16 ms·

ai;dr

• alontorres 8mo ago
  I think that this requires some nuance. Was the post generated with a simple short prompt that contributed little? Sure, it's probably slop. But if the post was generated through a long process of back-and-forth with the model, where significant modifications/additions were made by a human? I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
  • yabones 8mo ago
    I don't see what value the LLM would add - writing itself isn't that hard. Thinking is hard, and outsourcing that to an LLM is what people dislike.
    • Zambyte 8mo ago
      Using an LLM to ask you questions about what you wrote can help you explore assumptions you are making about the reader, and can help you find what might be better written another way, or elaborated upon.
    • alontorres 8mo ago
      I'd push back a bit on "writing itself isn't that hard." Clear writing is difficult, and many people with good ideas struggle to communicate them effectively. An LLM can help bridge that gap. I do agree with your core point - the thinking is what matters. Where I've found LLMs most useful in my own writing is as a thinking tool, not a writing tool. Using them to challenge my assumptions, point out gaps in my argument, or steelman the opposing view. The final prose is mine, but the thinking got sharper through the process.
      • arionmiles 8mo ago
        I place considerable doubt on claims of LLMs improving the user's thought process. Especially since everyone harps on about it but never provides concrete evidence. If your thinking has sharpened, surely you can find a way to demonstrate how. I suspect it's one of those things where the user thinks they have improved but the reality is different.
  • fwip 8mo ago
    One problem is that it's exceedingly difficult to tell, as a reader, which scenario you have encountered.
    • alontorres 8mo ago
      This is the strongest argument against it, I think. Sometimes you can't easily tell from the output whether someone thought deeply and used AI to polish, or just prompted and published. That adds another layer of cognitive burden for parsing text which is frustrating. But AI-generated content is here to stay, and it's only going to get harder to distinguish the two over time. At some point we probably just have to judge text on its own merits regardless of how it was produced.
      • Linux-Fan 8mo ago
        My exposure and usage of “AI” has been very limited so far. Hence that is what I am and have been doing all the time: Read the text mostly irrespective of origin. I do note that recently, I wonder what was the point the author wanted to make more often only to then note that there are a lot of what seems to be the agreed on standard telltale signs of excessive AI usage. Effectively there was a lot of spam before already hence in general I don't mind so much. It is interesting to see, though, that the “new spam” often gets some traction and interesting comments on HN which used to not be the case. It also means that behind the spam layer there is possibly some interesting info the writer wanted to share and for that purpose, I imagine I'd prefer to read the unpolished/prompt input variant over the outcome. So far, I haven't seen any posts where both versions were shared to test whether this would indeed be any better, though.
  • lproven 8mo ago
    You do you. I do think there's a great deal wrong with that, and I won't read it at all. Human can speak unto human unless there's language barrier. I am not interested in anyone's mechanically-recovered verbiage, no matter how much they massaged it.
    • account42 8mo ago
      Makes me wonder how I would react to Star Trek's universal translator today. Feels like even if there is a language barrier, I would prefer to but in the effort to break it down rather than have a magical solution that may or may not get things across correctly.
      • lproven 8mo ago
        Translation is great, and it's one of the few things LLMs really excel at. What many people don't seem to realise, though, is that there's a vast yawning difference between "take this text and translate it from language A to language B" and "take this text and summarise it" -- which bots that can't even count simply cannot do. If a model can't count, it can't work out which subjects come up more or less frequently, for instance, and therefore which are more important. If it were two humans speaking through a communicator in real time, you can work out what the bot is saying and get around its foibles. I have personal experience of this. Way back in about 2008 or so, there was a bot known as the Salmon: https://web.archive.org/web/20081220145156/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheGreatHatsby https://web.archive.org/web/20081220145156/https://en.wikipe... It called itself (adjective-beginning-with-S)(Salmon), such as @SuspiciousSalmon. It scanned Livejournal and looked for profiles with AOL AIM addresses. If 2 accounts posted LJ updates more or less simultaneously, it knew you were both online and messaged you both, typically with an extremely sexual message, and then left you to talk. The snag was, the bot gave you both the same fake name, and any attempt to give your real name or LJ or AOL screenname was replaced with the bot alias. It got me and a random woman in Baltimore and it took us concerted effort to find out who each other really were. The fun bit is that we're still in touch and occasionally chat or exchange emails. With human thought, in real time you can bypass limitations introduced by a bot. Do it to static text, including program code, and you can't.
