18 ms·

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that. Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. But what I had never noticed until now is that knowing that a human being was behind the written words (however flawed they can be, and hopefully are) is crucial for me. This has completely destroyed my interest in reading any new things. I guess I'm lucky that we have produced so much writing in the past century or so and I'll never run out of stuff to read, but it's still depressing, to be honest.

elnasca2 2y ago
What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?
- baq 2y ago
  scale makes all the difference. society without trust falls apart. it's good if some people doubt some things, but if everyone necessarily must doubt everything, it's anarchy.
  - dangitman 2y ago
    [dead]
    - Hoasi 2y ago
      > Is our society built on trust? A good part of society, the foundational part, is trust. Trust between individuals, but also trust in the sense that we expect things to behave in a certain way. We trust things like currencies despite their flaws. Our world is too complex to reinvent the wheel whenever we need to do a transaction. We must believe enough in a make-believe system to avoid perpetual collapse.
      - dangitman 2y ago
        [dead]
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Perhaps that anarchy is the exact thing we need to convince everyone to revolt against big tech firms like Google and OpenAI and take them down by mob rule.
- kombookcha 2y ago
  Debunking bullshit inherently takes more effort than generating bullshit, so the human factor is normally your big force multiplier. Does this person seem trustworthy? What else have they done, who have they worked with, what hidden motivations or biases might they have, are their vibes /off/ to your acute social monkey senses? However with AI anyone can generate absurd torrential flows of bullshit at a rate where, with your finite human time and energy, the only winning move is to reject out of hand any piece of media that you can sniff out as AI. It's a solution that's imperfect, but workable, when you're swimming through a sea of slop.
  - bitexploder 2y ago
    Maybe the debunking AIs can match the bullshit generating AIs, and we will have balance in the force. Everyone is focused on the generative AIs, it seems.
    - nicce 2y ago
      There is always more money available for bullshit generation than bullshit removal.
    - desdenova 2y ago
      No, they can't. They'll still be randomly deciding if something is fake or not, so they'll only have a probability of being correct, like all nondeterministic AI.
  - ontouchstart 2y ago
    Debugging is harder than writing code. Once the code passed linter, compiler and test, the bugs might be more subtly logical and require more effort and intelligence. We are all becoming QA of this super automated world.
- nicce 2y ago
  In the past, you had to put a lot of effort to produce a text which seemed to be high quality, especially when you knew nothing about the subject. By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject. Now, that is completely removed. There is no easy filter anymore. While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller... I don't criticise you for it, because that strategy is both rational and popular. But you never checked the accuracy of your information before so you have no way of telling if it has gotten more or less accurate with the advent of AI. You were testing for whether someone of high social intelligence wanted you to believe what they said rather than if what they said was true.
    - dietr1ch 2y ago
      I guess the complaint is about losing this proxy to gain some assurance for little cost. We humans are great at figuring out the least amount of work that's good enough. Now we'll need to be fully diligent, which means more work, and also there'll be way more things to review.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        I'd argue people clearly don't care about the truth at all - they care about being part of a group and that is where it ends. It shows up in things like critical thinking being a difficult skill acquired slowly vs social proof which humans just do by reflex. Makes a lot of sense, if there are 10 of us and 1 of you it doesn't matter how smartypants you may be when the mob forms. AI does indeed threaten people's ability to identify whether they are reading work by a high status human and what the group consensus is - and that is a real problem for most people. But it has no bearing on how correct information was in the past vs will be in the future. Groups are smart but they get a lot of stuff wrong in strategic ways (it is almost a truism that no group ever identifies itself or its pursuit of its own interests as the problem).
- tempfile 2y ago
  > I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. You might question new information, but you certainly do not actually verify it. So all you can hope to do is sense-checking - if something doesn't sound plausible, you assume it isn't true. This depends on having two things: having trustworthy sources at all, and being able to relatively easily distinguish between junk info and real thorough research. AI is a very easy way for previously-trustworthy sources to sneak in utter disinformation without necessarily changing tone much. That makes it much easier for the info to sneak past your senses than previously.
- thesz 2y ago
  Propaganda works by repeating the same in different forms. Now it is easier to have different forms of the same, hence, more propaganda. Also, it is much easier to iinfluence whatever people write by influencing the tool they use to write. Imagine that AI tools sway generated sentences to be slightly close, in summarisation space, to the phrase "eat dirt" or anything. What would happen?
  - ImHereToVote 2y ago
    Hopefully people will exercise more judgement now that every Tom, Dick, and Harry scam artists can output elaborate prose.
- eesmith 2y ago
  The negation of 'I cannot trust' is not 'I could always trust' but rather 'I could sometimes trust'. Nor is trust meant to mean something is absolute and unquestionable. I may trust someone, but with enough evidence I can withdraw trust.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  Trust as no bearing on what they said. Reading was a form of connecting with someone. Their opinions are bound to be flawed, everyone's are - but they're still the thoughts and words of a person. This is no longer the case. Thus, the human factor is gone and this reduces the experience to some of us, me included.
  - farleykr 2y ago
    This is exactly what’s at stake. I heard an artist say one time that he’d rather listen to Bob Dylan miss a note than listen to a song that had all the imperfections engineered out of it.
    - herval 2y ago
      The flipside of that is the most popular artists of all time (eg Taylor Swift) do autotune to perfection, and yet more and more people love them
      - kombookcha 2y ago
        If you ask a Swiftie what they love about Taylor Swift, I guarantee they will not say "the autotune is flawless". They're not connecting with the relative correctness of each note, but feeling a human, creative connection with an artist expressing herself.
        herval 2y ago
        They're "creatively connecting" to an autotuned version of a human, not to a "flawed Bob Dylan"
        kombookcha 2y ago
        They're not connecting to the autotune, but to the artist. People have a lot of opinions about Taylor Swift's music but "not being personal enough" is definitely not a common one. If you wanna advocate for unplugged music being more gratifying, I don't disagree, but acting like the autotune is what people are getting out of Taylor Swift songs is goofy.
- croes 2y ago
  The quota changed because it's now easier and faster
- tuyguntn 2y ago
  > For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. I also did, but LLM increased the volume of content, which forces my brain first try to identify if content is generated by LLMs, which is consuming a lot of energy and makes brain even less focused, because now it's primary goal is skimming quickly to identify, instead of absorbing first and then analyzing info
  - desdenova 2y ago
    The web being polluted only makes me ignore more of it. You already know some of the more trustworthy sources of information, you don't need to read a random blog which will require a lot more effort to verify. Even here on hackernews, I ignore like 90% of the spam people post. A lot of posts here are extremely low effort blogs adding zero value to anything, and I don't even want to think whether someone wasted their own time writing that or used some LLM, it's worthless in both cases.
- everdrive 2y ago
  How do you like questioning much more of it, much more frequently, from many more sources? And mistrusting it in new ways. AI and regular people are not wrong in the same ways, nor for the same reasons, and now you must track this too, increasingly.
- voidmain0001 2y ago
  I read the original comment not as a lament of not being able to trust the content, rather, they are lamenting the fact that AI/LLM generated content has no more thought or effort put into it than a cheap microwave dinner purchased from Walmart. Yes, it fills the gut with calories but it lacks taste. On second thought, perhaps AI/LLM generated content is better illustrated with it being like eating the regurgitated sludge called cud. Nothing new, but it fills the gut.
- a99c43f2d565504 2y ago
  Perhaps "trust" was a bit misplaced here, but I think we can all agree on the idea: Before LLMs, there was intelligence behind text, and now there's not. The I in LLM stands for intelligence, as written in one blog. Maybe the text never was true, but at least it made sense given some agenda. And like pointed out by others, the usual text style and vocabulary signs that could have been used to identify expertise or agenda are gone.
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    Those signs are largely bs. It's a textual version of charisma.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > Perhaps "trust" was a bit misplaced here, but I think we can all agree on the idea: Before LLMs, there was intelligence behind text, and now there's not. The I in LLM stands for intelligence, as written in one blog. Maybe the text never was true, but at least it made sense given some agenda. Nope. A lot of people just wrote stuff. There were always plenty of word salad blogs (and arguably entire philosophy journals) out there.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  There are topics on which you should be somewhat suspicious of anything you read, but also many topics where it is simply improbable that anyone would spend time maliciously coming up with a lie. However, they may well have spicy autocomplete imagine something for them. An example from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645282
- desdenova 2y ago
  Exactly. The web before LLMs was mostly low effort SEO spam written by low-wage people in marketing agencies. Now it's mostly zero effort LLM-generated SEO spam, and the low-wage workers lost their jobs.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    The difference is that now we'll have even more zero-effort SEO spam because AI is a force multiplier for that. Much more.
- galactus 2y ago
  I think it is a totally different threat. Excluding adversarial behavior, humans usually produce information with a quality level that is homogeneous (from homogeneously sloppy to homogeneously rigurous). AI otoh can produce texts that are quite accurate globally with some totally random hallucinations here and there. It makes it quite harder to identify
- akudha 2y ago
  There were news reports that Russia spent less than a million dollars on a massive propaganda campaign targeting U.S elections and the American population in general. Do you think it would be possible before internet, before AI? Bad actors, poorly written/sourced information, sensationalism etc have always existed. It is nothing new. What is new is the scale, speed and cost of making and spreading poor quality stuff now. All one needs today is a laptop and an internet connection and a few hours, they can wreak havoc. In the past, you'd need TV or newspapers to spread bad (and good) stuff - they were expensive, time consuming to produce and had limited reach.
  - kloop 2y ago
    There are lots of organizations with $1M and a desire to influence the population This can only be done with a sentiment that was, at least partially, already there. And may very well happen naturally eventually
  - immibis 2y ago
    How can I wreck havoc with a few hours, a laptop, and an internet connection? It takes a bit more than that.
    - akudha 2y ago
      Some woman’s cat was hiding in her basement. She automatically assumed her Haitian neighbors stole her cat and made some comment about it, which landed on Facebook, which got morphed into “immigrants eating pets” story, JD Vance picked it up, Trump mentioned it in a national debate watched by 65 million people. All of this happened in a few days. This resulted in violence in Springfield. If you can place a rumor or lie in front of the right person/people to amplify, it will be amplified. It will spread like wildfire, and by the time it is fact checked, it will have done at least some damage.
      - immibis 2y ago
        These successful manipulation stories are extremely rare though. What usually happens is that you say your neighbour ate your cat, then everyone laughs at you. Did the person who posted do the manipulation, or did JD Vance and Donald Trump do it?
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. [...] Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? A human communicator is, in a sense, testifying when communicating. Humans have skin in the social game. We try to educate people, we do want people to be well-informed and to think critically about what they read and hear. In the marketplace of information, we tend very strongly to trust non-delusional, non-hallucinating members of society. Human society is a social-confidence network. In social media, where there is a cloak of anonymity (or obscurity), people may behave very badly. But they are usually full of excuses when the cloak is torn away; they are usually remarkably contrite before a judge. A human communicator can face social, legal, and economic consequences for false testimony. Humans in a corporation, and the corporation itself, may be held accountable. They may allocate large sums of money to their defence, but reputation has value and their defence is not without social cost and monetary cost. It is literally less effort at every scale to consult a trusted and trustworthy source of information. It is literally more effort at every scale to feed oneself untrustworthy communication.
- sevensor 2y ago
  For me, the problem has gone from “figure out the author’s agenda” to “figure out whether this is a meaningful text at all,” because gibberish now looks a whole lot more like meaning than it used to.
  - pxoe 2y ago
    This has been a problem on the internet for the past decade if not more anyway, with all of the seo nonsense. If anything, maybe it's going to be ever so slightly more readable.
    - orthecreedence 2y ago
      I don't know what you're talking about. Most people don't think of SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Performance, Search Engine Relevance, Search Rankings, Result Page Optimization, or Result Performance when writing their Article, Articles, Internet Articles, News Articles, Current News, Press Release, or News Updates...
- solidninja 2y ago
  There's a quantity argument to be made here - before, it used to be hard to generate large amounts of plausible but incorrect text. Now it easy. Similar to surveillance before/after smartphones + the internet - you had to have a person following you vs just soaking up all the data on the backbone.
- escape_goat 2y ago
  There was a degree of proof of work involved. Text took human effort to create, and this roughly constrained the quantity and quality of misinforming text to the number of humans with motive to expend sufficient effort to misinform. Now superficially indistinguishable text can be created by an investment in flops, which are fungible. This means that the constraint on the amount of misinforming text instead scales with whatever money is resourced to the task of generating misinforming text. If misinforming text can generate value for someone that can be translated back into money, the generation of misinforming text can be scaled to saturation and full extraction of that value.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  It’s nothing to do with trusting in terms of being true or false, but whatever I read before I felt like, well, it can be good or bad, I can judge it, but whatever it is, somebody wrote it. It’s their work. Now when I read something I just have absolutely no idea whether the person wrote it, how much percent did they write it, or how much they even had to think before publishing it. Anyone can simply publish a perfectly well-written piece of text about any topic whatsoever, and I just can’t wrap my head around why, but it feels like a complete waste of time to read anything. Like… it’s all just garbage, I don’t know.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  The following appears to be true: If one spends a lot of years reading a lot of stuff, they come to this conclusion, that most of it cannot be trusted. But it takes lots of years and lots of material to see it. If they don't, they don't.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  It's that you trusted that what you read came from a human being. Back in the day I used to spend hours reading Evolution vs Creationism debates online. I didn't "trust" the veracity of half of what I read, but that didn't mean I didn't want to read it. I liked reading it because it came from people. I would never want to read AI regurgitation of these arguments.
t43562 2y ago
It empowers people to create mountains of shit that they cannot distinguish from shit - so they are happy.
walthamstow 2y ago
I've even grown to enjoy spelling and grammar mistakes - at least I know a human wrote it.
- oneshtein 2y ago
  > Write a response to this comment, make spelling and grammar mistakes. yeah well sumtimes spellling and grammer erors just make thing hard two read. like i no wat u mean bout wanting two kno its a reel person, but i think cleear communication is still importint! ;)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 1aleksa 2y ago
  Whenever somebody misspells my name, I know it's legit haha
  - sseagull 2y ago
    Way back when we had a landline and would get telemarketers, it was always a sign when the caller couldn’t pronounce our last name. It’s not even that uncommon a name, either
- Gigachad 2y ago
  There was a meme along the lines of people will start including slurs in their messages to prove it wasn’t AI generated.
  - dijit 2y ago
    I mean, it's not a meme.. I included a few more "private" words than I should and I even tried to narrate things to prove I wasn't an AI. https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/ https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/ Not sure what else I should do, but it's pretty clear that it's not AI written (mostly because it's incoherent) even without grammar mistakes.
grecy 2y ago
