7 ms·

I think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas. I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaki

by tomlue 9mo ago

I think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas. I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaking relative. A person struggling with dimentia can use AI to help remember the words they lost. These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications. I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.

minimaxir 9mo ago
That is not what is happening here. There is no human the loop, it's just automated spam.
- tomlue 9mo ago
  good point. My response was to the comment not the OP
nkrisc 9mo ago
Well your examples are things that were possible before LLMs.
- tomlue 9mo ago
  This is disingenuous
simonask 9mo ago
I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing. You can achieve these things, but this is a way to not do the work, by copying from people who did do the work, giving them zero credit. (As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.)
- cm2012 9mo ago
  Do you feel the same about spellcheck?
  - Capricorn2481 9mo ago
    Does Spellcheck take a full sentence and spit out paragraphs of stuff I didn't write? I mean how do you write this seriously?
    - cm2012 9mo ago
      But in the end a human takes the finished work and says yes, this matches what I intended to communicate. That is what is important.
      - llmslave2 9mo ago
        That's neither what happens nor what is important.
- tomlue 9mo ago
  > I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing. Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI. > As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level. This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people. I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.
amvrrysmrthaker 9mo ago
What beautiful things? It just comes across as immoral and lazy to me. How beautiful.
WD-42 9mo ago
I’d much rather read a letter from you full of errors than some smooth average-of-all-writers prose. To be human is to struggle. I see no reason to read anything from anyone if they didn’t actually write it.
- tomlue 9mo ago
  If I spend hours writing and rewriting a paragraph into something I love while using AI to iterate, did I write that paragraph? edit: Also, I think maybe you don't appreciate the people who struggle to write well. They are not proud of the mistakes in their writing.
  - kentm 9mo ago
    > did I write that paragraph? No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.
    - jama211 9mo ago
      What about when someone who can barely type (like stephen hawking used to, 3 minutes per sentence using his cheek) uses autocomplete to reduce the unbelievable effort required to type out sentences? That person could pick the auto completed sentence that is closest to what they’re trying to communicate, and such a thing can be a life saver.
      - skydhash 9mo ago
        You may as well ask for a person that can walk to be able to compete in a marathon using a car. I’m all for using technology for accessibility. But this kind of whataboutism is pure nonsense.
        9mo ago
Capricorn2481 9mo ago
> These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you. There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.
- tomlue 9mo ago
  This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers. You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before. Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now. If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today. This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.
  - qnleigh 9mo ago
    > If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding. (Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)
    - tomlue 9mo ago
      Yeah it can be a risk or a benefit for sure. I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort. My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback. Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.
qnleigh 9mo ago
> People are capable of seeing which is which. I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment: > When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous. > I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?
trinsic2 9mo ago
I hear you. and I think AI has some good uses esp. assisting with challenges like you mentioned. I think whats happening is that these companies are developing this stuff without transparency on how its being used, there is zero accountability, and they are forcing some of these tech into our lives with out giving us a choice. So Im sorry but much of it is being abused and the parts of it being abused needs to stop.
- tomlue 9mo ago
  I agree about the abuse, and the OP is probably a good example of that. Do you have any ideas on how to curtail abuse? Ideas I often hear usually assume it is easy to discern AI content from human, which is wrong, especially at scale. Either that, or they involve some form of extreme censorship. Microtransactions might work by making it expensive run bots while costing human users very little. I'm not sure this is practical either though, and has plenty of downsides as well.
  - trinsic2 9mo ago
    I don't see this changing without a complete shift in our priorities on the level of politics and business. Enforcing Anti-trust legislation and dealing with Citizens United. Corporations don't have free speech. Free speech and other rights like these are limited to living, breathing humans. Corporations operate by charters, granted by society to operate in a limited fashion, for the betterment of society. If that's not happening, corporations don't have a right to exist.

by tomlue 9mo ago

minimaxir 9mo ago

That is not what is happening here. There is no human the loop, it's just automated spam.

tomlue 9mo ago
good point. My response was to the comment not the OP

nkrisc 9mo ago

Well your examples are things that were possible before LLMs.

tomlue 9mo ago
This is disingenuous

simonask 9mo ago

I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing. You can achieve these things, but this is a way to not do the work, by copying from people who did do the work, giving them zero credit. (As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.)

cm2012 9mo ago
Do you feel the same about spellcheck?
- Capricorn2481 9mo ago
  Does Spellcheck take a full sentence and spit out paragraphs of stuff I didn't write? I mean how do you write this seriously?
  - cm2012 9mo ago
    But in the end a human takes the finished work and says yes, this matches what I intended to communicate. That is what is important.
    - llmslave2 9mo ago
      That's neither what happens nor what is important.
tomlue 9mo ago
> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing. Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI. > As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level. This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people. I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.

amvrrysmrthaker 9mo ago

What beautiful things? It just comes across as immoral and lazy to me. How beautiful.

WD-42 9mo ago

I’d much rather read a letter from you full of errors than some smooth average-of-all-writers prose. To be human is to struggle. I see no reason to read anything from anyone if they didn’t actually write it.

tomlue 9mo ago
If I spend hours writing and rewriting a paragraph into something I love while using AI to iterate, did I write that paragraph? edit: Also, I think maybe you don't appreciate the people who struggle to write well. They are not proud of the mistakes in their writing.
- kentm 9mo ago
  > did I write that paragraph? No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.
  - jama211 9mo ago
    What about when someone who can barely type (like stephen hawking used to, 3 minutes per sentence using his cheek) uses autocomplete to reduce the unbelievable effort required to type out sentences? That person could pick the auto completed sentence that is closest to what they’re trying to communicate, and such a thing can be a life saver.
    - skydhash 9mo ago
      You may as well ask for a person that can walk to be able to compete in a marathon using a car. I’m all for using technology for accessibility. But this kind of whataboutism is pure nonsense.
      - 9mo ago

Capricorn2481 9mo ago

> These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you. There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.

tomlue 9mo ago
This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers. You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before. Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now. If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today. This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.
- qnleigh 9mo ago
  > If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding. (Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)
  - tomlue 9mo ago
    Yeah it can be a risk or a benefit for sure. I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort. My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback. Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.

qnleigh 9mo ago

> People are capable of seeing which is which. I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment: > When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous. > I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?

trinsic2 9mo ago

I hear you. and I think AI has some good uses esp. assisting with challenges like you mentioned. I think whats happening is that these companies are developing this stuff without transparency on how its being used, there is zero accountability, and they are forcing some of these tech into our lives with out giving us a choice. So Im sorry but much of it is being abused and the parts of it being abused needs to stop.

tomlue 9mo ago
I agree about the abuse, and the OP is probably a good example of that. Do you have any ideas on how to curtail abuse? Ideas I often hear usually assume it is easy to discern AI content from human, which is wrong, especially at scale. Either that, or they involve some form of extreme censorship. Microtransactions might work by making it expensive run bots while costing human users very little. I'm not sure this is practical either though, and has plenty of downsides as well.
- trinsic2 9mo ago
  I don't see this changing without a complete shift in our priorities on the level of politics and business. Enforcing Anti-trust legislation and dealing with Citizens United. Corporations don't have free speech. Free speech and other rights like these are limited to living, breathing humans. Corporations operate by charters, granted by society to operate in a limited fashion, for the betterment of society. If that's not happening, corporations don't have a right to exist.