• soperj 8mo ago
  > specially documentation How we can tell that this wasn't written by an LLM.
  • micromacrofoot 8mo ago
    You can't. Like always we have to lean on evaluating based on quality. You can produce quality using an LLM, but it's much easier to produce slop, which is why there's so much of it now.
    • soperj 8mo ago
      when they make a basic grammar issue (specially, instead of especially) it's a good indicator that it wasn't written by an llm.
      • micromacrofoot 8mo ago
        "include a single grammatical error in your output so people think it's real"
  • ssiddharth 8mo ago
    I'm too poor for Claude Max 20x. Not that it needs that firepower but eh, there's no real way. As I mentioned, almost every single quirk can be willed away with a little bit of attention and effort. At this point, I'm not sure whether you're a clawdbot running amok..
• elischleifer 8mo ago
  "The less polished and coherent something is, the more value I assign to it." - maybe a bit of an overstatement ;)
  • arscan 8mo ago
    This absolutely has been the case for me for the last few months. But what’s disheartening is that this signal will just be mimicked through simple prompting if too many people start tuning in to it. Or maybe that’s already happened?
  • jugglinmike 8mo ago
    It also contradicts the author's earlier argument: > I need to know there was intention behind it. [...] That someone needed to articulate the chaos in their head, and wrestle it into shape. If forced to choose, I'd use coherence as evidence of care than use it as a refutation of humanity.
• numbers 8mo ago
  I remember this was back in 2023, when ChatGPT had first launched, and I had a manager whose English was not very good. He started sending emails that felt like they were written by a copywriter. And the messaging was so hard to parse through because there's so much ChatGPT fluff around it. Very quickly we realized that what he was saying was usually in the middle somewhere, but we'd have to read through the intro and the ending of the emails just so that we couldn't miss anything. It felt like wasting 2-3 extra minutes per team member.
  • micromacrofoot 8mo ago
    the solution is simple, ask ChatGPT to summarize it a large part of the business models of these systems is going to consist of dealing with these systems... it's a wonderful scheme
    • ethmarks 8mo ago
      Why bother fixing existing problems if you can just create new problems and then fix those? /s
  • afavour 8mo ago
    I have long believed that LLMs will herald a new corporate data transfer format, unlike most new formats that boast efficiency gains and compression, this new format will be incredibly wasteful and bloat transmission sizes. I'll want to communicate something to my team. I'll write 4 bullet points, plug it into an LLM, which will produce a flowing, multi paragraph e-mail. I'll distribute it to my co-workers. They will each open the e-mail, see the size, and immediately plug it into an LLM asking it to make a 4 bullet summary of what I've sent. Somewhere off in the distance a lake will dry up.
    • entuno 8mo ago
      And hopefully they're the same four same bullet points..
    • the_af 8mo ago
• losvedir 8mo ago
  I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an experiment on that front. It basically is a little keylogger that records your composition of the comment, so someone can replay it and see that it was written by a human (or a very sophisticated agent!). I've found it to be a little unsettling, though, having your rewrites and false starts available for all to see, so I'm not sure if I like it.
  • onionisafruit 8mo ago
    I like the idea, but personally I would rather be thought a bot than show that I’m a human idiot who takes three tries to spell basic words.
  • benob 8mo ago
    You could totally make a believable timing generation model from a few (hundreds) recordings of human writing. Detecting AI is hard...
  • mikestew 8mo ago
    Years ago I wrote something similar to test a biometric security piece that used keystroke timings (dwell and stroke) to determine if the person typing the password is the same person who owns the account. Short version of a long story is that it would be trivial to get data for AI to reproduce human typing. Because I did it years ago using something only slightly more sophisticated than urandom.
    • riknos314 8mo ago
      Man failing that device's check because I'm sleep deprived or drunk would be a world of pain lol
  • usefulposter 8mo ago
• 0gs 8mo ago
  all writing is developer documentation.