Eh, like everything in life you can choose what you spend your time on and what you ignore. There have always been human writers I don’t waste my time on, and now there are AI writers in the same category. I don’t care. I will just do what I want with my life and use my time and energy on things I enjoy and find useful.
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avereveard 2y ago
why do you trust things now? unless you recognize the author and have a chain of trust from that author production to the content you're consuming, there already was no way to estabilish trust.
- layer8 2y ago
  For one, I trust authors more who are not too lazy to start sentences with upper case.
flir 2y ago
I've been using it in my personal writing (combination of GPT and Claude). I ask the AI to write something, maybe several times, and I edit it until I'm happy with it. I've always known I'm a better editor than I am an author, and the AI text gives me somewhere to start. So there's a human in the loop who is prepared to vouch for those sentences. They're not 100% human-written, but they are 100% human-approved. I haven't just connected my blog to a Markov chain firehose and walked away. Am I still adding to the AI smog? idk. I imagine that, at a bare minimum, its way of organising text bleeds through no matter how much editing I do.
- vladstudio 2y ago
  you wrote this comment completely by your own, right? without any AI involved. And I read your comment feeling confident that it's truly 100% yours. I think this reader's confidence is what the OP is talking about.
  - flir 2y ago
    I did. I write for myself mostly so I'm not so worried about one reader's trust - I guess I'm more worried that I might be contributing to the dead internet theory by generating AI-polluted text for the next generation of AIs to train on. At the moment I'm using it for local history research. I feed it all the text I can find on an event (mostly newspaper articles and other primary sources, occasionally quotes from secondary sources) and I prompt with something like "Summarize this document in a concise and direct style. Focus on the main points and key details. Maintain a neutral, objective voice." Then I hack at it until I'm happy (mostly I cut stuff). Analysis, I do the other way around: I write the first draft, then ask the AI to polish. Then I go back and forth a few times until I'm happy with that paragraph. I'm not going anywhere with this really, I'm just musing out loud. Am I contributing to a tragedy of the commons by writing about 18th century enclosures? Because that would be ironic.
    - ontouchstart 2y ago
      If you write for yourself, whether you use generated text or not, (I am using the text completion on my phone typing this message), the only thing that matters is how it affects you. Reading and writing are mental processes (with or without advanced technology) that shape our collective mind.
ozim 2y ago
What kind of silliness is this? AI generated crap is one thing. But human generated crap is there - just because human wrote something it is not making it good. Had a friend who thought that if it is written in a book it is for sure true. Well NO! There was exactly the same sentiment with stuff on the internet and it is still the same sentiment about Wikipedia that “it is just some kids writing bs, get a paper book or real encyclopedia to look stuff up”. Not defending gen AI - but still you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not, it was always an effort and nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff.
- tempfile 2y ago
  > you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not yes, obviously. But AI slop makes those proxy measures significantly more complicated. Critical thinking is not magic - it is still a guess, and people are obviously worse at distinguishing AI bullshit from human bullshit.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  > nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff. The problem is that wheat:chaff ratio used to be 1:100, and soon it's going to become 1:100 million. I think you're severely underestimating the amount of effort it's going to take to find real information in the sea of AI generated content.
  - ozim 2y ago
    Just like people were able to find real information on topics like: "tobacco is not that bad, it is just nice like coffee" and "fat is bad for you, here have some sugar", "alcohol is fun, having beer is nice"? Fundamentally AI changes nothing for masses and for individuals alike and there was nothing you could "just trust" because it was written on a website or in a book. That is why I call it silly. It also doesn't make it easier or harder for people in power that have vast resources to plant what they want - they have money and power and will do so anyway.
- shprd 2y ago
paganel 2y ago
You kind of notice the stuff written with AI, it has a certain something that makes it detectable. Granted, stuff like the Reuters press reports might have already been written by AI, but I think that in that case it doesn’t really matter.
lokimedes 2y ago
I get two associations from your comment: One about how AI being mainly used to interpolate within a corpus of prior knowledge, seems like entropy in a thermodynamical sense. The other, how this is like the Tower of Babel but where distrust is sown by sameness rather than differences. In fact, relying on AI for coding and writing, feels more like channeling demonic suggestions than anything else. No wonder we are becoming skeptical.
- seniortaco 2y ago
  I know and at my company we actually cannot disable the AI suggestions :( It's like dealing with a pathological liar who produces very convincing looking code for me to review, but actually there is a bug in it 50% of the time. It's like it's trying to trick me into committing bugs.
ks2048 2y ago
> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. Is that true today? I guess it depends what kind of writing you are talking about, but I wouldn't think most successful writers today - from novelests to tech bloggers - rely that much on AI, but I don't know. Five years from now, could be a different story.
- theshackleford 2y ago
  Yes it’s true today, depending on what is your writing is the foundation of. It doesn’t matter that my writing is more considered, more accurate and of a higher quality when my coworkers are all openly using AI to perform five times the work I am and producing outcomes that are “good enough” because good enough is quite enough for a larger majority than many likely realise.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  It's not true at all. Much like the claims that you have to use LLMs to keep up in programming: if that is true then you weren't a good programmer (or writer in this case) to begin with.
  - davidgerard 2y ago
    yeah, this is just critihype
  - low_tech_love 2y ago
    That is absolutely wrong. Regardless of whether you were or not good to begin with, an LLM assistant will still accelerate a lot of repetitive tasks for you. Repetitive is repetitive, no matter if you’re John Carmack or the guy sitting in the booth next to you in the paper company. And anyway in a few years none of it will matter because programming without assistance will be a vintage thing of the past (like perforated cards). It’s the same with writing. If you find yourself writing a boring introduction section to a paper with a bunch of meaningless blabla, then why wouldn’t you use AI for that? There is simply no good reason, especially when you see mediocre researchers publishing at three times your rate and getting promoted over you.
williamcotton 2y ago
Well we’re going to need some system of PKI that is tied to real identities. You can keep being anonymous if you want but I would prefer not and prefer to not interact with the anonymous, just like how I don’t want to interact with people wearing ski masks.
- nottorp 2y ago
  Why are you posting on this forum where the user's identity isn't verified by anyone then? :) But the real problem is that having the poster's identity verified is no proof that their output is not coming straight from a LLM.
  - williamcotton 2y ago
    I don’t really have a choice about interacting with the anonymous at this point. It certainly will affect the reputation of people that are consistently publishing untruths.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      > It certainly will affect the reputation of people that are consistently publishing untruths. Oh? I thought there are a lot of very well identified people making a living from publishing untruths right now on all social media. How would PKI help, when they're already making it very clear who they are?
- flir 2y ago
  I doubt that's possible. I can always lend my identity to an AI. The best you can hope for is not "a human wrote this text", it's "a human vouched for this text".
FrankyHollywood 2y ago
I have never read more bullshit in my life than during the corona pandemic, all written by humans. So you should never trust something you read, always question the source and it's reasoning. At the same time I use copilot on a daily basis, both for coding as well as the normal chat. It is not perfect, but I'm at a point I trust AI more than the average human. And why shouldn't I? LLMs ingest and combine more knowledge than any human can ever do. An LLM is not a human brain but it's actually performing really well.
dijit 2y ago
Agreed, I feel like there's an inherent nobility in putting effort into something. If I took the time to write a book and have it proof-read and edited and so on: perhaps it's actually worth my time. Lowering the bar to write books is "good" but increases the noise to signal ratio. I'm not 100% certain how to give another proof-of-work, but what I've started doing is narrating my blog posts - though AI voices are getting better too.. :\
- vasco 2y ago
  > Agreed, I feel like there's an inherent nobility in putting effort into something. If I took the time to write a book and have it proof-read and edited and so on: perhaps it's actually worth my time. Said the scribe upon hearing about the printing press.
  - dijit 2y ago
    I'm not certain what statement you're implying, but yes, accessibility of bookwriting has definitely decreased the quality of books. Even technical books like Hardcore Java: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hardcore-java/0596005687/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hardcore-java/059600568... are god-awful, and even further away from the seminal texts on computer science that came before. It does feel like authorship was once heralded in higher esteem than it deserves today. Seems like people agree: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/18cvy9e/rant_bestsellers_are_getting_worse_and_worse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/18cvy9e/rant_bestsel...
  - yoyohello13 2y ago
    It's true though. Books hand written and illustrated by scribes were astronomically higher quality than mass printed books. People just tend to prefer what they have access to, and cheap/low quality is easy to access.
BikeShuester 2y ago
[flagged]
- 0x_rs 2y ago
  Spoken like a true LLM.
- Jevon23 2y ago
  You know that ChatGPT writing is still obvious even when you ask it to change its style, right?
  - block_dagger 2y ago
    Please provide evidence for this claim.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - 0x_rs 2y ago
      Take a look at the user's comment history. I'd argue the majority of them are generated, it really doesn't take much to recognize the patterns and tics those models commonly display (for now*), and it doesn't seem there was any attempt to make it appear otherwise, too. It may look coherent at first, but there's no deeper meaning or significance, it's noise.
      - hackable_sand 2y ago
        So no evidence. Got it.
onion2k 2y ago
The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. What AI is going to teach people is that they don't actually need to trust half as many things as they thought they did, but that they do need to verify what's left. This has always been the case. We've just been deferring to 'truster organizations' a lot recently, without actually looking to see if they still warrant having our trust when they change over time.
- layer8 2y ago
  How can you verify most of anything if you can’t trust any writing (or photographs, audio, and video, for that matter)?
  - Frost1x 2y ago
    Independent verification is always good however not always possible and practical. At complex levels of life we have to just trust underlying processes work, usually until something fails. I don’t go double checking civil engineers work (nor could I) for every bridge I drive over. I don’t check inspection records to make sure it was recent and proper actions were taken. I trust that enough people involved know what they’re doing with good enough intent that I can take my 20 second trip over it in my car without batting an eye. If I had to verify everything, I’m not sure how I’d get across many bridges on a daily basis. Or use any major infrastructure in general where my life might be at risk. And those are cases where it’s very important to be done right, if it’s some accounting form or generated video on the internet… I have even less time to be concerned from a practical standpoint. Having the skills to do it should I want or need to are good and everyone should have these but we’re at a point in society we really have to outsource trust in a lot of cases. This is true everywhere, even in science which these days many people just trust in ways akin to faith in some cases, and I don’t see anyway around that. The key being that all the information should exist to be able to independently verify something but from a practice standpoint it’s rarely viable.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Get good at spotting inconsistencies. And pay attention to when something contradicts your own experience. Cultivate a wide range of experiences so that you have more domains where you can do this (this is a good idea anyway).
nils-m-holm 2y ago
> It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. I am writing regularly and I will never use AI. In fact I am working on a 400+ pages book right now and it does not contain a single character that I have not come up with and typed myself. Something like pride in craftmanship does exist.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Nice. I will definitely consider your book over other books. I'm not interested in reading AI-assisted works.
- smitelli 2y ago
  I'm right there with you. I write short and medium form articles for my personal site (link in bio, follow it or don't, the world keeps spinning either way). I will never use AI as part of this craft. If that hampers my output, or puts me at a disadvantage compared to the competition, or changes the opinion others have of me, I really don't care.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  In b4 all the botslop shills tell you you're gonna get "left behind" if you don't pollute your output with GPT'd copypasta.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  Amazing! Do you feel any pressure from your environment? And are you self-funded? I am also thinking about starting my first book.
  - nils-m-holm 2y ago
    What I write is pretty niche anyway (compilers, LISP, buddhism, advaita), so I do not think AI will cause much trouble. Google ranking small websites into oblivion, though, I do notice that!
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that. Are you sure you don't mean if you write regularly in one particular subclass of writing - like technical writing, documentation etc.? Do you think novel writing, poetry, film reviews etc. cannot keep up in the same way?
- t-3 2y ago
  I'm absolutely positive that the vast majority of fiction is or will soon be written by LLM. Will it be high-quality? Will it be loved and remembered by generations to come? Probably not. Will it make money? Probably more than before on average as the author's effort is reduced to writing outlines and prompts, and editing the generated-in-seconds output, rather than months-years of doing the writing themselves.
- PeterisP 2y ago
  I think that novel writing and reviews are types of writing where potentially AI should eventually surpass human writers, because they have the potential to replace content skillfully tailored to be liked by many people with content that's tailored (perhaps less skillfully) explicitly for a specific very, very, very narrow niche of exactly you and all the things that happen to work for your particular biases. There seems to be an upcoming wave of adult content products (once again, being on the bleeding edge users of new abilities) based on this principle, as hitting very specific niches/kinks/fetishes can be quite effective in that business, but it should then move on to romance novels and pulp fiction and then, over time, most other genres. Similarly, good pedagogy, curriculum design and educational content development is all about accurately modeling which exact bits of the content the target audience will/won't know, and explaining the gaps with analogies and context that will work for them (for example, when adapting a textbook for a different country, translation is not sufficient; you'd also need to adapt the content). In that regard, if AI models can make personalized technical writing, then that can be more effective than the best technical writing the most skilled person can make addressed to a broader audience.
dustingetz 2y ago
> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. What? No! Content volume only matters in stupid contests like VC app marketing grifts or political disinformation ops where the content isn’t even meant to be read, it’s an excuse for a headline. I personally write all my startup’s marketing content, quality is exquisite and due to this our brand is becoming a juggernaut
GrumpyNl 2y ago
response from AI on this: I completely understand where you're coming from. The increasing reliance on AI in writing does raise important questions about authenticity and connection. There’s something uniquely human in knowing that the words you're reading come from someone’s personal thoughts, experiences, and emotions—even if flawed. AI-generated content, while efficient and often well-written, lacks that deeper layer of humanity, the imperfections, and the creative struggle that gives writing its soul. It’s easy to feel disillusioned when you know AI is shaping so much of the content around us. Writing used to be a deeply personal exchange, but now, it can feel mechanical, like it’s losing its essence. The pressure to keep up with AI can be overwhelming for human writers, leading to this shift in content creation. At the same time, it’s worth considering that the human element still exists and will always matter—whether in long-form journalism, creative fiction, or even personal blogs. There are people out there who write for the love of it, for the connection it fosters, and for the need to express something uniquely theirs. While the presence of AI is unavoidable, the appreciation for genuine human insight and emotion will never go away. Maybe the answer lies in seeking out and cherishing those authentic voices. While AI-generated writing will continue to grow, the hunger for human storytelling and connection will persist too. It’s about finding balance in this new reality and, when necessary, looking back to the richness of past writings, as you mentioned. While it may seem like a loss in some ways, it could also be a call to be more intentional in what we read and who we trust to deliver those words.
sandworm101 2y ago
>> cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten. I was talking to someone about Taylor Swift recently. They thought that she wrote all her songs. I commented that one cannot really know that, that the entertainment industry is very going at generating seemingly "authentic" product at a rapid pace. My colleague looked at me like I had just killed a small animal. The idea that TS was "genuine" was a cornerstone of their fandom, and my suggestion had attacked that love. If you love music or film, don't dig too deep. It is all a factory. That AI is now part of that factory doesn't change much for me. Maybe my opinion would change if I saw something AI-generated with even a hint of artistic relevance. I've seen cool pictures and passable prose, but nothing so far with actual meaning, nothing worthy of my time.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Watch the movie "The Wrecking Crew" about how a group of studio musicians in the 1970s were responsible for the albums of quite a few diverse "bands". Many bands had to then learn to play their own songs so they could go on tour.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Or the SCTV skit about Michael McDonald backing seemingly everything at one point
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  > You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten. I'm reminded of 'Under The Silver Lake' with this reference. Strange film, but that plotline stuck with me.
- davidhaymond 2y ago
  While I do enjoy some popular genres, I'm all too aware of the massive industry behind it all. I believe that most of humanity's greatest works of art were created not for commercial interests but rather for the pure joy of creation, of human expression. This can be found in any genre if you look hard enough, but it's no accident that the music I find the most rewarding is classical music: Intellect, emotion, spirit, and narrative dreamed into existence by one person and then brought to life by other artists so we can share in its beauty. I think music brings about a connection between the composers, lyricists, performers, and listeners. Music lets us participate in something uniquely human. Replacing any of the human participants with AI greatly diminishes or eliminates its value in my eyes.
advael 2y ago
In trying to write a book, it makes little sense to try to "compete" on speed or volume of output. There were already vast disparities in that among people who write, and people whose aim was to express themselves or contribute something of importance to people's lives, or the body of creative work in the world, have little reason to value quantity over quality. Probably if there's a significant correlation with volume of output, it's in earnings, and that seems both somewhat tenuous and like something that's addressable by changes in incentives, which seem necessary for a lot of things. Computers being able to do dumb stuff at massive scale should be viewed as finding vulnerabilities in the metrics this allows it to become trivial to game, and it's baffling whenever people say "Well clearly we're going to keep all our metrics the same and this will ruin everything." Of course, in cases where we are doing that, we should stop (For example, we should probably act to significantly curb price and wage discrimination, though that's more like a return to form of previous regulatory standards) As a creator of any kind, I think that simply relying on LLMs to expand your output via straightforward uses of widely available tools is inevitably going to lead to regression to the mean in terms of creativity. I'm open to the idea, however, that there could be more creative uses of the things that some people will bother to do. Feedback loops they can create that somehow don't stifle their own creativity in favor of mimicking a statistical model, ways of incorporating their own ingredients into these food processors of information. I don't see a ton of finished work that seems to do this, but I see hints that some people are thinking this way, and they might come up with some cool stuff. It's a relatively newly adopted technology, and computer-generated art of various kinds usually separates into "efficiency" (which reads as low quality) in mimicking existing forms, and new forms which are uniquely possible with the new technology. I think plenty of people are just going to keep writing without significant input from LLMs, because while writer's block is a famous ailment, many writers are not primarily limited by their speed in producing more words. Like if you count comments on various sites and discussions with other people, I write thousands of words unassisted most days This kind of gets to the crux of why these things are useful in some contexts, but really not up to snuff with what's being claimed about them. The most compelling use cases I've seen boil down to some form of fitting some information into a format that's more contextually appropriate, which can be great for highly structured formatting requirements and dealing with situations which are already subject to high protocol of some kind, so long as some error is tolerated. For things for which conveying your ideas with high fidelity, emphasizing your own narrative voice or nuanced thoughts on a subject, or standing behind the factual claims made by the piece are not as important. As much as their more strident proponents want to claim that humans are merely learning things by aggregating and remixing them in the same sense as these models do, this reads as the same sort of wishful thinking about technology that led people to believe that brains should work like clockwork or transistors at various other points in time at best, and honestly this most often seems to be trotted out as the kind of bad-faith analogy tech lawyers tend to use when trying to claim that the use of [exciting new computer thing] means something they are doing can't be a crime So basically, I think rumors of the death of hand-written prose are, at least at present, greatly exaggerated, though I share the concern that it's going to be much harder to filter out spam from the genuine article, so what it's really going to ruin is most automated search techniques. The comparison to "low-background steel" seems apt, but analogies about how "people don't handwash their clothes as much anymore" kind of don't apply to things like books
wengo314 2y ago
i think the problem started when quantity became more important over quality. you could totally compete on quality merit, but nowadays the volume of output (and frequency) is what is prioritized.
yusufaytas 2y ago
I totally understand your frustration. We started writing our book long before(2022) AI became mainstream, and when we finally published it on May 2024, all we hear now is people asking if it's just AI-generated content. It’s sad to see how quickly the conversation shifts away from the human touch in writing.
- eleveriven 2y ago
  I can imagine how disheartening that must be
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eleveriven 2y ago
Maybe, over time, there will also be a renewed appreciation for authenticity
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it). I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence. But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, for hundreds of years.
- layer8 2y ago
  > marketing fluff for the App Store If it’s fluff, why do you put it there? As an App Store user, I‘m not interested in reading marketing fluff.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    Because it’s required? I’ve released over 20 apps, over the years, and have learned to add some basic stuff to each app. Truth be told, it was really sort of a self-deprecating joke. I’m not a marketer, so I don’t have the training to write the kind of stuff users expect on the Store, and could use all the help I can get Over the years, I’ve learned that owning my limitations, can be even more important, than knowing my strengths.
    - layer8 2y ago
      My point was that as a user I expect substance, not fluff. Some app descriptions actually provide that, but many don’t.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        Well, you can always check out my stuff, and see what you think. Easy to find.
- notarobot123 2y ago
  I have my reservations about AI but it's hard not to notice that LLMs are effectively a Gutenberg level event in the history of written communication. They mark a fundamental shift in our capacity to produce persuasive text. The ability to speak the same language or understand cultural norms are no longer barriers to publishing pretty much anything. You don't have to understand a topic or the jargon of any given domain. You don't have to learn the expected style or conventions an author might normally use in that context. You just have to know how to write a good prompt. There's bound to be a significant increase in the quantity as well as the quality of untrustworthy published text because of these new capacities to produce it. It's not the phenomenon but the scale of production that changes the game here.
munksbeer 2y ago
> but it's still depressing, to be honest. Cheer up. Things usually get better, we just don't notice it because we're so consumed with extrapolating the negatives. Humans are funny like that.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I actually disagree with that. People are so busy hoping things will get better, and creating little bubbles for themselves to hide away from what human beings as a whole are doing, that they don't realize things are getting worse. Technology constantly makes things worse. Cheering up is a good self-help strategy but not a good strategy if you want to contribute to making the world actually a better place.
  - munksbeer 2y ago
    >Technology constantly makes things worse. And it also makes things a lot better. Overall we lead better lives than people just 50 years ago, never mind centuries.
    - vouaobrasil 2y ago
      No way. Life 50 years ago was better for MANY. Maybe that would be true for 200. But 50 years ago was the 70s. There were far fewer people, and the world was not starting to suffer from climate change. Tell your statement to any climate refugee, and ask them whether they'd like to live now or back then. AND, we had fewer computers and life was not so hectic. YES, some things have gotten better, but on average? It's arguable.
      - munksbeer 2y ago
        I think you're demonstrating the point I was trying to make. You're falling for a very prevalent narrative that just isn't true. Fact: Life has improved for the majority of people on the planet in the last 50 years.
neta1337 2y ago
Why do you have to use it? I don’t get it. If you write your own book, you don’t compete with anyone. If anyone finished The Winds of Winter for R.R.Martin using AI, nobody would bat an eye, obviously, as we already experienced how bad a soulless story is that drifts too far away from what the author had built in his mind.
verisimi 2y ago
You're lucky. I consider it a possibility that older works (even ancient writings) are retrojected into the historical record.
datavirtue 2y ago
It's either good or it isn't. It either tracks or it doesn't. No need to befuddle your thoughts over some perceived slight.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. Wrong. I am a professional writer and I never use AI. I hate AI.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  Do you feel any pressure from your environment? Like seeing other authors publishing at a much faster pace than you?
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Well, at the business that I work for, I convinced everyone to have an anti-AI 100% free policy, although that wasn't too hard because no one there was ever enthusiastic about AI. Plus, we don't publish generic SEO stuff but real gear testing, real experience, so AI goes against that.
tim333 2y ago
I'm not sure it's always that hard to tell the AI stuff from the non AI. Comments on HN and on twitter from people you follow are pretty much non AI, also people on youtube where you an see the actual human talking. On the other hand there's a lot on youtube for example that is obviously ai - weird writing and speaking style and I'll only watch those if I'm really interested in the subject matter and there aren't alternatives. Maybe people will gravitate more to the stuff like PaulG or Elon Musk on twitter or HN and less to blog style content?
wickedsight 2y ago
With a friend, I created a website about a race track in the past two years. I definitely used AI to speed up some of writing. One thing I used it for was a track guide, describing every corner and how to drive it. It was surprisingly accurate, most of the time. The other times though, it would drive the track backwards, completely hallucinate the instructions or link corners that are in different parts of the track. I spent a lot of time analyzing the track myself and fixed everything to the point that experienced drivers agreed with my description. If I hadn't done that, most visitors would probably still accept our guide as the truth, because they wouldn't know any better. We know that not everyone cares about whether what they put on the internet is correct and AI allows those people to create content at an unprecedented pace. I fully agree with your sentiment.
jshdhehe 2y ago
AI only helps writing in so far as checking/suggesting edits. Most people can write better than AI (more engaging). AI cant tell a human story, have real tacit experience. So it is like saying my champaigne bottle cant keep up with the tap water.
Roark66 2y ago
>The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their primary business of advertising. Before, at least they were trying to downrank all the crap "word aggregators". After, they stopped caring at all. AI gives even better tools to page rank. Detection of AI generated content is not that bad. So why don't we have "a new Google" emerge? Simple, because of the monopolistic practices Google did to make the barrier to entry huge. First, 99% of the content people want to search for is behind a login wall (Facebook, Instagram, twitter, YouTube), second almost all CDNs now implement "verify you are human" by default. Third, no one links to other sites. Ever! These 3 things mean a new Google is essentially impossible. Even duck duck go has thrown the towel and subscribed to Bing results. It has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with Google. In fact AI might give us the tools to better fight Google.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  Some great grand ancestor of mine was a civil servant, a great achievement given his peasant background. The single skill that enabled it was the knowledge of calligraphy. He went to school and wrote nicely and that was sufficient. The flip side was, calligraphy was sufficient evidence for both his education to whoever hired him, and for a recipient of a document, of its official nature. Calligraphy itself or course didn't make him efficient or smart or fair. That's long gone of course, but we had similar heuristics. I am reminded of the Reddit story about an AI-generated mushroom atlas that had factual errors and lead to someone getting poisoned. We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The story of course is from reddit, so probably untrue, but it doesn't matter - it totally could be true. LLMs are fantastic at breaking our heuristics as to what is and isn't legit, but not as good at being right.
  - matwood 2y ago
    > We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automatically trust what you read on the internet". I was speaking to a librarian the other day who teaches incoming freshman how to use LLMs. What was shocking to me is that the librarian said a majority of the kids trust what the computer says by default. Not just LLMs, but generally what they read. That's such a huge shift from my generation. Maybe LLM education will shift people back toward skepticism - unlikely, but I can hope.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
Just dont be average and your fine.
akudha 2y ago
I was listening to an interview few months ago (forgot the name). He is a prolific reader/writer and has a huge following. He mentioned that he only reads books that are at least 50 years old, so pre 70s. That sounds like a good idea now. Even ignoring the AI, if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average). Maybe people's attention spans and taste is to blame, or maybe people just don't have the money/time/patience to consume quality work... I do not know. One thing I know for sure - there is enough high quality material written before AI, before article spinners, before MFA sites etc. We would need multiple lifetimes to even scratch the surface of that body of work. We can ignore mostly everything that is published these days and we won't be missing much
- eloisant 2y ago
  I'd say it's probably survivor's bias. Bad books from the pre 70s are probably forgotten and no longer printed. Old books that we're still printing and are still talking about have stood the test of time. It doesn't mean that are no great recent books.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  > if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average) I'm sorry but this is just nonsense.
- alwa 2y ago
  Nassim Taleb famously argues that position, in his popular work Antifragile and elsewhere. I believe the theory is that time serves as a sieve: only works with lasting value can remain relevant through the years.
- inkcapmushroom 2y ago
  Completely disagree just from my own personal experience as a sci-fi reader. Modern day bestseller sci-fi novels fit right in with the old classics, and in many ways outshine them. I have read many bad obscure sci-fi books published from the 50's to today, most of them a dollar at the thrift store. There was never a time when writers were perfect and every published work was high quality, then or now.
EGreg 2y ago
I have been predicting this from 2016 And I also predict that many responses to you will say “it was always that way, nothing changed”.
limit499karma 2y ago
I'll take your statement that your conclusions are based on a 'depressed mind' at face value, since it is so self-defeating and places little faith in Human abilities. Your assumption that a person driven to write will "with a high degree of certainty" also mix up their work with a machine assistant can only be informed by your own self-assessment (after all how could you possibly know the mindset of every creative human out there?) My optimistic and enthusiastic view of AI's role in Human development is that it will create selection pressures that will release the dormant psychological abilities of the species. Undoubtedly, wide-spread appearance of Psi abilities will be featured in this adjustment of the human super-organism to technologies of its own making. Machines can't do Psi.
greenie_beans 2y ago
i know a lot of writers who don't use ai. in fact, i can't think of any writers who use it, except a few literary fiction writers. working theory: writers have taste and LLM writing style doesn't match the typical taste of a published writer.
osigurdson 2y ago
AI expansion: take a few bullet points and have ChatGPT expand it into several pages of text AI compression: take pages of text and use ChatGPT to compress into a few bullet points We need to stop being impressed with long documents.
- fennecfoxy 2y ago
