10 ms·

I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety

by alyxya 1y ago

I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me. > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human! It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable.

furyofantares 1y ago
People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they don't. All I care about is content, too, but people using LLMs to blog and make readmes is routinely getting garbage content past the filters and into my eyeballs. It's especially egregious when the author put good content into the LLM and pasted the garage output at us. Are there people out there using an LLM as a starting point but taking ownership of the words they post, taking care that what they're posting still says what they're trying to say, etc? Maybe? But we're increasingly drowning in slop.
- kirurik 1y ago
  To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. Maybe you only notice it because it is obvious. Just like someone would only notice machine translation if it is obvious.
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    > To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. It's not an assumption. Look at this example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707 The author posted their input to the LLM in the comments after receiving critcism, and that input was much better than their actual post. In this thread I'm less sure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 - it DOES look like there was something interesting thrown into the LLM that then put garbage out. It's more of an informed guess than an assumption, you can tell the author did have an experience to share, but you can't really figure out what's what because of all the slop. In this case the author redid their post in response to criticism and it's still pretty bad to me, and then they kept using an LLM to post comments in the thread, I can't really tell how much non-garbage was going in.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      What's really sad here is that it is all form over function. The original got the point across, didn't waste words and managed to be mostly coherent. The result, after spending a lot of time on coaxing the AI through the various rewrites (11!) was utter garbage. You'd hope that we somehow reach a stage where people realize that what you think is what matters and not how pretty the packaging is. But with middle management usually clueless we've conditioned people to having an audience that doesn't care either, they go by word count rather than by signal:noise ratio, clarity and correctness. This whole AI thing is rapidly becoming very tiresome. But the trend seems to be to push it everywhere, regardless of merit.
- paulpauper 1y ago
  Quality , human-made content is seldom rewarded anymore. Difficulty has gone up. The bar for quality is too high, so an alternative strategy is to use LLMs for a more lottery approach to content: produce as much LLM-assisted content as possible in the hope something goes viral. Given that it's effectivity free to produce LLM writing, eventually something will work if enough content is produced. I cannot blame people for using software as a crutch when human-based writing has become too hard and seldom rewarded anymore unless you are super-talented, which statistically the vast majority of people are not.
- alyxya 1y ago
  That’s true, I just wanted to offer a counter perspective to the anti-AI sentiment in the blog post. I agree that the slop issue is probably more common and egregious, but it’s unhelpful to discount all AI assisted writing because of slop. The only way I see to counteract slop is to care about the reputation of the author.
  - ares623 1y ago
    And how does an author build up said reputation?
- dcow 1y ago
  The problem is the “they’re making it to the top of HN routinely” part.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
c4wrd 1y ago
I think the author’s point is that by exposing oneself to feedback, you are on the receiving end of the growth in the case of error. If you hand off all of your tasks to ChatGPT to solve, your brain will not grow and you will not learn.
latexr 1y ago
> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. “Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written. > The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > there was never a period when blogs were hand written. I’ve seen exactly that. In one case, it was JPEG scans of handwriting, but most of the time, it’s a cursive font (which may obviate “handwritten”). I can’t remember which famous author it was, that always submitted their manuscripts as cursive writing on yellow legal pads. Must have been thrilling to edit.
  - latexr 1y ago
    Isolated instances do not a period define. We can always find some example of someone who did something, but the point is it didn’t start like that. For example, there was never a period when movies were made by creating frames as oil paintings and photographing them. A couple of movies were made like that, but that was never the norm or a necessity or the intended process.
  - y0eswddl 1y ago
    The fact that this one example stands out so clearly to you gives more Credence to the fact that this is so rare and not a common aspect of blogging.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read? Like, I’m totally on board with rejecting slop, but not all content that AI was involved in is slop, and it’s kind of frustrating so many people see things so black and white.
k__ 1y ago
This. It's about to find the sweet spot. Vibe coding is crap, but I love the smarter autocomplete I get from AI. Generating whole blog posts from thin air is crap, but I love smart grammar, spelling, and diction fixes I get from AI.
throw35546 1y ago
The best yarn is spun from mouth to ear over an open flame. What is this handwriting?
- falcor84 1y ago
  It's what is used to feed the flames.
MangoToupe 1y ago
> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.
- alyxya 1y ago
  I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources, and sometimes I can rely on that source to fact check.
  - latexr 1y ago