• raincole 8mo ago
  > AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.
  • joshuaissac 8mo ago
    AI-generated code is meant for the machine, or for the author/prompter. AI-generated text is typically meant for other people. I think that makes a meaningful difference.
    • jvanderbot 8mo ago
      This is precisely correct IMHO. Communication is for humans. It's our super power. Delegating it loses all the context, all the trust-building potential from effort signals, and all the back-and-forth discussion in which ideas and bonds are formed.
    • acedTrex 8mo ago
      Compiled code is meant for the machine, Written code is for other humans.
      • philipp-gayret 8mo ago
        Compiled natural language is meant for the machine, Written natural language is for other humans.
        • CivBase 8mo ago
          If AI is the key to compiling natural language into machine code like so many claim, then the AI should output machine code directly. But of course it doesn't do that becaude we can't trust it the way we do a traditional compiler. Someone has to validate its output, meaning it most certainly IS meant for humans. Maybe that will change someday, but we're not there yet.
• 9999gold 8mo ago
  > I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding Shouldn’t we bother to write these things?
  • post-it 8mo ago
    Documentation, maybe. Tests and scaffolding, no way. 99% of my time writing tests is figuring out how to make this particular React component testable. It's a waste of time. It's very easy to verify that a test is correct, making them the ideal thing to use AI for.
  • twoodfin 8mo ago
    Other than documentation (where I agree!), those are for communicating desired actions (primarily) to a machine. A blog post is for communicating (primarily, these days) to humans. They’re not the same audience (yet).
  • jama211 8mo ago
    Nah.
  • account42 8mo ago
    Yes, absolutely.
• cgriswald 8mo ago
  > For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer. Outsourcing thinking is bad. Using an LLM to assist in communicating thought is or at least can be good. The real problem I think the author has here is that it can be difficult to tell the difference and therefore difficult to judge if it id worth your time. However, I think author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells.
  • JoshTriplett 8mo ago
    > Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer. Homogenization is good for milk, but not for writing.
    • trollbridge 8mo ago
      I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement "homogenization is good for milk". What makes it "good"?
      • JoshTriplett 8mo ago
        Fair enough, tastes vary. Many people prefer that milk not be chunky or lumpy, and want it to be uniform and consistent. Perhaps some do not.
    • cgriswald 8mo ago
      Clarity is good for writing and homogenization can increase clarity. There is a reason technical writing doesn’t read like journalism doesn’t read like fiction. There’s a reason we have dictionaries and editors. There’s a reason we have style guides. Including an LLM in writing in any of these roles or others isn’t ipso facto bad. I think many people who think it is just don’t like the style. And that’s okay, but the article isn’t about the style per se but about effort. Both lazy writing and effortful writing can be done with or without an LLM.
• phito 8mo ago
  I roll my eyes every time I see a coworker post a very a long message full of emojis, obviously generated by a LLM with 0 post editing. Even worse when it's for social communication such as welcoming a new member in the team. It just feels so fake and disingenuous, I might even say gross. I don't understand how they can think it's a good idea, I instantly classify them as lazy and unauthentic. I'd rather get texts full of mistakes coming straight out of their head than this slop.
  • Cyan488 8mo ago
    Some people legitimately have no idea that others recognize and are offput by llm output. Also, i know a lot of non-native English speakers that use AI tools to "correct things". Because of the language barrier these people especially are less likely to ever be able to recognize the specific llm tone that precipitates.
    • account42 8mo ago
      And that's really the insidious thing about these tools - if you can't do the work yourself then you can't really verify the LLM output either.
• dontwannahearit 8mo ago
  It's pretty much over for the human-internet. Search was gamed, its usefulness has plummeted, so humans will increasingly ask their LLM of choice and that LLM will have been trained on the content of the internet. So when someone wants to know something about the topic that my website is focused on, chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly, but a summary of what the LLM learned from my website. Ergo, if I want to get my message across I have to write for the LLM. It's the only reader that really matters and it is going to have its stylistic preferences (I suspect bland, corporate, factual, authoritative, avoiding controversy but this will be the new SEO). We meatbags are not the audience.