  The foundations of our education systems are based on rote memorisation so I'd probably start there.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  That’s the ideal way forward in my opinion. My optimistic view of the future is one where we get so fed up of the noise that we only write what is absolutely necessary, because anything more than that is AI-generated.
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noobermin 2y ago
When you're writing, how are you "missing out" if you're not using chatgpt??? I don't even understand how this can be unless what you're writing is already unnecessary such that you shouldn't need to write it in the first place.
- jwells89 2y ago
  I don’t get it either. Writing is not something I need that level of assistance with, and I would even say that using LLMs to write defeats some significant portion of the point of writing — by using LLMs to write for me I feel that I’m no longer expressing myself in the purest sense, because the words are not mine and do not exhibit any of my personality, tendencies, etc. Even if I were to train an LLM on my style, it’d only be a temporal facsimile of middling quality, because peoples’ styles evolve (sometimes quite rapidly) and there’s no way to work around all the corner cases that never got trained for. As you say, if the subject is worth being written about, there should be no issue and writing will come naturally. If it’s a struggle, maybe one should step back and figure out why that is. There may some argument for speed, because writing quality prose does take time, but then the question becomes a matter of quantity vs. quality. Do you want to write high quality pieces that people want to read at a slower pace or churn out endless volumes of low-substance grey goo “content”?
- dotnet00 2y ago
  LLMs are surprisingly capable editors/brainstorming tools. So, you're missing out in that you're being less efficient in editing. Like, you can write a bunch of text, then ask an LLM to improve it with minimal changes. Then, you read through its output and pick out the improvements you like.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Sure, but Grammarly and similar have existed far before the LLM boom.
    - dotnet00 2y ago
      That's a fair point, I only very recently found that LLMs could actually be useful for editing, and hadn't really thought much of using tools for that kind of thing previously.
_heimdall 2y ago
> Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. Why do you say people have to do it? People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is not worth wasting time and resources on. There will always be side effects to making those decisions, but its well within everyone's right to make them.
- DrillShopper 2y ago
  > Why do you say people have to do it? Gotta eat, yo
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Somehow people made enough to eat before LLMs became all the rage a couple years ago. I suspect people are still making enough to eat without having to use LLMs.
    - DrillShopper 2y ago
      The existence of LLMs in the market will push real wages down and then the people currently making a living we be faced with three main choices. Choice 1 - embrace the chaos and start using LLMs to help you work so you can churn out more cOnTeNt to survive. Choice 2 - don't embrace the chaos by starting to use LLMs and just work more hours of the day to match the output of the machine. Choice 3 - leave writing and either join another profession or start delivering for Uber.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  If you find yourself in a situation where you write one book at the same time as your peers are writing ten, how can you keep up? Also how can you justify to yourself not using it if nobody around you seems to value that, and even worse, is pushing you to actually use it? I find it hard to find a reason why you would. Unless we see a super strong reader revolution that collectively decides to shun AI and pay more money for all-human books. Read that last sentence and tell you think that’s reasonable and likely to happen?
uhtred 2y ago
To be honest I got sick of most new movies, TV shows, music even before AI so I will continue to consume media from pre 2010 until the day I die and will hope I don't get through it all. Something happened around 2010 and it all got shit. I think everyone becoming massively online made global cultural output reduce in quality to meet the interests of most people and most people have terrible taste.
edavison1 2y ago
>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.
- DrillShopper 2y ago
  It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output. At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of the cost of a skilled human writer output something acceptably good for people to read it between giant ads on our website / watch the TTS video on YouTube and sit through the ads and sponsors?", and I'm sorry to say, skilled human writers are at a distinct disadvantage here because they have professional standards and self respect.
  - easterncalculus 2y ago
    Exactly. Also, if the past few years is any indication, at the very least tech journalists in general tend to love to use what they hate.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    So you're saying major media companies are going to outsource their writing to people overseas using LLMs? There is more to journalism than the writing. There's also the investigative part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc.
    - edavison1 2y ago
      This has become such a talking point of mine when I'm inevitably forced to explain why LLMs can't come for my job (yet). People seem baffled by the idea that reporting collects novel information about the world which hasn't been indexed/ingested at any point because it didn't exist before I did the interview or whatever it is.
amelius 2y ago
Funny thing is that people will also ask AI to __read__ stuff for them and summarize it. So everything an AI writes will eventually be nothing more than some kind of internal representation.
jcd748 2y ago
Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point. If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  > If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, The problem is this kind of content is flooding the internet. Before you know it becomes extremely hard to find non AI generated content...
  - jcd748 2y ago
    I think we agree. I hate it, and I can't stop it, but also I definitely won't participate in it.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  That’s super cool, and I hope you are right and that I am wrong and artists/creators like you will still have a place in the future. My fear is that your work turns into some kind of artesanal fringe activity that is only accessible to 1% of people, like Ming vases or whatever.
- seniortaco 2y ago
  That's true art, I love people like you. Technology can do a lot of things but it cannot give people or society principles, and without principles society fails.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
Why does a human being behind any words change anything at all? Trust should be based on established facts/research and not species.
- bloak 2y ago
  A lot of communication isn't about "established facts/research"; it's about someone's experience. For example, if a human writes about their experience of using a product, perhaps a drug, or writes what they think about a book or a film, then I might be interested in reading that. When they write using their own words I get some insight into how they think and what sort of person they are. I have very little interest in reading an AI-generated text with similar "content".
- goatlover 2y ago
  An LLM isn't even a species. I prefer communicating with other humans, unless I choose to interact with an LLM. But then I know that it's a text generator and not a person, even when I ask it to act like a person. The difference matters to most humans.
  - fennecfoxy 2y ago
    I'm predicting the future a little with that. As always people accept new ideas at a glacial pace. At what point do we consider some entity alive? At what point do we decide to consider it a species (of living thing)? If we find out there are aliens, biological and therefore similar to us? Sure. What if we meet aliens whose physical forms are synthetic? What if we meet the synthetic creations of biological aliens? I'm not saying that LLMs are alive, of course. But I am saying that I'd consider LLMs to be a precursor to AGI, along with all our our historical artificial intelligence experiments, in the same way that prokaryotes were the precursors to...us.
farts_mckensy 2y ago
>But what I had never noticed until now is that knowing that a human being was behind the written words (however flawed they can be, and hopefully are) is crucial for me. Everyone is going to have to get over that very soon, or they're going to start sounding like those old puritanical freaks who thought Elvis thrusting his hips around was the work of the devil.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Those two things don't sound at all similar. We don't have to get over wanting to communicate with humans online.
  - farts_mckensy 2y ago
    They don't sound similar because the former has been fully integrated into culture while the latter is still a strange, alien phenomenon.
hyggetrold 2y ago
> The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. This has nearly always been true. "Manufacturing consent" is way older than any digital technology.
- unshavedyak 2y ago
  Agreed. I also suspect we've grown to rely on the crutch of trust far too much. Faulty writing has existed for ages but now suddenly because the computer is the thing making it up we have an issue with it. I guess it depends on scope. I'm imaging scientific or education. Ie things we probably shouldn't have relied on Blogs to facilitate, yet we did. For looking up some random "how do i build a widget?", yea AI will probably make it worse. For now. Then it'll massively improve to the point that it's not even worth asking how to build the widget. The larger "scientific or education" is what i'm concerned about, and i think we'll need a new paradigm to validate. We've been getting attacked on this front for 12+ years, AI is only bringing this to light imo. Trust will have to be earned and verified in this word-soup world. I just hope we find a way.
  - hyggetrold 2y ago
    IMHO AI tools will (or at least should!) fundamentally change the way the education system works. AI tools are - from a certain point of view - really just a scaled version of AI now can put at our fingertips. Paradoxically, the more AI can do "grunt work" the more we need folks to be educated on the higher-level constructs on which they are operating. Some of the bigger issues you're raising I think have less to do with technology and more to do with how our economic system is currently structured. AI will be a tremendous accelerant, but are we sure we know where we're going?
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. Only if you're competing on volume.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  Who isn’t? Can you rely on your readers to rebel against AI and value more your writing than that of your peers? If one of your competitors write 10 articles while you write 1, and charge 10% of what you charge, they already equaled your wins. Raise it to 20% and they are already making twice what you make. Can you really trust that your writing is so good and so incredibly special that someone would be willing to pay 10x more for your content, against one that was assisted by the absolute state of the art of a technology that has revolutionized the world?
  - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    The curation is part of the value.
beefnugs 2y ago
Just add more swearing and off color jokes to everything you do and say. If there is one thing we know for sure its that the corporate AIs will never allow dirty jokes. (it will get into the dark places like spam though, which seems dumb since they know how to make meth instead, spend time on that you wankers)
- deleted 2y ago
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FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Maybe this will push people back to reading old paper books? There could be resurgence in reading the classics, on paper, since we know they are not AI.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
A lot of writers using AI use it to create outlines of a chapter or scene then flesh it out by hand.
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cookingrobot 2y ago
Idea: we should make sure we keep track of what the human created content is, so that we don’t get confused by AI edits of everything in the future. For ex, calculate the hash of all important books, and publish that as the “historical authenticity” check. Put the hashes on some important blockchain so we know it’s unchanged over time.
bilsbie 2y ago
Wait until you find out about copywriters.
alwa 2y ago
People like you, the author, and me all share this sentiment. It motivates us to seek out authentic voices and writing that’s associated with specific humans. The commodity end of the writing market may well have been automated, but was that really the kind of writing you or the author or I ever sought out in the first place? I can get mass-manufactured garments from Shein if I want, but I can also still find tailors locally if it’s worth it to me. I can buy IKEA or I can still save up for something made out of real wood. I can “shoot a cinematic digital film” on my iPhone but the cineplex remains in business and the art film folks are still doing their scrappy thing (and still moaning about its economics). I can lap up slop from an academic paper mill journal or I can identify who’s doing the thinking in a field and read what they’re writing or saying. And the funny thing is that none of those human-scale options commands all that much of a premium in the scheme of things. There may be less human-scald work to go around and thus fewer small enterprises plying a specific trade, but any given one of them just has to put food on the table for a number of humans roughly proportional to the same level of output as always. It seems to me that there’s no special virtue in the specific form that the mass publishing market took over the last century or however long: my local grocery store chain’s division producing weekly newspaper circulars probably employed more people than J Peterman has. But there was and remains a place for quality. If anything—as you point out—the AI schlock has sensitized us to the value we place on a human voice. And at some level, once people notice that they miss that quality, isn’t there a sense in which they become more willing to seek it out and pay for it if necessary?
m463 2y ago
I think ... between now and the day you die... you'll get your personal AI to read things for you. It will analyze what's been written, check any arguments for fallacious reasoning, and look up related things for background and omissions that may support or negate things. It is actually happening now. I've noticed amazon reviews have an AI summary at the top, reading the reviews for you and even pointing out shortcomings.
- phatfish 2y ago
  I've seen "summarise this" and "explain this code" buttons added to technical documentation. This works reasonably well for most common situations, which is probably the reason it's one of the few "production" uses for LLMs. I didn't know Amazon was using it though. Microsoft has a note on some of their documentation, something like; "this article was written with the help of an AI and edited by a human". I have a feeling this won't lead to informative to-the-point documentation. It will get bloated because an LLM will spew out reams of bullet point ridden paragraphs, which will need a "summarise this" button to stop the reader nodding off. Rinse and repeat.
LeroyRaz 2y ago
Your take seems hyperbolic. Until LLMs exceed the very best of human quality there will be human content in all forms of media. This claims follows because there is always (some) demand for top quality content. I agree that many writers might use LLMs as a tool, but good writers who care about quality will ensure that such use is not detrimental (e.g., using the LLM to identify errors rather than having it draft copy).
- njarboe 2y ago
  Will that happen in 1,2,5,10 or never years?
  - LeroyRaz 2y ago
    I mean if AI output exceeds human quality then all humans will be redundant. So it would then be quite a brave new world! My point is that I do not agree that LMM output will degrade all media (as there is always a demand for top quality content). So we either have bad LLM output and then people who care about quality avoiding such works. Or good LLM output and hopefully some form of post scarcity society (e.g., Iain Bank's Culture Novels).
jwuice 2y ago
i would change to: if you do ANYTHING online and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. you're out. it's depressing.
seniortaco 2y ago
+1, and to put more simply, AI as we know it today makes zero guarantees about its accuracy. That's pretty insane for a "tool" to make no guarantees about being correct in any way for any purpose. A spellchecker makes guarantees about accuracy. So does a calculator. Broad, sweeping guarantees. Imagine if we built a tool that could automatically do all the electrical work in a new home from the breaker box to every outlet, and it could do it in 2 hours. However, what if that tool made no guarantees about its ability to meet electrical code? Would people use it anyway? Of course they would. Many dangerous errors would slip through inspection and many more house fires would ensue as a result.
bschmidt1 2y ago
Oh please the content online now is so fake as hell. You're acting as if AI can only produce garbage but CNN and Fox News are producing gold. The internet is 4 total websites now, congrats big media won. And you want to shut down the only decent attempt against it. Shame on you "hackers"
mulmen 2y ago
> The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. Today is September 11349, 1993
th3byrdm4n 2y ago
Honestly, I've developers saying the same thing about IDEs and high level languages. This new generation of tools add efficiency the same way IntelliJ added efficiency on top of Eclipse which added efficiency on top of Emacs/VI/Notepad/etc. The more time that someone can focus on the systemsit takes certain types of high-time, [not domain problem specific] skill processes and obfuscated it away so the developer can focus on the most critical aspects of the software. Yes, sometimes generators do the wrong thing, but it's usually obvious/quick to correct. Cost of occasional correction is much less than the time to scaffold every punchcard.
davidgerard 2y ago
> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. This statement strikes me (a writer) as ridiculous. LLM slop is sloppy. I would expect anyone who reads a reasonable amount to spot it immediately. Are you saying you are literally unable to distinguish LLM cliches?
itsTyrion 2y ago
Same goes for art. No longer can you see art on social media, press like and maybe leave a nice comment, you need to fricking pixel peep for artifacts as it's becoming less obvious.
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  Exactly. And it makes sense: think about how much one would have to pay for an artist to do the same? It’s simply inconceivable. The convergence is clear: we just won’t care about anything anymore after a while. Writing, art, whatever; it’ll all turn into noise.
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elnasca2 2y ago

