusPlus wrote 2 days ago:
Itâs a shame they never made any sequels
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