    > The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI slop is by checking the sources posted at the end and seeing they don’t exist. Asking for sources isn’t a magical incantation that suddenly makes things true. > It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. This is a poor argument. The overwhelming difference with humans is that you learn who you can trust about what. With LLMs, you can never reach that level.
    - the_af 1y ago
      > And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In tech-related matters such as coding, I've come to expect every link ChatGPT provides as reference/documentation is simply wrong or nonexistent. I can count with fingers from a single hand the times I clicked on a link to a doc from ChatGPT that didn't result in a 404. I've had better luck with links to products from Amazon or eBay (or my local equivalent e-shop). But for tech documentation which is freely available online? ChatGPT just makes shit up.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Sure, but a chatbot will compound the inaccuracy.
B56b 1y ago
Even if someone COULD write a great post with AI, I think the author is right in assuming that it's less likely than a handwritten one. People seem to use AI to avoid thinking hard about a topic. Otherwise, the actual writing part wouldn't be so difficult. This is similar to the common objection for AI-coding that the hard part is done before the actual writing. Code generation was never a significant bottleneck in most cases.
signorovitch 1y ago
I tend to agree, though not in all cases. If I’m reading because I want to learn something, I don’t care how the material was generated. As long as it’s correct and intuitive, and LLMs have gotten pretty good at that, it’s valuable to me. It’s always fun when a human takes the time to make something educational and creative, or has a pleasant style, or a sense of humor; but I’m not reading the blog post for that. What does bother me is when clearly AI-generated blog posts (perhaps unintentionally) attempt to mask their artificial nature through superfluous jokes or unnaturally lighthearted tone. It often obscures content and makes the reading experience inefficient, without the grace of a human writer that could make it worth it. However, if I’m reading a non-technical blog, I am reading because I want something human. I want to enjoy a work a real person sank their time and labor into. The less touched by machines, the better. > It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. And I would totally ready handwritten blog posts!
- paulpauper 1y ago
  AI- assisted or generated content tends to have an annoying wordiness or bloat to it, but only astute readers will pick up on it. But it can make for tiresome reading. Like, a 2000 word post can be compressed to 700 or something had a human editor pruned it.
apsurd 1y ago
Human as in unique kind of experiential learning. We are the sum of our mistakes. So offloading your mistakes, becomes less human, less leaning into the human experience. Maybe humans aren't so unique after all, but that's its own topic.
enraged_camel 1y ago
Content can be useful. The AI tone/prose is almost always annoying. You learn to identify it after a while, especially if you use AI yourself.
thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
Even letting the LLM “clean it up” puts its voice on your text. In general, you don’t want its voice. The associations are LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. It’s the modern equivalent of “talking like a used car salesman”. Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.
- ryanmerket 1y ago
  It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.
  - px43 1y ago
    Exactly. It's so wild to me when people hate on generated text because it sounds like something they don't like, when they could easily tell it to set the tone to any other tone that has ever appeared in text.
    - zarmin 1y ago
      respectfully, read more.
  - chipotle_coyote 1y ago
    You can say anything to an LLM, but it’s not going to actually write in your voice. When I was writing a very long blog post about “creative writing” from AIs, I researched Sudowrite briefly, which purports to be able to do exactly this; not only could it not write convincingly in my voice (and the novel I gave it has a pretty strong narrative voice), following Sudowrite’s own tutorial in which they have you get their app to write a few paragraphs in Dan Brown’s voice demonstrated it could not convincingly do that. I don’t think having a ML-backed proofreading system is an intrinsically bad idea; the oft-maligned “Apple Intelligence” suite has a proofreading function which is actually pretty good (although it has a UI so abysmal it’s virtually useless in most circumstances). But unless you truly, deeply believe your own writing isn’t as good as a precocious eighth-grader trying to impress their teacher with a book report, don’t ask an LLM to rewrite your stuff.
paulpauper 1y ago
I have human-written blog posts, and I can rest assured no one reads those either.
- yashasolutions 1y ago
  Yeah, same here. I’ve got to the stage where what I write is mostly just for myself as a reminder, or to share one-to-one with people I work with. It’s usually easier to put it in a blog post than spend an hour explaining it in a meeting anyway. Given the state of the internet these days, that’s probably all you can really expect from blogging.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  I have those too and I don't actually care who reads them. When I write it is mostly to organize my thoughts or to vent my frustration about something. Afterwards I feel better ;)
korse 1y ago
:Edit, not anymore kek Somehow this is currently the top comment. Why? Most non-quantitative content has value due to a foundation of distinct lived experience. Averages of the lived experience of billions just don't hit the same, and are less likely to be meaningful to me (a distinct human). Thus, I want to hear your personal thoughts, sans direct algorithmic intermediary.
- medstrom 1y ago
  HN favors very fresh comments, to give them all some time in the limelight.
AlexandrB 1y ago
If you want this, why would you want the LLM output and not just the prompts? The prompts are faster to read and as models evolve you can get "better" blog posts out of them. It's like being okay with reading the entirety of generated ASM after someone compiles C++.
caconym_ 1y ago
> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable. Whether I hand write a blog post or type it into a computer, I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far more important distinction than whatever differences we might imagine arise from hand writing vs. typing. > your thoughts No, they aren't! Not if you had AI write the post for you. That's the problem!
- zanellato19 1y ago
  The idea that an AI can keep the authors voice just means it is so unoriginal that it doesn't make a difference.
- gr4vityWall 1y ago
  >I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far more important distinction than whatever differences we might imagine That apparently is not the case for a lot of people.
  - caconym_ 1y ago
    s/important/significant/, then, if that helps make the point clearer. I cannot tell you that it objectively matters whether or not an article was written by a human or an LLM, but it should be clear to anybody that it is at least a significant difference in kind vs. the analogy case of handwriting vs. typing. I think somebody who won't acknowledge that is either being intellectually dishonest, or has already had their higher cognitive functions rotted away by excessive reliance on LLMs to do their thinking for them. The difference in kind is that of using power tools instead of hand tools to build a chair, vs. going out to a store and buying one.
    - gr4vityWall 1y ago
      I wasn't even arguing with you, nor saying that it doesn't matter to me, rather just pointing an out an observation. > I think somebody who won't acknowledge that is either being intellectually dishonest, or has already had their higher cognitive functions rotted away by excessive reliance on LLMs to do their thinking for them. This feels too aggressive for a good faith discussion on this site. Even if you do think that, there's no point in insulting the humans who could engage with you in that conversation.
aakkaakk 1y ago
As long as you’re not using an autopen, because that is definitely not you! https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-17/trump-calls-biden-pardons-void-because-of-autopen-usage https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
- jibal 1y ago
  Trump uses it more than anyone.
rustystump 1y ago
I agree with you to a point. Ai will often suggest edits which destroy the authentic voice of a person. If you as a writer do not see these suggestions for what they are, you will take them and destroy the best part of your work. I write pretty long blog posts that some enjoy and dump them into various llms for review. I am pretty opinionated on taste so I usually only update grammar but it can be dangerous for some. To be more concrete, often ai tells me to be more “professional” and less “irreverent” which i think is bullshit. The suggestions it gives are pure slop. But if english isnt first language or you dont have confidence, you may just accept the slop.
k_r_z 1y ago
Couldn’t agree more with this. AI is a tool like everything else. I mean if You are not a native it could be handy just to suggest You the polishing the style and all the language quirks to some degree. Why when You use autocorrect You are the boss but when You use AI You turn to half brain with ChatGPT?
strbean 1y ago
I just despise the trend of commenting "I asked ChatGPT about this and this is what it said:". It's like getting an unsolicited text with a "Let Me Google That For You" link. Yes, we can all ask ChatGPT about the thing. We don't need you to do it for us.
- sings 1y ago
  What is remarkable is the frequency with which I’ve heard so-called subject matter experts do this on podcasts. It seems to me a very effective way to communicate your lack of any such expertise.
beej71 1y ago
Do you care if a scifi book was written by an AI or human, out of curiosity?
- tpmoney 1y ago
  I'm not the OP but I've been thinking about this for a little bit since I read your question. Part of me says no, what could be more Sci-Fi than a complete and comprehensive story written by a computer. Who wouldn't want Data to have been able to and succeeded at writing a story that connects with his human compatriots? On the other hand, I also understand the concern and feeling of "something lost" when I consider a story written by a human vs a machine. But if I'm truly honest with myself, I think in the long run I wouldn't care. I grew up on Science Fiction, and the stories I've always found most interesting were ones that explored human nature instead of just being techno fetishism. But the reality is I don't feel a human connection to Asimov, or Cherryh, or any of the innumerable short form authors who wrote for the SF&F magazines I devoured every chance I got. I remember the stories, but very rarely the names. So they might as well have been written by an AI since the human was never really part of the equation (for me as a reader). And even when I do remember the names, maybe the human isn't one I want a lot of "human connection" with anyway. Ender's Game, the short story and later the novel were stories I greatly enjoyed. But I feel like my enjoyment is hampered by knowing that the author of a phenomenal book that has some interesting things to day on the pains caused by de-humanizing the other has themselves become someone who dehumanizes others often. The human connection might be ironic now, but that doesn't make the story better for me. Here too, the story might as well have been written by an AI for all that the current person that the author is represents who they were (either in reality or just in my head) when I read those stories for the first time. Some authors I have been exposed to later in life, I have had a degree of human connection with. I felt sadness and pain when Steve Miller died and left his spouse and long time writing partner Sharon Lee to carry on the Liaden series. But that connection isn't what drew me to the stories in the first place and that connection is largely the same superficial parasocial one that the easy access into the private lives of famous people gives us. Sure I'm saddened, but honesty requires me to note I'm more sad that it reminds me eventually this decades spanning series will draw to a close, and likely with many loose ends. And so even here, if an AI were capable of producing such a phenomenal series of books, in a twisted way as a reader it would be better because they would never end. The world created by the author would live on forever, just like a "real" world should. Emotionally I feel like I should care that a book was or wasn't written by an AI. But if I'm truly honest with myself, the author being a human hasn't so far added much to the experience, except in some ways to make it worse, or to cut short something that I wish could have continued forever. All of that as a longwinded way of answering, "no, I don't think I would care".