What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

baq 2y ago
scale makes all the difference. society without trust falls apart. it's good if some people doubt some things, but if everyone necessarily must doubt everything, it's anarchy.
- dangitman 2y ago
  [dead]
  - Hoasi 2y ago
    > Is our society built on trust? A good part of society, the foundational part, is trust. Trust between individuals, but also trust in the sense that we expect things to behave in a certain way. We trust things like currencies despite their flaws. Our world is too complex to reinvent the wheel whenever we need to do a transaction. We must believe enough in a make-believe system to avoid perpetual collapse.
    - dangitman 2y ago
      [dead]
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Perhaps that anarchy is the exact thing we need to convince everyone to revolt against big tech firms like Google and OpenAI and take them down by mob rule.
kombookcha 2y ago
Debunking bullshit inherently takes more effort than generating bullshit, so the human factor is normally your big force multiplier. Does this person seem trustworthy? What else have they done, who have they worked with, what hidden motivations or biases might they have, are their vibes /off/ to your acute social monkey senses? However with AI anyone can generate absurd torrential flows of bullshit at a rate where, with your finite human time and energy, the only winning move is to reject out of hand any piece of media that you can sniff out as AI. It's a solution that's imperfect, but workable, when you're swimming through a sea of slop.
- bitexploder 2y ago
  Maybe the debunking AIs can match the bullshit generating AIs, and we will have balance in the force. Everyone is focused on the generative AIs, it seems.
  - nicce 2y ago
    There is always more money available for bullshit generation than bullshit removal.
  - desdenova 2y ago
    No, they can't. They'll still be randomly deciding if something is fake or not, so they'll only have a probability of being correct, like all nondeterministic AI.
- ontouchstart 2y ago
  Debugging is harder than writing code. Once the code passed linter, compiler and test, the bugs might be more subtly logical and require more effort and intelligence. We are all becoming QA of this super automated world.
nicce 2y ago
In the past, you had to put a lot of effort to produce a text which seemed to be high quality, especially when you knew nothing about the subject. By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject. Now, that is completely removed. There is no easy filter anymore. While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller... I don't criticise you for it, because that strategy is both rational and popular. But you never checked the accuracy of your information before so you have no way of telling if it has gotten more or less accurate with the advent of AI. You were testing for whether someone of high social intelligence wanted you to believe what they said rather than if what they said was true.
  - dietr1ch 2y ago
    I guess the complaint is about losing this proxy to gain some assurance for little cost. We humans are great at figuring out the least amount of work that's good enough. Now we'll need to be fully diligent, which means more work, and also there'll be way more things to review.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      I'd argue people clearly don't care about the truth at all - they care about being part of a group and that is where it ends. It shows up in things like critical thinking being a difficult skill acquired slowly vs social proof which humans just do by reflex. Makes a lot of sense, if there are 10 of us and 1 of you it doesn't matter how smartypants you may be when the mob forms. AI does indeed threaten people's ability to identify whether they are reading work by a high status human and what the group consensus is - and that is a real problem for most people. But it has no bearing on how correct information was in the past vs will be in the future. Groups are smart but they get a lot of stuff wrong in strategic ways (it is almost a truism that no group ever identifies itself or its pursuit of its own interests as the problem).
tempfile 2y ago
> I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. You might question new information, but you certainly do not actually verify it. So all you can hope to do is sense-checking - if something doesn't sound plausible, you assume it isn't true. This depends on having two things: having trustworthy sources at all, and being able to relatively easily distinguish between junk info and real thorough research. AI is a very easy way for previously-trustworthy sources to sneak in utter disinformation without necessarily changing tone much. That makes it much easier for the info to sneak past your senses than previously.
thesz 2y ago
Propaganda works by repeating the same in different forms. Now it is easier to have different forms of the same, hence, more propaganda. Also, it is much easier to iinfluence whatever people write by influencing the tool they use to write. Imagine that AI tools sway generated sentences to be slightly close, in summarisation space, to the phrase "eat dirt" or anything. What would happen?
- ImHereToVote 2y ago
  Hopefully people will exercise more judgement now that every Tom, Dick, and Harry scam artists can output elaborate prose.
eesmith 2y ago
The negation of 'I cannot trust' is not 'I could always trust' but rather 'I could sometimes trust'. Nor is trust meant to mean something is absolute and unquestionable. I may trust someone, but with enough evidence I can withdraw trust.
ffsm8 2y ago
Trust as no bearing on what they said. Reading was a form of connecting with someone. Their opinions are bound to be flawed, everyone's are - but they're still the thoughts and words of a person. This is no longer the case. Thus, the human factor is gone and this reduces the experience to some of us, me included.
- farleykr 2y ago
  This is exactly what’s at stake. I heard an artist say one time that he’d rather listen to Bob Dylan miss a note than listen to a song that had all the imperfections engineered out of it.
  - herval 2y ago
    The flipside of that is the most popular artists of all time (eg Taylor Swift) do autotune to perfection, and yet more and more people love them
    - kombookcha 2y ago
      If you ask a Swiftie what they love about Taylor Swift, I guarantee they will not say "the autotune is flawless". They're not connecting with the relative correctness of each note, but feeling a human, creative connection with an artist expressing herself.
      - herval 2y ago
        They're "creatively connecting" to an autotuned version of a human, not to a "flawed Bob Dylan"
        kombookcha 2y ago
        They're not connecting to the autotune, but to the artist. People have a lot of opinions about Taylor Swift's music but "not being personal enough" is definitely not a common one. If you wanna advocate for unplugged music being more gratifying, I don't disagree, but acting like the autotune is what people are getting out of Taylor Swift songs is goofy.
croes 2y ago
The quota changed because it's now easier and faster
tuyguntn 2y ago
> For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. I also did, but LLM increased the volume of content, which forces my brain first try to identify if content is generated by LLMs, which is consuming a lot of energy and makes brain even less focused, because now it's primary goal is skimming quickly to identify, instead of absorbing first and then analyzing info
- desdenova 2y ago
  The web being polluted only makes me ignore more of it. You already know some of the more trustworthy sources of information, you don't need to read a random blog which will require a lot more effort to verify. Even here on hackernews, I ignore like 90% of the spam people post. A lot of posts here are extremely low effort blogs adding zero value to anything, and I don't even want to think whether someone wasted their own time writing that or used some LLM, it's worthless in both cases.
everdrive 2y ago
How do you like questioning much more of it, much more frequently, from many more sources? And mistrusting it in new ways. AI and regular people are not wrong in the same ways, nor for the same reasons, and now you must track this too, increasingly.
voidmain0001 2y ago
I read the original comment not as a lament of not being able to trust the content, rather, they are lamenting the fact that AI/LLM generated content has no more thought or effort put into it than a cheap microwave dinner purchased from Walmart. Yes, it fills the gut with calories but it lacks taste. On second thought, perhaps AI/LLM generated content is better illustrated with it being like eating the regurgitated sludge called cud. Nothing new, but it fills the gut.
a99c43f2d565504 2y ago
Perhaps "trust" was a bit misplaced here, but I think we can all agree on the idea: Before LLMs, there was intelligence behind text, and now there's not. The I in LLM stands for intelligence, as written in one blog. Maybe the text never was true, but at least it made sense given some agenda. And like pointed out by others, the usual text style and vocabulary signs that could have been used to identify expertise or agenda are gone.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  Those signs are largely bs. It's a textual version of charisma.
- lmm 2y ago
  > Perhaps "trust" was a bit misplaced here, but I think we can all agree on the idea: Before LLMs, there was intelligence behind text, and now there's not. The I in LLM stands for intelligence, as written in one blog. Maybe the text never was true, but at least it made sense given some agenda. Nope. A lot of people just wrote stuff. There were always plenty of word salad blogs (and arguably entire philosophy journals) out there.
rsynnott 2y ago
There are topics on which you should be somewhat suspicious of anything you read, but also many topics where it is simply improbable that anyone would spend time maliciously coming up with a lie. However, they may well have spicy autocomplete imagine something for them. An example from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645282
desdenova 2y ago
Exactly. The web before LLMs was mostly low effort SEO spam written by low-wage people in marketing agencies. Now it's mostly zero effort LLM-generated SEO spam, and the low-wage workers lost their jobs.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  The difference is that now we'll have even more zero-effort SEO spam because AI is a force multiplier for that. Much more.
galactus 2y ago
I think it is a totally different threat. Excluding adversarial behavior, humans usually produce information with a quality level that is homogeneous (from homogeneously sloppy to homogeneously rigurous). AI otoh can produce texts that are quite accurate globally with some totally random hallucinations here and there. It makes it quite harder to identify
akudha 2y ago
There were news reports that Russia spent less than a million dollars on a massive propaganda campaign targeting U.S elections and the American population in general. Do you think it would be possible before internet, before AI? Bad actors, poorly written/sourced information, sensationalism etc have always existed. It is nothing new. What is new is the scale, speed and cost of making and spreading poor quality stuff now. All one needs today is a laptop and an internet connection and a few hours, they can wreak havoc. In the past, you'd need TV or newspapers to spread bad (and good) stuff - they were expensive, time consuming to produce and had limited reach.
- kloop 2y ago
  There are lots of organizations with $1M and a desire to influence the population This can only be done with a sentiment that was, at least partially, already there. And may very well happen naturally eventually
- immibis 2y ago
  How can I wreck havoc with a few hours, a laptop, and an internet connection? It takes a bit more than that.
  - akudha 2y ago
    Some woman’s cat was hiding in her basement. She automatically assumed her Haitian neighbors stole her cat and made some comment about it, which landed on Facebook, which got morphed into “immigrants eating pets” story, JD Vance picked it up, Trump mentioned it in a national debate watched by 65 million people. All of this happened in a few days. This resulted in violence in Springfield. If you can place a rumor or lie in front of the right person/people to amplify, it will be amplified. It will spread like wildfire, and by the time it is fact checked, it will have done at least some damage.
    - immibis 2y ago
      These successful manipulation stories are extremely rare though. What usually happens is that you say your neighbour ate your cat, then everyone laughs at you. Did the person who posted do the manipulation, or did JD Vance and Donald Trump do it?
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. [...] Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? A human communicator is, in a sense, testifying when communicating. Humans have skin in the social game. We try to educate people, we do want people to be well-informed and to think critically about what they read and hear. In the marketplace of information, we tend very strongly to trust non-delusional, non-hallucinating members of society. Human society is a social-confidence network. In social media, where there is a cloak of anonymity (or obscurity), people may behave very badly. But they are usually full of excuses when the cloak is torn away; they are usually remarkably contrite before a judge. A human communicator can face social, legal, and economic consequences for false testimony. Humans in a corporation, and the corporation itself, may be held accountable. They may allocate large sums of money to their defence, but reputation has value and their defence is not without social cost and monetary cost. It is literally less effort at every scale to consult a trusted and trustworthy source of information. It is literally more effort at every scale to feed oneself untrustworthy communication.
sevensor 2y ago
For me, the problem has gone from “figure out the author’s agenda” to “figure out whether this is a meaningful text at all,” because gibberish now looks a whole lot more like meaning than it used to.
- pxoe 2y ago
  This has been a problem on the internet for the past decade if not more anyway, with all of the seo nonsense. If anything, maybe it's going to be ever so slightly more readable.
  - orthecreedence 2y ago
    I don't know what you're talking about. Most people don't think of SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Performance, Search Engine Relevance, Search Rankings, Result Page Optimization, or Result Performance when writing their Article, Articles, Internet Articles, News Articles, Current News, Press Release, or News Updates...
solidninja 2y ago
There's a quantity argument to be made here - before, it used to be hard to generate large amounts of plausible but incorrect text. Now it easy. Similar to surveillance before/after smartphones + the internet - you had to have a person following you vs just soaking up all the data on the backbone.
escape_goat 2y ago
There was a degree of proof of work involved. Text took human effort to create, and this roughly constrained the quantity and quality of misinforming text to the number of humans with motive to expend sufficient effort to misinform. Now superficially indistinguishable text can be created by an investment in flops, which are fungible. This means that the constraint on the amount of misinforming text instead scales with whatever money is resourced to the task of generating misinforming text. If misinforming text can generate value for someone that can be translated back into money, the generation of misinforming text can be scaled to saturation and full extraction of that value.
low_tech_love 2y ago
It’s nothing to do with trusting in terms of being true or false, but whatever I read before I felt like, well, it can be good or bad, I can judge it, but whatever it is, somebody wrote it. It’s their work. Now when I read something I just have absolutely no idea whether the person wrote it, how much percent did they write it, or how much they even had to think before publishing it. Anyone can simply publish a perfectly well-written piece of text about any topic whatsoever, and I just can’t wrap my head around why, but it feels like a complete waste of time to read anything. Like… it’s all just garbage, I don’t know.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
The following appears to be true: If one spends a lot of years reading a lot of stuff, they come to this conclusion, that most of it cannot be trusted. But it takes lots of years and lots of material to see it. If they don't, they don't.
mvdtnz 2y ago
It's that you trusted that what you read came from a human being. Back in the day I used to spend hours reading Evolution vs Creationism debates online. I didn't "trust" the veracity of half of what I read, but that didn't mean I didn't want to read it. I liked reading it because it came from people. I would never want to read AI regurgitation of these arguments.

t43562 2y ago

It empowers people to create mountains of shit that they cannot distinguish from shit - so they are happy.

walthamstow 2y ago

I've even grown to enjoy spelling and grammar mistakes - at least I know a human wrote it.

oneshtein 2y ago
> Write a response to this comment, make spelling and grammar mistakes. yeah well sumtimes spellling and grammer erors just make thing hard two read. like i no wat u mean bout wanting two kno its a reel person, but i think cleear communication is still importint! ;)
- deleted 2y ago
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1aleksa 2y ago
Whenever somebody misspells my name, I know it's legit haha
- sseagull 2y ago
  Way back when we had a landline and would get telemarketers, it was always a sign when the caller couldn’t pronounce our last name. It’s not even that uncommon a name, either
Gigachad 2y ago
There was a meme along the lines of people will start including slurs in their messages to prove it wasn’t AI generated.
- dijit 2y ago
  I mean, it's not a meme.. I included a few more "private" words than I should and I even tried to narrate things to prove I wasn't an AI. https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/ https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/ Not sure what else I should do, but it's pretty clear that it's not AI written (mostly because it's incoherent) even without grammar mistakes.

grecy 2y ago

Eh, like everything in life you can choose what you spend your time on and what you ignore. There have always been human writers I don’t waste my time on, and now there are AI writers in the same category. I don’t care. I will just do what I want with my life and use my time and energy on things I enjoy and find useful.