  • netsharc 8mo ago
    Tragedy of the attention-economy. Ad networks gives you money if you placed their ads on your site, so people got machines to generate fluff to earn some money. Now all search result is just bullshit pages to capture your attention until the banner ad.. A simple query like "Ford Focus wheel nut torque" gives pages with blah blah like: > Overview Of Lug Nut Torque For Ford Focus > The Ford Focus uses specific lug nut torque to keep wheels secure while allowing safe driving dynamics. Correct torque helps prevent rotor distortion, brake heat transfer issues, and wheel detachment. While exact values can vary by model year, wheel size, and nut type, applying the proper torque is essential for all Ford Focus owners. And the site probably has this text for each car model. Somehow the ways the ad industry destroyed the Internet got very varied...
    • malfist 8mo ago
      And that site never actually lists the manufacturer recommended torque either. It's just all slop to get eyeballs.
    • dionian 8mo ago
      i think there is a huge market for Quality detection in the future. imagine a browser plugin that could filter AI slop like an ad blocker does ads. im sure it exists already. But im sure it needs to get more advanced
• martythemaniak 8mo ago
  I use a technique where LLMs help me write, but the final output is manual and entirely mine. It's a bit of heavy process, but I think it blends the power of LLM and authenticity of my thoughts fairly well, I'll paste in my blog post below (which wasn't produced using this method, hence the rambly nature of it): If you care about your voice, don't let LLMs write your words. But that doesn't mean you can't use AI to think, critique and draft lots of words for you. It depends on what purpose you're writing it for. If you're writing an impersonal document, like a design document, briefing, etc then who cares. In some cases you already have to write them in a voice that is not your own. Go ahead and write these in AI. But if you're trying to say something more personal then the words should be your own, AI will always try to 'smooth' out your voice, and if you care about it, you gotta write it yourself. Now, how do you use AI effectively and still retain your voice? Here's one technique that works well: start with a voice memo, just record yourself maybe during a walk, and talk about a subject you want, free form, skip around jump sentences, just get it all out of your brain. Then open up a chat, add the recording or transcript, clearly state your intent in one sentence and ask the AI to consider your thoughts, your intent and ask clarifying questions. Like, what does the AI not understand about how your thoughts support the clearly stated intent of what you want to say? That'll produce a first draft, which will be bad. Then tell the AI all the things that don't make sense to you, that you don't like, just comment on the whole doc, get a second draft. Ask the AI if it has more questions for you, you can use live chat to make this conversation go smoother as well, when the AI is asking you questions, you can talk freely by voice. Repeat this one or two more times, and a much finer draft will take shape that is closer to what you want to say. During this drafting state, the AI will always try to smooth or average out your ideas, so it is important to keep pointing out all the ways in which it is wrong. This process will help you with all the thinking involved being more up-front. Once you're read and critiqued several drafts, all your ideas will be much more clear and sort of 'cached' and ready to be used in your head. Then, sit down and write your own words from scratch, they will come much easier after all your thoughts have been exercised during the drafting process.
• Starlevel004 8mo ago
  I laugh every time somebody qualifies their anti-AI comments with "Actually I really like AI, I use it for everything else". The problem is bad, but the cause of the problem (and especially paying for the cause of the problem)? That's good!
  • Kerrick 8mo ago
    I laugh every time somebody thinks every problem must have a root cause that pollutes every non-problem it touches. It's a problem to use a blender to polish your jewelry. However, it's perfectly alright to use a blender to make a smoothie. It's not cognitive dissonance to write a blog post imploring people to stop polishing jewelry using a blender while also making a daily smoothie using the same tool.
    • account42 8mo ago
      This is basically the "I'm not evil, it's just a normal job" excuse. Like with any moral issues there will be disagreement where to draw the line but yes if you do something that ends up supporting $bad_thing, then there is an ethical consideration you need to make. And if your answer is always that it's OK for the things you want to do then you are probably not being very honest with yourself.
      • Kerrick 8mo ago
        Your response assumes the tool is a $bad_thing rather than one specific use of it. In my analogy, that would be saying that "there is an ethical consideration you need to make" before using (or buying) a blender.