bee_rider 1y ago
It is sort of fun to bounce little ideas off ChatGPT, but I can’t imagine wanting to read somebody else’s ChatGPT responses. IMO a lot of the dumb and bad behavior around LLMs could be solved by a “just share the prompts” strategy. If somebody wants to generate an email from bullet points and send it to me: just send the bullet points, and I can pass them into an LLM if I want. Blog post based on interesting prompts? Share the prompt. It’s just text completion anyway, so if a reader knows more about the topic than the prompt-author, they can even tweak the prompt (throw in some lingo to get the LLM to a better spot in the latent space or whatever). The only good reason not to do that is to save some energy in generation, but inference is pretty cheap compared to training, right? And the planet is probably doomed anyway at this point so we as well enjoy the ride.
- alyxya 1y ago
  AI assisted blog posts could have an interleaved mix of AI and human written words where a person could edit the LLM’s output. If the whole blog post were simply a few prompts on ChatGPT with no human directly touching the output, then sure it makes sense to share the prompt.
munificent 1y ago
> The only thing that matters to me is the content. The content itself does have value, yes. But some people also read to connect with other humans and find that connection meaningful and important too. I believe the best writing has both useful content and meaningful connection.
subsection1h 1y ago
> I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. 0% of your HN comments include URLs for sources that support the positions and arguments you've expressed at HN.[1] Do you generally not care about the sources of ideas? For example, when you study public policy issues, do you not differentiate between research papers published in the most prestigious journals and 500-word news articles written at the 8th-grade level by nonspecialist nobodies? [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+https https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+htt...
akst 1y ago
I would personally find it insulting if i ask someone something and they gave me ChatGPT output, i would rather then say idk and I look for answers else where. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT I would have done so myself. Generative AI tends to be very sure of itself. It doesn’t say, it doesn’t know when it doesn’t know. Sometimes when it doesn’t it won’t engage in the premise of the question and instead give an answer to an easier question
xarope 1y ago
so this is the danger. If you are an expert in the content, you'll realize the AI slop. If you are not an expert, you'll think the AI is amazing, without realizing the slop. I'll rather do without the AI slop, thanks.
somethingsome 1y ago
I don't mind either, I have way too few time to write blogposts, but I have some things that I want to share. So I focus on the content extensively, and use the llm to help with the style and the phrasing and grammar.. But I often correct the result and change some wording. Maybe at the beginning, when I was less experienced with llms, I used more llm style, but now I find it a good compromise to convey what I think without hindering the message behind my awful writing :)
palmotea 1y ago
> I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. An LLM generated blog post is by definition derivative and bland. > I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me. Then say so, up front. But that's not what people do. They're lazy or lack ideas but want "content" (usually for some kind of self-promotional reason). So you get to read that.
- jibal 1y ago
  People say "by definition" when they have no idea what the phrase actually means, and their use of it is intellectually dishonest.
robwwilliams 1y ago
Agreed. This short target piece is an amusing Luddite rant. No true content other than to bemoan our first stumbling steps toward using AI to write and think. I am a reasonably good (but sloppy) writer and use Claude to help improve my text, my ideas, and the flow of sentences and paragraphs. A huge help once I have a good first draft. I treat Claude like a junior editor who is useful but requires a tight leash and sharp advice. This thoughtless piece is like complaining about getting help from professional human editors: a profession nearly killed off over the last three decades. Who can afford $50/hr human editorial services? Not me. Claude is a great “second best” and way faster and cheaper.
kagerou74 1y ago
I agree. I remember back in the days when facebook came out around mid 2000s or so my mentor started an online open-source academic journal. that was frowned upon by his colleagues. if it wasn't printed, it wasn't considered authentic. And then he went ahead and asked me (a helper, a volunteer) to create a facebook and Twitter accounts to spread the word. and that was frowned upon, too. it was considered like a really crass move among his respectable colleagues. Now social media has become a given. Why do I need to spend hours on formatting when AI can help clean them up in seconds? Or typos? grammar inconsistencies? Clarifying sentences? I'd rather much read writings cleaned up by an AI than some incoherent fluff that really says nothing and wasting space. And frankly, in my experience, writing with AI is no more easier than writing on your own. It's just that my priority shifts from being distracted on those externalities (like fixing typos and formatting) to the subject matter of writing itself. So I go deep dive researching topics and contents at hand with AIs and try to figure out the best way to communicate the ideas to the audience with an AI. It takes time and it's a work of its own. It takes hours depending on what I am doing. And you probably wished I have cleaned this comment up with an AI, too! (I tried in my best human way given time I'm allowed).