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avereveard 2y ago

why do you trust things now? unless you recognize the author and have a chain of trust from that author production to the content you're consuming, there already was no way to estabilish trust.

layer8 2y ago
For one, I trust authors more who are not too lazy to start sentences with upper case.

flir 2y ago

I've been using it in my personal writing (combination of GPT and Claude). I ask the AI to write something, maybe several times, and I edit it until I'm happy with it. I've always known I'm a better editor than I am an author, and the AI text gives me somewhere to start. So there's a human in the loop who is prepared to vouch for those sentences. They're not 100% human-written, but they are 100% human-approved. I haven't just connected my blog to a Markov chain firehose and walked away. Am I still adding to the AI smog? idk. I imagine that, at a bare minimum, its way of organising text bleeds through no matter how much editing I do.

vladstudio 2y ago
you wrote this comment completely by your own, right? without any AI involved. And I read your comment feeling confident that it's truly 100% yours. I think this reader's confidence is what the OP is talking about.
- flir 2y ago
  I did. I write for myself mostly so I'm not so worried about one reader's trust - I guess I'm more worried that I might be contributing to the dead internet theory by generating AI-polluted text for the next generation of AIs to train on. At the moment I'm using it for local history research. I feed it all the text I can find on an event (mostly newspaper articles and other primary sources, occasionally quotes from secondary sources) and I prompt with something like "Summarize this document in a concise and direct style. Focus on the main points and key details. Maintain a neutral, objective voice." Then I hack at it until I'm happy (mostly I cut stuff). Analysis, I do the other way around: I write the first draft, then ask the AI to polish. Then I go back and forth a few times until I'm happy with that paragraph. I'm not going anywhere with this really, I'm just musing out loud. Am I contributing to a tragedy of the commons by writing about 18th century enclosures? Because that would be ironic.
  - ontouchstart 2y ago
    If you write for yourself, whether you use generated text or not, (I am using the text completion on my phone typing this message), the only thing that matters is how it affects you. Reading and writing are mental processes (with or without advanced technology) that shape our collective mind.

ozim 2y ago

What kind of silliness is this? AI generated crap is one thing. But human generated crap is there - just because human wrote something it is not making it good. Had a friend who thought that if it is written in a book it is for sure true. Well NO! There was exactly the same sentiment with stuff on the internet and it is still the same sentiment about Wikipedia that “it is just some kids writing bs, get a paper book or real encyclopedia to look stuff up”. Not defending gen AI - but still you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not, it was always an effort and nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff.

tempfile 2y ago
> you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not yes, obviously. But AI slop makes those proxy measures significantly more complicated. Critical thinking is not magic - it is still a guess, and people are obviously worse at distinguishing AI bullshit from human bullshit.
dns_snek 2y ago
> nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff. The problem is that wheat:chaff ratio used to be 1:100, and soon it's going to become 1:100 million. I think you're severely underestimating the amount of effort it's going to take to find real information in the sea of AI generated content.
- ozim 2y ago
  Just like people were able to find real information on topics like: "tobacco is not that bad, it is just nice like coffee" and "fat is bad for you, here have some sugar", "alcohol is fun, having beer is nice"? Fundamentally AI changes nothing for masses and for individuals alike and there was nothing you could "just trust" because it was written on a website or in a book. That is why I call it silly. It also doesn't make it easier or harder for people in power that have vast resources to plant what they want - they have money and power and will do so anyway.
shprd 2y ago

paganel 2y ago

You kind of notice the stuff written with AI, it has a certain something that makes it detectable. Granted, stuff like the Reuters press reports might have already been written by AI, but I think that in that case it doesn’t really matter.

lokimedes 2y ago

I get two associations from your comment: One about how AI being mainly used to interpolate within a corpus of prior knowledge, seems like entropy in a thermodynamical sense. The other, how this is like the Tower of Babel but where distrust is sown by sameness rather than differences. In fact, relying on AI for coding and writing, feels more like channeling demonic suggestions than anything else. No wonder we are becoming skeptical.

seniortaco 2y ago
I know and at my company we actually cannot disable the AI suggestions :( It's like dealing with a pathological liar who produces very convincing looking code for me to review, but actually there is a bug in it 50% of the time. It's like it's trying to trick me into committing bugs.

ks2048 2y ago

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. Is that true today? I guess it depends what kind of writing you are talking about, but I wouldn't think most successful writers today - from novelests to tech bloggers - rely that much on AI, but I don't know. Five years from now, could be a different story.

theshackleford 2y ago
Yes it’s true today, depending on what is your writing is the foundation of. It doesn’t matter that my writing is more considered, more accurate and of a higher quality when my coworkers are all openly using AI to perform five times the work I am and producing outcomes that are “good enough” because good enough is quite enough for a larger majority than many likely realise.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
It's not true at all. Much like the claims that you have to use LLMs to keep up in programming: if that is true then you weren't a good programmer (or writer in this case) to begin with.
- davidgerard 2y ago
  yeah, this is just critihype
- low_tech_love 2y ago
  That is absolutely wrong. Regardless of whether you were or not good to begin with, an LLM assistant will still accelerate a lot of repetitive tasks for you. Repetitive is repetitive, no matter if you’re John Carmack or the guy sitting in the booth next to you in the paper company. And anyway in a few years none of it will matter because programming without assistance will be a vintage thing of the past (like perforated cards). It’s the same with writing. If you find yourself writing a boring introduction section to a paper with a bunch of meaningless blabla, then why wouldn’t you use AI for that? There is simply no good reason, especially when you see mediocre researchers publishing at three times your rate and getting promoted over you.

williamcotton 2y ago

Well we’re going to need some system of PKI that is tied to real identities. You can keep being anonymous if you want but I would prefer not and prefer to not interact with the anonymous, just like how I don’t want to interact with people wearing ski masks.

nottorp 2y ago
Why are you posting on this forum where the user's identity isn't verified by anyone then? :) But the real problem is that having the poster's identity verified is no proof that their output is not coming straight from a LLM.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  I don’t really have a choice about interacting with the anonymous at this point. It certainly will affect the reputation of people that are consistently publishing untruths.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > It certainly will affect the reputation of people that are consistently publishing untruths. Oh? I thought there are a lot of very well identified people making a living from publishing untruths right now on all social media. How would PKI help, when they're already making it very clear who they are?
flir 2y ago
I doubt that's possible. I can always lend my identity to an AI. The best you can hope for is not "a human wrote this text", it's "a human vouched for this text".

FrankyHollywood 2y ago

I have never read more bullshit in my life than during the corona pandemic, all written by humans. So you should never trust something you read, always question the source and it's reasoning. At the same time I use copilot on a daily basis, both for coding as well as the normal chat. It is not perfect, but I'm at a point I trust AI more than the average human. And why shouldn't I? LLMs ingest and combine more knowledge than any human can ever do. An LLM is not a human brain but it's actually performing really well.

dijit 2y ago

Agreed, I feel like there's an inherent nobility in putting effort into something. If I took the time to write a book and have it proof-read and edited and so on: perhaps it's actually worth my time. Lowering the bar to write books is "good" but increases the noise to signal ratio. I'm not 100% certain how to give another proof-of-work, but what I've started doing is narrating my blog posts - though AI voices are getting better too.. :\

vasco 2y ago
> Agreed, I feel like there's an inherent nobility in putting effort into something. If I took the time to write a book and have it proof-read and edited and so on: perhaps it's actually worth my time. Said the scribe upon hearing about the printing press.
- dijit 2y ago
  I'm not certain what statement you're implying, but yes, accessibility of bookwriting has definitely decreased the quality of books. Even technical books like Hardcore Java: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hardcore-java/0596005687/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hardcore-java/059600568... are god-awful, and even further away from the seminal texts on computer science that came before. It does feel like authorship was once heralded in higher esteem than it deserves today. Seems like people agree: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/18cvy9e/rant_bestsellers_are_getting_worse_and_worse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/18cvy9e/rant_bestsel...
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  It's true though. Books hand written and illustrated by scribes were astronomically higher quality than mass printed books. People just tend to prefer what they have access to, and cheap/low quality is easy to access.

BikeShuester 2y ago

[flagged]

0x_rs 2y ago
Spoken like a true LLM.
Jevon23 2y ago
You know that ChatGPT writing is still obvious even when you ask it to change its style, right?
- block_dagger 2y ago
  Please provide evidence for this claim.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0x_rs 2y ago
    Take a look at the user's comment history. I'd argue the majority of them are generated, it really doesn't take much to recognize the patterns and tics those models commonly display (for now*), and it doesn't seem there was any attempt to make it appear otherwise, too. It may look coherent at first, but there's no deeper meaning or significance, it's noise.
    - hackable_sand 2y ago
      So no evidence. Got it.

onion2k 2y ago

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. What AI is going to teach people is that they don't actually need to trust half as many things as they thought they did, but that they do need to verify what's left. This has always been the case. We've just been deferring to 'truster organizations' a lot recently, without actually looking to see if they still warrant having our trust when they change over time.

layer8 2y ago
How can you verify most of anything if you can’t trust any writing (or photographs, audio, and video, for that matter)?
- Frost1x 2y ago
  Independent verification is always good however not always possible and practical. At complex levels of life we have to just trust underlying processes work, usually until something fails. I don’t go double checking civil engineers work (nor could I) for every bridge I drive over. I don’t check inspection records to make sure it was recent and proper actions were taken. I trust that enough people involved know what they’re doing with good enough intent that I can take my 20 second trip over it in my car without batting an eye. If I had to verify everything, I’m not sure how I’d get across many bridges on a daily basis. Or use any major infrastructure in general where my life might be at risk. And those are cases where it’s very important to be done right, if it’s some accounting form or generated video on the internet… I have even less time to be concerned from a practical standpoint. Having the skills to do it should I want or need to are good and everyone should have these but we’re at a point in society we really have to outsource trust in a lot of cases. This is true everywhere, even in science which these days many people just trust in ways akin to faith in some cases, and I don’t see anyway around that. The key being that all the information should exist to be able to independently verify something but from a practice standpoint it’s rarely viable.
- lmm 2y ago
  Get good at spotting inconsistencies. And pay attention to when something contradicts your own experience. Cultivate a wide range of experiences so that you have more domains where you can do this (this is a good idea anyway).

nils-m-holm 2y ago

> It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. I am writing regularly and I will never use AI. In fact I am working on a 400+ pages book right now and it does not contain a single character that I have not come up with and typed myself. Something like pride in craftmanship does exist.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
Nice. I will definitely consider your book over other books. I'm not interested in reading AI-assisted works.
smitelli 2y ago
I'm right there with you. I write short and medium form articles for my personal site (link in bio, follow it or don't, the world keeps spinning either way). I will never use AI as part of this craft. If that hampers my output, or puts me at a disadvantage compared to the competition, or changes the opinion others have of me, I really don't care.
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
In b4 all the botslop shills tell you you're gonna get "left behind" if you don't pollute your output with GPT'd copypasta.
low_tech_love 2y ago
Amazing! Do you feel any pressure from your environment? And are you self-funded? I am also thinking about starting my first book.
- nils-m-holm 2y ago
  What I write is pretty niche anyway (compilers, LISP, buddhism, advaita), so I do not think AI will cause much trouble. Google ranking small websites into oblivion, though, I do notice that!

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that. Are you sure you don't mean if you write regularly in one particular subclass of writing - like technical writing, documentation etc.? Do you think novel writing, poetry, film reviews etc. cannot keep up in the same way?

t-3 2y ago
I'm absolutely positive that the vast majority of fiction is or will soon be written by LLM. Will it be high-quality? Will it be loved and remembered by generations to come? Probably not. Will it make money? Probably more than before on average as the author's effort is reduced to writing outlines and prompts, and editing the generated-in-seconds output, rather than months-years of doing the writing themselves.
PeterisP 2y ago
I think that novel writing and reviews are types of writing where potentially AI should eventually surpass human writers, because they have the potential to replace content skillfully tailored to be liked by many people with content that's tailored (perhaps less skillfully) explicitly for a specific very, very, very narrow niche of exactly you and all the things that happen to work for your particular biases. There seems to be an upcoming wave of adult content products (once again, being on the bleeding edge users of new abilities) based on this principle, as hitting very specific niches/kinks/fetishes can be quite effective in that business, but it should then move on to romance novels and pulp fiction and then, over time, most other genres. Similarly, good pedagogy, curriculum design and educational content development is all about accurately modeling which exact bits of the content the target audience will/won't know, and explaining the gaps with analogies and context that will work for them (for example, when adapting a textbook for a different country, translation is not sufficient; you'd also need to adapt the content). In that regard, if AI models can make personalized technical writing, then that can be more effective than the best technical writing the most skilled person can make addressed to a broader audience.

dustingetz 2y ago

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. What? No! Content volume only matters in stupid contests like VC app marketing grifts or political disinformation ops where the content isn’t even meant to be read, it’s an excuse for a headline. I personally write all my startup’s marketing content, quality is exquisite and due to this our brand is becoming a juggernaut

GrumpyNl 2y ago

response from AI on this: I completely understand where you're coming from. The increasing reliance on AI in writing does raise important questions about authenticity and connection. There’s something uniquely human in knowing that the words you're reading come from someone’s personal thoughts, experiences, and emotions—even if flawed. AI-generated content, while efficient and often well-written, lacks that deeper layer of humanity, the imperfections, and the creative struggle that gives writing its soul. It’s easy to feel disillusioned when you know AI is shaping so much of the content around us. Writing used to be a deeply personal exchange, but now, it can feel mechanical, like it’s losing its essence. The pressure to keep up with AI can be overwhelming for human writers, leading to this shift in content creation. At the same time, it’s worth considering that the human element still exists and will always matter—whether in long-form journalism, creative fiction, or even personal blogs. There are people out there who write for the love of it, for the connection it fosters, and for the need to express something uniquely theirs. While the presence of AI is unavoidable, the appreciation for genuine human insight and emotion will never go away. Maybe the answer lies in seeking out and cherishing those authentic voices. While AI-generated writing will continue to grow, the hunger for human storytelling and connection will persist too. It’s about finding balance in this new reality and, when necessary, looking back to the richness of past writings, as you mentioned. While it may seem like a loss in some ways, it could also be a call to be more intentional in what we read and who we trust to deliver those words.

sandworm101 2y ago

>> cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten. I was talking to someone about Taylor Swift recently. They thought that she wrote all her songs. I commented that one cannot really know that, that the entertainment industry is very going at generating seemingly "authentic" product at a rapid pace. My colleague looked at me like I had just killed a small animal. The idea that TS was "genuine" was a cornerstone of their fandom, and my suggestion had attacked that love. If you love music or film, don't dig too deep. It is all a factory. That AI is now part of that factory doesn't change much for me. Maybe my opinion would change if I saw something AI-generated with even a hint of artistic relevance. I've seen cool pictures and passable prose, but nothing so far with actual meaning, nothing worthy of my time.