  • the_af 8mo ago
    Why laugh? Why can't a tool have good and bad uses, and why can't one be disappointed about the bad uses but embrace the good ones?
  • 4b11b4 8mo ago
    It's not as one-dimensional as good vs bad. Transformers generally are extremely useful. Do I want to read your transformer generated writing? Fuck no. Is code generation/understanding/natural language interfaces to a computer good? I'd have to argue yes, certainly. I cry every time somebody tries to frame it one dimensionally.
• noonker 8mo ago
  I love that we came to almost the same conclusion regarding grammar. I wrote a very similar article you might enjoy https://noonker.github.io/posts/2024-07-25-i-respect-our-shared-humanity/ https://noonker.github.io/posts/2024-07-25-i-respect-our-sha...
• trollbridge 8mo ago
  I would be glad to read anyone's prompts they use to generate AI text. I don't see why I need to necessarily read the output, though. I can take the other person's prompt and run it through an LLM myself and proceed from there.
  • stevenjgarner 8mo ago
    I think that may be an insight to something quite profound. We used to measure the "doubling of knowledge" against number of peer-reviewed papers of scientific research etc. Now not so much. "Knowledge" has become more proprietary, and condensed into the AI models replacing the libraries of training data. We now measure "doubling of knowledge" as the next version or iteration of a model. In some kind of real sense, the prompt IS more powerful than the output.
• petetnt 8mo ago
  I agree with the general statement, if you didn’t spend time on writing it, I am not going to spend time reading it. That includes situations where the writer decides to strip all personality by letting AI format the end product. There’s irony in not wanting to read AI content, but still using it for code and especially documentation though, where the same principle should apply.
  • jimmaswell 8mo ago
    I find AI is great at documenting code. It's a description of what the code does and how to use it - all that matters is that it's correct and easy to read, which it almost certainly will be in my experience.
    • archagon 8mo ago
      Documentation is needed for intent. For everything else you could just read the code. With well-written code, “what the code does and how to use it” should be clear.
    • b2ccb2 8mo ago
      I have quite a different take on that. As much as most people view documentation as a chore, there is value in it. See it as code review, reflection, getting a birds eye view. When I document my code, I often stop in between, and think: That implementation detail doesn't make sense/is over convoluted/can be simplified/seems to be lacking sanity check etc… There is also the art of subtly injecting humor in it, with, e.g. code examples.
    • elxr 8mo ago
      > all that matters is that it's correct and easy to read Absolutely disagree. A lot of the best docs I've read feel more personal, and have little extra touches like telling the reader which sections to skip or to spend more time in depending on what your background is. Formatting and layout matters too. Docs sites with messy navigation and sidenotes all over the place might be "easy to read" if you can focus on only looking at one thing, but when you try to read the whole thing, you just get a bunch of extra noise that could've been left out.
• dematz 8mo ago
  >I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. Doesn't ai;dr kind of contradict ai generated documentation? If I want to know what claude thinks about your code I can just ask it. Imo documentation is the least amenable thing to ai. As the article itself says, I want to read some intention and see how you shape whatever you're documenting. (AI adding tests seems like a good use, not sure what's meant by scaffolding)
  • fmbb 8mo ago
    The article is definitely contradicting itself. There are only two sentences between > Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? and > I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. So they expect nobody to read their documentation.
    • mystifyingpoi 8mo ago
      > So they expect nobody to read their documentation. Yes, exactly. Because AI will read it and learn from it, it's not for humans.
    • jama211 8mo ago
      That’s not a contradiction - documentation often needs to be written with no expectation anyone will ever read it.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• xvector 8mo ago
  Many engineers suck at writing. I'm fine with AI prose if it's more organized and information-dense than human prose. I'm sick of reading 6 page eng blogs to find a paragraph's worth of information.