by alyxya 1y ago

furyofantares 1y ago

People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they don't. All I care about is content, too, but people using LLMs to blog and make readmes is routinely getting garbage content past the filters and into my eyeballs. It's especially egregious when the author put good content into the LLM and pasted the garage output at us. Are there people out there using an LLM as a starting point but taking ownership of the words they post, taking care that what they're posting still says what they're trying to say, etc? Maybe? But we're increasingly drowning in slop.

kirurik 1y ago
To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. Maybe you only notice it because it is obvious. Just like someone would only notice machine translation if it is obvious.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  > To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. It's not an assumption. Look at this example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707 The author posted their input to the LLM in the comments after receiving critcism, and that input was much better than their actual post. In this thread I'm less sure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 - it DOES look like there was something interesting thrown into the LLM that then put garbage out. It's more of an informed guess than an assumption, you can tell the author did have an experience to share, but you can't really figure out what's what because of all the slop. In this case the author redid their post in response to criticism and it's still pretty bad to me, and then they kept using an LLM to post comments in the thread, I can't really tell how much non-garbage was going in.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    What's really sad here is that it is all form over function. The original got the point across, didn't waste words and managed to be mostly coherent. The result, after spending a lot of time on coaxing the AI through the various rewrites (11!) was utter garbage. You'd hope that we somehow reach a stage where people realize that what you think is what matters and not how pretty the packaging is. But with middle management usually clueless we've conditioned people to having an audience that doesn't care either, they go by word count rather than by signal:noise ratio, clarity and correctness. This whole AI thing is rapidly becoming very tiresome. But the trend seems to be to push it everywhere, regardless of merit.
paulpauper 1y ago
Quality , human-made content is seldom rewarded anymore. Difficulty has gone up. The bar for quality is too high, so an alternative strategy is to use LLMs for a more lottery approach to content: produce as much LLM-assisted content as possible in the hope something goes viral. Given that it's effectivity free to produce LLM writing, eventually something will work if enough content is produced. I cannot blame people for using software as a crutch when human-based writing has become too hard and seldom rewarded anymore unless you are super-talented, which statistically the vast majority of people are not.
alyxya 1y ago
That’s true, I just wanted to offer a counter perspective to the anti-AI sentiment in the blog post. I agree that the slop issue is probably more common and egregious, but it’s unhelpful to discount all AI assisted writing because of slop. The only way I see to counteract slop is to care about the reputation of the author.
- ares623 1y ago
  And how does an author build up said reputation?
dcow 1y ago
The problem is the “they’re making it to the top of HN routinely” part.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

c4wrd 1y ago

I think the author’s point is that by exposing oneself to feedback, you are on the receiving end of the growth in the case of error. If you hand off all of your tasks to ChatGPT to solve, your brain will not grow and you will not learn.

latexr 1y ago

> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. “Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written. > The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
> there was never a period when blogs were hand written. I’ve seen exactly that. In one case, it was JPEG scans of handwriting, but most of the time, it’s a cursive font (which may obviate “handwritten”). I can’t remember which famous author it was, that always submitted their manuscripts as cursive writing on yellow legal pads. Must have been thrilling to edit.
- latexr 1y ago
  Isolated instances do not a period define. We can always find some example of someone who did something, but the point is it didn’t start like that. For example, there was never a period when movies were made by creating frames as oil paintings and photographing them. A couple of movies were made like that, but that was never the norm or a necessity or the intended process.
- y0eswddl 1y ago
  The fact that this one example stands out so clearly to you gives more Credence to the fact that this is so rare and not a common aspect of blogging.
Aeolun 1y ago
Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read? Like, I’m totally on board with rejecting slop, but not all content that AI was involved in is slop, and it’s kind of frustrating so many people see things so black and white.

k__ 1y ago

This. It's about to find the sweet spot. Vibe coding is crap, but I love the smarter autocomplete I get from AI. Generating whole blog posts from thin air is crap, but I love smart grammar, spelling, and diction fixes I get from AI.

throw35546 1y ago

The best yarn is spun from mouth to ear over an open flame. What is this handwriting?

falcor84 1y ago
It's what is used to feed the flames.

MangoToupe 1y ago

> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.

alyxya 1y ago
I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources, and sometimes I can rely on that source to fact check.
- latexr 1y ago
  > The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI slop is by checking the sources posted at the end and seeing they don’t exist. Asking for sources isn’t a magical incantation that suddenly makes things true. > It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. This is a poor argument. The overwhelming difference with humans is that you learn who you can trust about what. With LLMs, you can never reach that level.
  - the_af 1y ago
    > And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In tech-related matters such as coding, I've come to expect every link ChatGPT provides as reference/documentation is simply wrong or nonexistent. I can count with fingers from a single hand the times I clicked on a link to a doc from ChatGPT that didn't result in a 404. I've had better luck with links to products from Amazon or eBay (or my local equivalent e-shop). But for tech documentation which is freely available online? ChatGPT just makes shit up.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  Sure, but a chatbot will compound the inaccuracy.