WalterBright 2y ago
Watch the movie "The Wrecking Crew" about how a group of studio musicians in the 1970s were responsible for the albums of quite a few diverse "bands". Many bands had to then learn to play their own songs so they could go on tour.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Or the SCTV skit about Michael McDonald backing seemingly everything at one point
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
> You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten. I'm reminded of 'Under The Silver Lake' with this reference. Strange film, but that plotline stuck with me.
davidhaymond 2y ago
While I do enjoy some popular genres, I'm all too aware of the massive industry behind it all. I believe that most of humanity's greatest works of art were created not for commercial interests but rather for the pure joy of creation, of human expression. This can be found in any genre if you look hard enough, but it's no accident that the music I find the most rewarding is classical music: Intellect, emotion, spirit, and narrative dreamed into existence by one person and then brought to life by other artists so we can share in its beauty. I think music brings about a connection between the composers, lyricists, performers, and listeners. Music lets us participate in something uniquely human. Replacing any of the human participants with AI greatly diminishes or eliminates its value in my eyes.

advael 2y ago

In trying to write a book, it makes little sense to try to "compete" on speed or volume of output. There were already vast disparities in that among people who write, and people whose aim was to express themselves or contribute something of importance to people's lives, or the body of creative work in the world, have little reason to value quantity over quality. Probably if there's a significant correlation with volume of output, it's in earnings, and that seems both somewhat tenuous and like something that's addressable by changes in incentives, which seem necessary for a lot of things. Computers being able to do dumb stuff at massive scale should be viewed as finding vulnerabilities in the metrics this allows it to become trivial to game, and it's baffling whenever people say "Well clearly we're going to keep all our metrics the same and this will ruin everything." Of course, in cases where we are doing that, we should stop (For example, we should probably act to significantly curb price and wage discrimination, though that's more like a return to form of previous regulatory standards) As a creator of any kind, I think that simply relying on LLMs to expand your output via straightforward uses of widely available tools is inevitably going to lead to regression to the mean in terms of creativity. I'm open to the idea, however, that there could be more creative uses of the things that some people will bother to do. Feedback loops they can create that somehow don't stifle their own creativity in favor of mimicking a statistical model, ways of incorporating their own ingredients into these food processors of information. I don't see a ton of finished work that seems to do this, but I see hints that some people are thinking this way, and they might come up with some cool stuff. It's a relatively newly adopted technology, and computer-generated art of various kinds usually separates into "efficiency" (which reads as low quality) in mimicking existing forms, and new forms which are uniquely possible with the new technology. I think plenty of people are just going to keep writing without significant input from LLMs, because while writer's block is a famous ailment, many writers are not primarily limited by their speed in producing more words. Like if you count comments on various sites and discussions with other people, I write thousands of words unassisted most days This kind of gets to the crux of why these things are useful in some contexts, but really not up to snuff with what's being claimed about them. The most compelling use cases I've seen boil down to some form of fitting some information into a format that's more contextually appropriate, which can be great for highly structured formatting requirements and dealing with situations which are already subject to high protocol of some kind, so long as some error is tolerated. For things for which conveying your ideas with high fidelity, emphasizing your own narrative voice or nuanced thoughts on a subject, or standing behind the factual claims made by the piece are not as important. As much as their more strident proponents want to claim that humans are merely learning things by aggregating and remixing them in the same sense as these models do, this reads as the same sort of wishful thinking about technology that led people to believe that brains should work like clockwork or transistors at various other points in time at best, and honestly this most often seems to be trotted out as the kind of bad-faith analogy tech lawyers tend to use when trying to claim that the use of [exciting new computer thing] means something they are doing can't be a crime So basically, I think rumors of the death of hand-written prose are, at least at present, greatly exaggerated, though I share the concern that it's going to be much harder to filter out spam from the genuine article, so what it's really going to ruin is most automated search techniques. The comparison to "low-background steel" seems apt, but analogies about how "people don't handwash their clothes as much anymore" kind of don't apply to things like books

wengo314 2y ago

i think the problem started when quantity became more important over quality. you could totally compete on quality merit, but nowadays the volume of output (and frequency) is what is prioritized.

yusufaytas 2y ago

I totally understand your frustration. We started writing our book long before(2022) AI became mainstream, and when we finally published it on May 2024, all we hear now is people asking if it's just AI-generated content. It’s sad to see how quickly the conversation shifts away from the human touch in writing.

eleveriven 2y ago
I can imagine how disheartening that must be

deleted 2y ago

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eleveriven 2y ago

Maybe, over time, there will also be a renewed appreciation for authenticity

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it). I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence. But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, for hundreds of years.

layer8 2y ago
> marketing fluff for the App Store If it’s fluff, why do you put it there? As an App Store user, I‘m not interested in reading marketing fluff.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Because it’s required? I’ve released over 20 apps, over the years, and have learned to add some basic stuff to each app. Truth be told, it was really sort of a self-deprecating joke. I’m not a marketer, so I don’t have the training to write the kind of stuff users expect on the Store, and could use all the help I can get Over the years, I’ve learned that owning my limitations, can be even more important, than knowing my strengths.
  - layer8 2y ago
    My point was that as a user I expect substance, not fluff. Some app descriptions actually provide that, but many don’t.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      Well, you can always check out my stuff, and see what you think. Easy to find.
notarobot123 2y ago
I have my reservations about AI but it's hard not to notice that LLMs are effectively a Gutenberg level event in the history of written communication. They mark a fundamental shift in our capacity to produce persuasive text. The ability to speak the same language or understand cultural norms are no longer barriers to publishing pretty much anything. You don't have to understand a topic or the jargon of any given domain. You don't have to learn the expected style or conventions an author might normally use in that context. You just have to know how to write a good prompt. There's bound to be a significant increase in the quantity as well as the quality of untrustworthy published text because of these new capacities to produce it. It's not the phenomenon but the scale of production that changes the game here.

munksbeer 2y ago

> but it's still depressing, to be honest. Cheer up. Things usually get better, we just don't notice it because we're so consumed with extrapolating the negatives. Humans are funny like that.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
I actually disagree with that. People are so busy hoping things will get better, and creating little bubbles for themselves to hide away from what human beings as a whole are doing, that they don't realize things are getting worse. Technology constantly makes things worse. Cheering up is a good self-help strategy but not a good strategy if you want to contribute to making the world actually a better place.
- munksbeer 2y ago
  >Technology constantly makes things worse. And it also makes things a lot better. Overall we lead better lives than people just 50 years ago, never mind centuries.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    No way. Life 50 years ago was better for MANY. Maybe that would be true for 200. But 50 years ago was the 70s. There were far fewer people, and the world was not starting to suffer from climate change. Tell your statement to any climate refugee, and ask them whether they'd like to live now or back then. AND, we had fewer computers and life was not so hectic. YES, some things have gotten better, but on average? It's arguable.
    - munksbeer 2y ago
      I think you're demonstrating the point I was trying to make. You're falling for a very prevalent narrative that just isn't true. Fact: Life has improved for the majority of people on the planet in the last 50 years.

neta1337 2y ago

Why do you have to use it? I don’t get it. If you write your own book, you don’t compete with anyone. If anyone finished The Winds of Winter for R.R.Martin using AI, nobody would bat an eye, obviously, as we already experienced how bad a soulless story is that drifts too far away from what the author had built in his mind.

verisimi 2y ago

You're lucky. I consider it a possibility that older works (even ancient writings) are retrojected into the historical record.

datavirtue 2y ago

It's either good or it isn't. It either tracks or it doesn't. No need to befuddle your thoughts over some perceived slight.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. Wrong. I am a professional writer and I never use AI. I hate AI.

low_tech_love 2y ago
Do you feel any pressure from your environment? Like seeing other authors publishing at a much faster pace than you?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Well, at the business that I work for, I convinced everyone to have an anti-AI 100% free policy, although that wasn't too hard because no one there was ever enthusiastic about AI. Plus, we don't publish generic SEO stuff but real gear testing, real experience, so AI goes against that.

tim333 2y ago

I'm not sure it's always that hard to tell the AI stuff from the non AI. Comments on HN and on twitter from people you follow are pretty much non AI, also people on youtube where you an see the actual human talking. On the other hand there's a lot on youtube for example that is obviously ai - weird writing and speaking style and I'll only watch those if I'm really interested in the subject matter and there aren't alternatives. Maybe people will gravitate more to the stuff like PaulG or Elon Musk on twitter or HN and less to blog style content?

wickedsight 2y ago

With a friend, I created a website about a race track in the past two years. I definitely used AI to speed up some of writing. One thing I used it for was a track guide, describing every corner and how to drive it. It was surprisingly accurate, most of the time. The other times though, it would drive the track backwards, completely hallucinate the instructions or link corners that are in different parts of the track. I spent a lot of time analyzing the track myself and fixed everything to the point that experienced drivers agreed with my description. If I hadn't done that, most visitors would probably still accept our guide as the truth, because they wouldn't know any better. We know that not everyone cares about whether what they put on the internet is correct and AI allows those people to create content at an unprecedented pace. I fully agree with your sentiment.

jshdhehe 2y ago

AI only helps writing in so far as checking/suggesting edits. Most people can write better than AI (more engaging). AI cant tell a human story, have real tacit experience. So it is like saying my champaigne bottle cant keep up with the tap water.

Roark66 2y ago

>The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their primary business of advertising. Before, at least they were trying to downrank all the crap "word aggregators". After, they stopped caring at all. AI gives even better tools to page rank. Detection of AI generated content is not that bad. So why don't we have "a new Google" emerge? Simple, because of the monopolistic practices Google did to make the barrier to entry huge. First, 99% of the content people want to search for is behind a login wall (Facebook, Instagram, twitter, YouTube), second almost all CDNs now implement "verify you are human" by default. Third, no one links to other sites. Ever! These 3 things mean a new Google is essentially impossible. Even duck duck go has thrown the towel and subscribed to Bing results. It has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with Google. In fact AI might give us the tools to better fight Google.

rich_sasha 2y ago
Some great grand ancestor of mine was a civil servant, a great achievement given his peasant background. The single skill that enabled it was the knowledge of calligraphy. He went to school and wrote nicely and that was sufficient. The flip side was, calligraphy was sufficient evidence for both his education to whoever hired him, and for a recipient of a document, of its official nature. Calligraphy itself or course didn't make him efficient or smart or fair. That's long gone of course, but we had similar heuristics. I am reminded of the Reddit story about an AI-generated mushroom atlas that had factual errors and lead to someone getting poisoned. We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The story of course is from reddit, so probably untrue, but it doesn't matter - it totally could be true. LLMs are fantastic at breaking our heuristics as to what is and isn't legit, but not as good at being right.
- matwood 2y ago
  > We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automatically trust what you read on the internet". I was speaking to a librarian the other day who teaches incoming freshman how to use LLMs. What was shocking to me is that the librarian said a majority of the kids trust what the computer says by default. Not just LLMs, but generally what they read. That's such a huge shift from my generation. Maybe LLM education will shift people back toward skepticism - unlikely, but I can hope.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

Just dont be average and your fine.

akudha 2y ago

I was listening to an interview few months ago (forgot the name). He is a prolific reader/writer and has a huge following. He mentioned that he only reads books that are at least 50 years old, so pre 70s. That sounds like a good idea now. Even ignoring the AI, if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average). Maybe people's attention spans and taste is to blame, or maybe people just don't have the money/time/patience to consume quality work... I do not know. One thing I know for sure - there is enough high quality material written before AI, before article spinners, before MFA sites etc. We would need multiple lifetimes to even scratch the surface of that body of work. We can ignore mostly everything that is published these days and we won't be missing much

eloisant 2y ago
I'd say it's probably survivor's bias. Bad books from the pre 70s are probably forgotten and no longer printed. Old books that we're still printing and are still talking about have stood the test of time. It doesn't mean that are no great recent books.
mvdtnz 2y ago
> if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average) I'm sorry but this is just nonsense.
alwa 2y ago
Nassim Taleb famously argues that position, in his popular work Antifragile and elsewhere. I believe the theory is that time serves as a sieve: only works with lasting value can remain relevant through the years.
inkcapmushroom 2y ago
Completely disagree just from my own personal experience as a sci-fi reader. Modern day bestseller sci-fi novels fit right in with the old classics, and in many ways outshine them. I have read many bad obscure sci-fi books published from the 50's to today, most of them a dollar at the thrift store. There was never a time when writers were perfect and every published work was high quality, then or now.

EGreg 2y ago

I have been predicting this from 2016 And I also predict that many responses to you will say “it was always that way, nothing changed”.

limit499karma 2y ago

I'll take your statement that your conclusions are based on a 'depressed mind' at face value, since it is so self-defeating and places little faith in Human abilities. Your assumption that a person driven to write will "with a high degree of certainty" also mix up their work with a machine assistant can only be informed by your own self-assessment (after all how could you possibly know the mindset of every creative human out there?) My optimistic and enthusiastic view of AI's role in Human development is that it will create selection pressures that will release the dormant psychological abilities of the species. Undoubtedly, wide-spread appearance of Psi abilities will be featured in this adjustment of the human super-organism to technologies of its own making. Machines can't do Psi.

greenie_beans 2y ago

i know a lot of writers who don't use ai. in fact, i can't think of any writers who use it, except a few literary fiction writers. working theory: writers have taste and LLM writing style doesn't match the typical taste of a published writer.

osigurdson 2y ago

AI expansion: take a few bullet points and have ChatGPT expand it into several pages of text AI compression: take pages of text and use ChatGPT to compress into a few bullet points We need to stop being impressed with long documents.

fennecfoxy 2y ago
The foundations of our education systems are based on rote memorisation so I'd probably start there.
low_tech_love 2y ago
That’s the ideal way forward in my opinion. My optimistic view of the future is one where we get so fed up of the noise that we only write what is absolutely necessary, because anything more than that is AI-generated.