B56b 1y ago

Even if someone COULD write a great post with AI, I think the author is right in assuming that it's less likely than a handwritten one. People seem to use AI to avoid thinking hard about a topic. Otherwise, the actual writing part wouldn't be so difficult. This is similar to the common objection for AI-coding that the hard part is done before the actual writing. Code generation was never a significant bottleneck in most cases.

signorovitch 1y ago

I tend to agree, though not in all cases. If I’m reading because I want to learn something, I don’t care how the material was generated. As long as it’s correct and intuitive, and LLMs have gotten pretty good at that, it’s valuable to me. It’s always fun when a human takes the time to make something educational and creative, or has a pleasant style, or a sense of humor; but I’m not reading the blog post for that. What does bother me is when clearly AI-generated blog posts (perhaps unintentionally) attempt to mask their artificial nature through superfluous jokes or unnaturally lighthearted tone. It often obscures content and makes the reading experience inefficient, without the grace of a human writer that could make it worth it. However, if I’m reading a non-technical blog, I am reading because I want something human. I want to enjoy a work a real person sank their time and labor into. The less touched by machines, the better. > It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. And I would totally ready handwritten blog posts!

paulpauper 1y ago
AI- assisted or generated content tends to have an annoying wordiness or bloat to it, but only astute readers will pick up on it. But it can make for tiresome reading. Like, a 2000 word post can be compressed to 700 or something had a human editor pruned it.

apsurd 1y ago

Human as in unique kind of experiential learning. We are the sum of our mistakes. So offloading your mistakes, becomes less human, less leaning into the human experience. Maybe humans aren't so unique after all, but that's its own topic.

enraged_camel 1y ago

Content can be useful. The AI tone/prose is almost always annoying. You learn to identify it after a while, especially if you use AI yourself.

thatjoeoverthr 1y ago

Even letting the LLM “clean it up” puts its voice on your text. In general, you don’t want its voice. The associations are LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. It’s the modern equivalent of “talking like a used car salesman”. Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.

ryanmerket 1y ago
It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.
- px43 1y ago
  Exactly. It's so wild to me when people hate on generated text because it sounds like something they don't like, when they could easily tell it to set the tone to any other tone that has ever appeared in text.
  - zarmin 1y ago
    respectfully, read more.
- chipotle_coyote 1y ago
  You can say anything to an LLM, but it’s not going to actually write in your voice. When I was writing a very long blog post about “creative writing” from AIs, I researched Sudowrite briefly, which purports to be able to do exactly this; not only could it not write convincingly in my voice (and the novel I gave it has a pretty strong narrative voice), following Sudowrite’s own tutorial in which they have you get their app to write a few paragraphs in Dan Brown’s voice demonstrated it could not convincingly do that. I don’t think having a ML-backed proofreading system is an intrinsically bad idea; the oft-maligned “Apple Intelligence” suite has a proofreading function which is actually pretty good (although it has a UI so abysmal it’s virtually useless in most circumstances). But unless you truly, deeply believe your own writing isn’t as good as a precocious eighth-grader trying to impress their teacher with a book report, don’t ask an LLM to rewrite your stuff.

paulpauper 1y ago

I have human-written blog posts, and I can rest assured no one reads those either.

yashasolutions 1y ago
Yeah, same here. I’ve got to the stage where what I write is mostly just for myself as a reminder, or to share one-to-one with people I work with. It’s usually easier to put it in a blog post than spend an hour explaining it in a meeting anyway. Given the state of the internet these days, that’s probably all you can really expect from blogging.
jacquesm 1y ago
I have those too and I don't actually care who reads them. When I write it is mostly to organize my thoughts or to vent my frustration about something. Afterwards I feel better ;)

korse 1y ago

:Edit, not anymore kek Somehow this is currently the top comment. Why? Most non-quantitative content has value due to a foundation of distinct lived experience. Averages of the lived experience of billions just don't hit the same, and are less likely to be meaningful to me (a distinct human). Thus, I want to hear your personal thoughts, sans direct algorithmic intermediary.

medstrom 1y ago
HN favors very fresh comments, to give them all some time in the limelight.

AlexandrB 1y ago

If you want this, why would you want the LLM output and not just the prompts? The prompts are faster to read and as models evolve you can get "better" blog posts out of them. It's like being okay with reading the entirety of generated ASM after someone compiles C++.

caconym_ 1y ago

> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable. Whether I hand write a blog post or type it into a computer, I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far more important distinction than whatever differences we might imagine arise from hand writing vs. typing. > your thoughts No, they aren't! Not if you had AI write the post for you. That's the problem!

zanellato19 1y ago
The idea that an AI can keep the authors voice just means it is so unoriginal that it doesn't make a difference.
gr4vityWall 1y ago
>I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far more important distinction than whatever differences we might imagine That apparently is not the case for a lot of people.
- caconym_ 1y ago
  s/important/significant/, then, if that helps make the point clearer. I cannot tell you that it objectively matters whether or not an article was written by a human or an LLM, but it should be clear to anybody that it is at least a significant difference in kind vs. the analogy case of handwriting vs. typing. I think somebody who won't acknowledge that is either being intellectually dishonest, or has already had their higher cognitive functions rotted away by excessive reliance on LLMs to do their thinking for them. The difference in kind is that of using power tools instead of hand tools to build a chair, vs. going out to a store and buying one.
  - gr4vityWall 1y ago
    I wasn't even arguing with you, nor saying that it doesn't matter to me, rather just pointing an out an observation. > I think somebody who won't acknowledge that is either being intellectually dishonest, or has already had their higher cognitive functions rotted away by excessive reliance on LLMs to do their thinking for them. This feels too aggressive for a good faith discussion on this site. Even if you do think that, there's no point in insulting the humans who could engage with you in that conversation.

aakkaakk 1y ago

As long as you’re not using an autopen, because that is definitely not you! https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-17/trump-calls-biden-pardons-void-because-of-autopen-usage https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

jibal 1y ago
Trump uses it more than anyone.

rustystump 1y ago

I agree with you to a point. Ai will often suggest edits which destroy the authentic voice of a person. If you as a writer do not see these suggestions for what they are, you will take them and destroy the best part of your work. I write pretty long blog posts that some enjoy and dump them into various llms for review. I am pretty opinionated on taste so I usually only update grammar but it can be dangerous for some. To be more concrete, often ai tells me to be more “professional” and less “irreverent” which i think is bullshit. The suggestions it gives are pure slop. But if english isnt first language or you dont have confidence, you may just accept the slop.

k_r_z 1y ago

Couldn’t agree more with this. AI is a tool like everything else. I mean if You are not a native it could be handy just to suggest You the polishing the style and all the language quirks to some degree. Why when You use autocorrect You are the boss but when You use AI You turn to half brain with ChatGPT?

strbean 1y ago

I just despise the trend of commenting "I asked ChatGPT about this and this is what it said:". It's like getting an unsolicited text with a "Let Me Google That For You" link. Yes, we can all ask ChatGPT about the thing. We don't need you to do it for us.

sings 1y ago
What is remarkable is the frequency with which I’ve heard so-called subject matter experts do this on podcasts. It seems to me a very effective way to communicate your lack of any such expertise.

beej71 1y ago

Do you care if a scifi book was written by an AI or human, out of curiosity?

tpmoney 1y ago
I'm not the OP but I've been thinking about this for a little bit since I read your question. Part of me says no, what could be more Sci-Fi than a complete and comprehensive story written by a computer. Who wouldn't want Data to have been able to and succeeded at writing a story that connects with his human compatriots? On the other hand, I also understand the concern and feeling of "something lost" when I consider a story written by a human vs a machine. But if I'm truly honest with myself, I think in the long run I wouldn't care. I grew up on Science Fiction, and the stories I've always found most interesting were ones that explored human nature instead of just being techno fetishism. But the reality is I don't feel a human connection to Asimov, or Cherryh, or any of the innumerable short form authors who wrote for the SF&F magazines I devoured every chance I got. I remember the stories, but very rarely the names. So they might as well have been written by an AI since the human was never really part of the equation (for me as a reader). And even when I do remember the names, maybe the human isn't one I want a lot of "human connection" with anyway. Ender's Game, the short story and later the novel were stories I greatly enjoyed. But I feel like my enjoyment is hampered by knowing that the author of a phenomenal book that has some interesting things to day on the pains caused by de-humanizing the other has themselves become someone who dehumanizes others often. The human connection might be ironic now, but that doesn't make the story better for me. Here too, the story might as well have been written by an AI for all that the current person that the author is represents who they were (either in reality or just in my head) when I read those stories for the first time. Some authors I have been exposed to later in life, I have had a degree of human connection with. I felt sadness and pain when Steve Miller died and left his spouse and long time writing partner Sharon Lee to carry on the Liaden series. But that connection isn't what drew me to the stories in the first place and that connection is largely the same superficial parasocial one that the easy access into the private lives of famous people gives us. Sure I'm saddened, but honesty requires me to note I'm more sad that it reminds me eventually this decades spanning series will draw to a close, and likely with many loose ends. And so even here, if an AI were capable of producing such a phenomenal series of books, in a twisted way as a reader it would be better because they would never end. The world created by the author would live on forever, just like a "real" world should. Emotionally I feel like I should care that a book was or wasn't written by an AI. But if I'm truly honest with myself, the author being a human hasn't so far added much to the experience, except in some ways to make it worse, or to cut short something that I wish could have continued forever. All of that as a longwinded way of answering, "no, I don't think I would care".