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noobermin 2y ago

When you're writing, how are you "missing out" if you're not using chatgpt??? I don't even understand how this can be unless what you're writing is already unnecessary such that you shouldn't need to write it in the first place.

jwells89 2y ago
I don’t get it either. Writing is not something I need that level of assistance with, and I would even say that using LLMs to write defeats some significant portion of the point of writing — by using LLMs to write for me I feel that I’m no longer expressing myself in the purest sense, because the words are not mine and do not exhibit any of my personality, tendencies, etc. Even if I were to train an LLM on my style, it’d only be a temporal facsimile of middling quality, because peoples’ styles evolve (sometimes quite rapidly) and there’s no way to work around all the corner cases that never got trained for. As you say, if the subject is worth being written about, there should be no issue and writing will come naturally. If it’s a struggle, maybe one should step back and figure out why that is. There may some argument for speed, because writing quality prose does take time, but then the question becomes a matter of quantity vs. quality. Do you want to write high quality pieces that people want to read at a slower pace or churn out endless volumes of low-substance grey goo “content”?
dotnet00 2y ago
LLMs are surprisingly capable editors/brainstorming tools. So, you're missing out in that you're being less efficient in editing. Like, you can write a bunch of text, then ask an LLM to improve it with minimal changes. Then, you read through its output and pick out the improvements you like.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Sure, but Grammarly and similar have existed far before the LLM boom.
  - dotnet00 2y ago
    That's a fair point, I only very recently found that LLMs could actually be useful for editing, and hadn't really thought much of using tools for that kind of thing previously.

_heimdall 2y ago

> Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. Why do you say people have to do it? People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is not worth wasting time and resources on. There will always be side effects to making those decisions, but its well within everyone's right to make them.

DrillShopper 2y ago
> Why do you say people have to do it? Gotta eat, yo
- goatlover 2y ago
  Somehow people made enough to eat before LLMs became all the rage a couple years ago. I suspect people are still making enough to eat without having to use LLMs.
  - DrillShopper 2y ago
    The existence of LLMs in the market will push real wages down and then the people currently making a living we be faced with three main choices. Choice 1 - embrace the chaos and start using LLMs to help you work so you can churn out more cOnTeNt to survive. Choice 2 - don't embrace the chaos by starting to use LLMs and just work more hours of the day to match the output of the machine. Choice 3 - leave writing and either join another profession or start delivering for Uber.
low_tech_love 2y ago
If you find yourself in a situation where you write one book at the same time as your peers are writing ten, how can you keep up? Also how can you justify to yourself not using it if nobody around you seems to value that, and even worse, is pushing you to actually use it? I find it hard to find a reason why you would. Unless we see a super strong reader revolution that collectively decides to shun AI and pay more money for all-human books. Read that last sentence and tell you think that’s reasonable and likely to happen?

uhtred 2y ago

To be honest I got sick of most new movies, TV shows, music even before AI so I will continue to consume media from pre 2010 until the day I die and will hope I don't get through it all. Something happened around 2010 and it all got shit. I think everyone becoming massively online made global cultural output reduce in quality to meet the interests of most people and most people have terrible taste.

edavison1 2y ago

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

DrillShopper 2y ago
It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output. At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of the cost of a skilled human writer output something acceptably good for people to read it between giant ads on our website / watch the TTS video on YouTube and sit through the ads and sponsors?", and I'm sorry to say, skilled human writers are at a distinct disadvantage here because they have professional standards and self respect.
- easterncalculus 2y ago
  Exactly. Also, if the past few years is any indication, at the very least tech journalists in general tend to love to use what they hate.
- goatlover 2y ago
  So you're saying major media companies are going to outsource their writing to people overseas using LLMs? There is more to journalism than the writing. There's also the investigative part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc.
  - edavison1 2y ago
    This has become such a talking point of mine when I'm inevitably forced to explain why LLMs can't come for my job (yet). People seem baffled by the idea that reporting collects novel information about the world which hasn't been indexed/ingested at any point because it didn't exist before I did the interview or whatever it is.

amelius 2y ago

Funny thing is that people will also ask AI to __read__ stuff for them and summarize it. So everything an AI writes will eventually be nothing more than some kind of internal representation.

jcd748 2y ago

Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point. If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.

onemoresoop 2y ago
> If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, The problem is this kind of content is flooding the internet. Before you know it becomes extremely hard to find non AI generated content...
- jcd748 2y ago
  I think we agree. I hate it, and I can't stop it, but also I definitely won't participate in it.
low_tech_love 2y ago
That’s super cool, and I hope you are right and that I am wrong and artists/creators like you will still have a place in the future. My fear is that your work turns into some kind of artesanal fringe activity that is only accessible to 1% of people, like Ming vases or whatever.
seniortaco 2y ago
That's true art, I love people like you. Technology can do a lot of things but it cannot give people or society principles, and without principles society fails.

fennecfoxy 2y ago

Why does a human being behind any words change anything at all? Trust should be based on established facts/research and not species.

bloak 2y ago
A lot of communication isn't about "established facts/research"; it's about someone's experience. For example, if a human writes about their experience of using a product, perhaps a drug, or writes what they think about a book or a film, then I might be interested in reading that. When they write using their own words I get some insight into how they think and what sort of person they are. I have very little interest in reading an AI-generated text with similar "content".
goatlover 2y ago
An LLM isn't even a species. I prefer communicating with other humans, unless I choose to interact with an LLM. But then I know that it's a text generator and not a person, even when I ask it to act like a person. The difference matters to most humans.
- fennecfoxy 2y ago
  I'm predicting the future a little with that. As always people accept new ideas at a glacial pace. At what point do we consider some entity alive? At what point do we decide to consider it a species (of living thing)? If we find out there are aliens, biological and therefore similar to us? Sure. What if we meet aliens whose physical forms are synthetic? What if we meet the synthetic creations of biological aliens? I'm not saying that LLMs are alive, of course. But I am saying that I'd consider LLMs to be a precursor to AGI, along with all our our historical artificial intelligence experiments, in the same way that prokaryotes were the precursors to...us.

farts_mckensy 2y ago

>But what I had never noticed until now is that knowing that a human being was behind the written words (however flawed they can be, and hopefully are) is crucial for me. Everyone is going to have to get over that very soon, or they're going to start sounding like those old puritanical freaks who thought Elvis thrusting his hips around was the work of the devil.

goatlover 2y ago
Those two things don't sound at all similar. We don't have to get over wanting to communicate with humans online.
- farts_mckensy 2y ago
  They don't sound similar because the former has been fully integrated into culture while the latter is still a strange, alien phenomenon.

hyggetrold 2y ago

> The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. This has nearly always been true. "Manufacturing consent" is way older than any digital technology.

unshavedyak 2y ago
Agreed. I also suspect we've grown to rely on the crutch of trust far too much. Faulty writing has existed for ages but now suddenly because the computer is the thing making it up we have an issue with it. I guess it depends on scope. I'm imaging scientific or education. Ie things we probably shouldn't have relied on Blogs to facilitate, yet we did. For looking up some random "how do i build a widget?", yea AI will probably make it worse. For now. Then it'll massively improve to the point that it's not even worth asking how to build the widget. The larger "scientific or education" is what i'm concerned about, and i think we'll need a new paradigm to validate. We've been getting attacked on this front for 12+ years, AI is only bringing this to light imo. Trust will have to be earned and verified in this word-soup world. I just hope we find a way.
- hyggetrold 2y ago
  IMHO AI tools will (or at least should!) fundamentally change the way the education system works. AI tools are - from a certain point of view - really just a scaled version of AI now can put at our fingertips. Paradoxically, the more AI can do "grunt work" the more we need folks to be educated on the higher-level constructs on which they are operating. Some of the bigger issues you're raising I think have less to do with technology and more to do with how our economic system is currently structured. AI will be a tremendous accelerant, but are we sure we know where we're going?

BeFlatXIII 2y ago

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. Only if you're competing on volume.

low_tech_love 2y ago
Who isn’t? Can you rely on your readers to rebel against AI and value more your writing than that of your peers? If one of your competitors write 10 articles while you write 1, and charge 10% of what you charge, they already equaled your wins. Raise it to 20% and they are already making twice what you make. Can you really trust that your writing is so good and so incredibly special that someone would be willing to pay 10x more for your content, against one that was assisted by the absolute state of the art of a technology that has revolutionized the world?
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  The curation is part of the value.

beefnugs 2y ago

Just add more swearing and off color jokes to everything you do and say. If there is one thing we know for sure its that the corporate AIs will never allow dirty jokes. (it will get into the dark places like spam though, which seems dumb since they know how to make meth instead, spend time on that you wankers)

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FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Maybe this will push people back to reading old paper books? There could be resurgence in reading the classics, on paper, since we know they are not AI.

CuriouslyC 2y ago

A lot of writers using AI use it to create outlines of a chapter or scene then flesh it out by hand.

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cookingrobot 2y ago

Idea: we should make sure we keep track of what the human created content is, so that we don’t get confused by AI edits of everything in the future. For ex, calculate the hash of all important books, and publish that as the “historical authenticity” check. Put the hashes on some important blockchain so we know it’s unchanged over time.

bilsbie 2y ago

Wait until you find out about copywriters.

alwa 2y ago

People like you, the author, and me all share this sentiment. It motivates us to seek out authentic voices and writing that’s associated with specific humans. The commodity end of the writing market may well have been automated, but was that really the kind of writing you or the author or I ever sought out in the first place? I can get mass-manufactured garments from Shein if I want, but I can also still find tailors locally if it’s worth it to me. I can buy IKEA or I can still save up for something made out of real wood. I can “shoot a cinematic digital film” on my iPhone but the cineplex remains in business and the art film folks are still doing their scrappy thing (and still moaning about its economics). I can lap up slop from an academic paper mill journal or I can identify who’s doing the thinking in a field and read what they’re writing or saying. And the funny thing is that none of those human-scale options commands all that much of a premium in the scheme of things. There may be less human-scald work to go around and thus fewer small enterprises plying a specific trade, but any given one of them just has to put food on the table for a number of humans roughly proportional to the same level of output as always. It seems to me that there’s no special virtue in the specific form that the mass publishing market took over the last century or however long: my local grocery store chain’s division producing weekly newspaper circulars probably employed more people than J Peterman has. But there was and remains a place for quality. If anything—as you point out—the AI schlock has sensitized us to the value we place on a human voice. And at some level, once people notice that they miss that quality, isn’t there a sense in which they become more willing to seek it out and pay for it if necessary?

m463 2y ago

I think ... between now and the day you die... you'll get your personal AI to read things for you. It will analyze what's been written, check any arguments for fallacious reasoning, and look up related things for background and omissions that may support or negate things. It is actually happening now. I've noticed amazon reviews have an AI summary at the top, reading the reviews for you and even pointing out shortcomings.

phatfish 2y ago
I've seen "summarise this" and "explain this code" buttons added to technical documentation. This works reasonably well for most common situations, which is probably the reason it's one of the few "production" uses for LLMs. I didn't know Amazon was using it though. Microsoft has a note on some of their documentation, something like; "this article was written with the help of an AI and edited by a human". I have a feeling this won't lead to informative to-the-point documentation. It will get bloated because an LLM will spew out reams of bullet point ridden paragraphs, which will need a "summarise this" button to stop the reader nodding off. Rinse and repeat.

LeroyRaz 2y ago

Your take seems hyperbolic. Until LLMs exceed the very best of human quality there will be human content in all forms of media. This claims follows because there is always (some) demand for top quality content. I agree that many writers might use LLMs as a tool, but good writers who care about quality will ensure that such use is not detrimental (e.g., using the LLM to identify errors rather than having it draft copy).

njarboe 2y ago
Will that happen in 1,2,5,10 or never years?
- LeroyRaz 2y ago
  I mean if AI output exceeds human quality then all humans will be redundant. So it would then be quite a brave new world! My point is that I do not agree that LMM output will degrade all media (as there is always a demand for top quality content). So we either have bad LLM output and then people who care about quality avoiding such works. Or good LLM output and hopefully some form of post scarcity society (e.g., Iain Bank's Culture Novels).

jwuice 2y ago

i would change to: if you do ANYTHING online and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. you're out. it's depressing.

seniortaco 2y ago

+1, and to put more simply, AI as we know it today makes zero guarantees about its accuracy. That's pretty insane for a "tool" to make no guarantees about being correct in any way for any purpose. A spellchecker makes guarantees about accuracy. So does a calculator. Broad, sweeping guarantees. Imagine if we built a tool that could automatically do all the electrical work in a new home from the breaker box to every outlet, and it could do it in 2 hours. However, what if that tool made no guarantees about its ability to meet electrical code? Would people use it anyway? Of course they would. Many dangerous errors would slip through inspection and many more house fires would ensue as a result.

bschmidt1 2y ago

Oh please the content online now is so fake as hell. You're acting as if AI can only produce garbage but CNN and Fox News are producing gold. The internet is 4 total websites now, congrats big media won. And you want to shut down the only decent attempt against it. Shame on you "hackers"

mulmen 2y ago

> The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. Today is September 11349, 1993

th3byrdm4n 2y ago

Honestly, I've developers saying the same thing about IDEs and high level languages. This new generation of tools add efficiency the same way IntelliJ added efficiency on top of Eclipse which added efficiency on top of Emacs/VI/Notepad/etc. The more time that someone can focus on the systemsit takes certain types of high-time, [not domain problem specific] skill processes and obfuscated it away so the developer can focus on the most critical aspects of the software. Yes, sometimes generators do the wrong thing, but it's usually obvious/quick to correct. Cost of occasional correction is much less than the time to scaffold every punchcard.

davidgerard 2y ago

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. This statement strikes me (a writer) as ridiculous. LLM slop is sloppy. I would expect anyone who reads a reasonable amount to spot it immediately. Are you saying you are literally unable to distinguish LLM cliches?

itsTyrion 2y ago

Same goes for art. No longer can you see art on social media, press like and maybe leave a nice comment, you need to fricking pixel peep for artifacts as it's becoming less obvious.

low_tech_love 2y ago
Exactly. And it makes sense: think about how much one would have to pay for an artist to do the same? It’s simply inconceivable. The convergence is clear: we just won’t care about anything anymore after a while. Writing, art, whatever; it’ll all turn into noise.

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