bee_rider 1y ago

It is sort of fun to bounce little ideas off ChatGPT, but I can’t imagine wanting to read somebody else’s ChatGPT responses. IMO a lot of the dumb and bad behavior around LLMs could be solved by a “just share the prompts” strategy. If somebody wants to generate an email from bullet points and send it to me: just send the bullet points, and I can pass them into an LLM if I want. Blog post based on interesting prompts? Share the prompt. It’s just text completion anyway, so if a reader knows more about the topic than the prompt-author, they can even tweak the prompt (throw in some lingo to get the LLM to a better spot in the latent space or whatever). The only good reason not to do that is to save some energy in generation, but inference is pretty cheap compared to training, right? And the planet is probably doomed anyway at this point so we as well enjoy the ride.

alyxya 1y ago
AI assisted blog posts could have an interleaved mix of AI and human written words where a person could edit the LLM’s output. If the whole blog post were simply a few prompts on ChatGPT with no human directly touching the output, then sure it makes sense to share the prompt.

munificent 1y ago

> The only thing that matters to me is the content. The content itself does have value, yes. But some people also read to connect with other humans and find that connection meaningful and important too. I believe the best writing has both useful content and meaningful connection.

subsection1h 1y ago

> I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. 0% of your HN comments include URLs for sources that support the positions and arguments you've expressed at HN.[1] Do you generally not care about the sources of ideas? For example, when you study public policy issues, do you not differentiate between research papers published in the most prestigious journals and 500-word news articles written at the 8th-grade level by nonspecialist nobodies? [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+https https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+htt...

akst 1y ago

I would personally find it insulting if i ask someone something and they gave me ChatGPT output, i would rather then say idk and I look for answers else where. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT I would have done so myself. Generative AI tends to be very sure of itself. It doesn’t say, it doesn’t know when it doesn’t know. Sometimes when it doesn’t it won’t engage in the premise of the question and instead give an answer to an easier question

xarope 1y ago

so this is the danger. If you are an expert in the content, you'll realize the AI slop. If you are not an expert, you'll think the AI is amazing, without realizing the slop. I'll rather do without the AI slop, thanks.

somethingsome 1y ago

I don't mind either, I have way too few time to write blogposts, but I have some things that I want to share. So I focus on the content extensively, and use the llm to help with the style and the phrasing and grammar.. But I often correct the result and change some wording. Maybe at the beginning, when I was less experienced with llms, I used more llm style, but now I find it a good compromise to convey what I think without hindering the message behind my awful writing :)

palmotea 1y ago

> I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. An LLM generated blog post is by definition derivative and bland. > I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me. Then say so, up front. But that's not what people do. They're lazy or lack ideas but want "content" (usually for some kind of self-promotional reason). So you get to read that.

jibal 1y ago
People say "by definition" when they have no idea what the phrase actually means, and their use of it is intellectually dishonest.

robwwilliams 1y ago

Agreed. This short target piece is an amusing Luddite rant. No true content other than to bemoan our first stumbling steps toward using AI to write and think. I am a reasonably good (but sloppy) writer and use Claude to help improve my text, my ideas, and the flow of sentences and paragraphs. A huge help once I have a good first draft. I treat Claude like a junior editor who is useful but requires a tight leash and sharp advice. This thoughtless piece is like complaining about getting help from professional human editors: a profession nearly killed off over the last three decades. Who can afford $50/hr human editorial services? Not me. Claude is a great “second best” and way faster and cheaper.

kagerou74 1y ago

I agree. I remember back in the days when facebook came out around mid 2000s or so my mentor started an online open-source academic journal. that was frowned upon by his colleagues. if it wasn't printed, it wasn't considered authentic. And then he went ahead and asked me (a helper, a volunteer) to create a facebook and Twitter accounts to spread the word. and that was frowned upon, too. it was considered like a really crass move among his respectable colleagues. Now social media has become a given. Why do I need to spend hours on formatting when AI can help clean them up in seconds? Or typos? grammar inconsistencies? Clarifying sentences? I'd rather much read writings cleaned up by an AI than some incoherent fluff that really says nothing and wasting space. And frankly, in my experience, writing with AI is no more easier than writing on your own. It's just that my priority shifts from being distracted on those externalities (like fixing typos and formatting) to the subject matter of writing itself. So I go deep dive researching topics and contents at hand with AIs and try to figure out the best way to communicate the ideas to the audience with an AI. It takes time and it's a work of its own. It takes hours depending on what I am doing. And you probably wished I have cleaned this comment up with an AI, too! (I tried in my best human way given time I'm allowed).