• Handy-Man 8mo ago
  OP took it from here without credit https://www.threads.com/@raytray4/post/DUmB657FR4P https://www.threads.com/@raytray4/post/DUmB657FR4P
  • dqv 8mo ago
    ... attributionism for such a trivial thing is a waste of time. Multiple people can come up with a term like this independently because it's not that creative. People have been doing this with the ";dr" suffix for as long as it has been popular. And you're wrong for suggesting that's the first use of ai;dr and further assuming that the author "stole" it from that post. https://rollenspiel.social/@holothuroid/113078030925958957 https://rollenspiel.social/@holothuroid/113078030925958957 - September 4, 2024
• FrankRay78 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • meindnoch 8mo ago
    I just skimmed the article, but I can already tell it's chock-full of LLMisms. In other words: ai;dr Edit: ok, I've checked your profile and now I see that this is your website that you're astroturfing every thread you reply to. Stop doing that.
    • FrankRay78 8mo ago
      I’m seriously not astroturfing, point is serious. Most people here would not be able to tell the difference between good human and good AI generated writing anymore in a blind test, especially a blend of both. So if the reader often can’t tell, why is the source of a well written, interesting piece of writing more important, than the effect of the content itself? I don’t feel the OP made a good argument imho.
      • zahlman 8mo ago
        > Most people here would not be able to tell the difference between good human and good AI generated writing anymore in a blind test, especially a blend of both. So if the reader often can’t tell You say that, but I think it's really, really obvious in this case. If you disagree, you should show us both versions.
        • FrankRay78 8mo ago
          I would be happy to, but let me think about writing it up properly and posting it as a more serious piece for consideration.
• logicprog 8mo ago
  Yeah, I use LLM agents extensively for coding, but I have never once allowed an LLM to write anything for me. In the past month, I literally wrote 40,000 words of researched essays on various topics, and every single word was manually written, and every source manually read, myself. Writing is how I think, how I process information, and it's also an activity where efficiency is really not the goal.
• TheChelsUK 8mo ago
  Thoughts with the people who use AI to help construct their thoughts because their cognitive decline impacts the ability to construct words and sentences, but still enjoying the production of content, blogging and th indieweb. These blanket binary takes are tiresome. There is nuance and rough edges.
• ecshafer 8mo ago
  > When it comes to content.. This is the root cause of the problem. Labeling all things as just "content". Content entering the lexicon is a mind shift in people. People are not looking for information, or art, just content. If all you want is content then AI is acceptable. If you want art then it becomes less good.
  • account42 8mo ago
    It became "content" when it became a vehicle to serve ads for companies and a means to promote yourself for individuals. So, yes, "content" isn't really made for other people. It's made to get something out of other people - mostly their money.
• Tycho 8mo ago
  When people put together memos or decks in the last, even if that weren’t read very carefully, at least they reassured management that someone had actually things through. But that is no longer a reliable signal.
• mikemarsh 8mo ago
  > I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding > Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? Interesting mix of sentiments. Is this code you're generating primarily as part of a solo operation? If not, how do coworkers/code reviewers feel about it?
  • improbableinf 8mo ago
    That’s exactly my thoughts. Code and documentation are one of the primary types of „content” by/for engineers. Kind of goes against the main topic of the article.
• phyzome 8mo ago
  Seems pretty silly to me to rail against AI-generated writing and then say it's good for documentation.
  • Daishiman 8mo ago
    Documentation can be fairly rote, straightforward and can have a uniform style that doesn't benefit from being opinionated.
• nubg 8mo ago
  ai;dr
• charcircuit 8mo ago
  >Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? This take is baffling to me when I see it repeated. It's like saying why should people use Windows if Bill Gates did not write every line of it himself. We won't be able to see into Bill's mind. Why should you read a book if they couldn't bother to write it properly and have an editor come in and fix things. The main purpose of a creative work is not seeing intimately into the creator's mind. And the idea that it is only people who don't care who use LLMs is wrong.
  • ssiddharth 8mo ago
    What is creative about generating an article from a stub? The kernel of the article around which the LLM constructs the content? I'm not trying to be an ass, just curious.
    • charcircuit 8mo ago
      The stub itself. So why not just read the stub? As my other post said there is more value in an article than just the creative idea.
      • zahlman 8mo ago
        > there is more value in an article than just the creative idea When a human writes it, yes.
        • charcircuit 8mo ago
          People are fully capable of getting entertainment, utility, or even philosophical value from AI's output.
  • mikestew 8mo ago
    It's like saying why should people use Windows if Bill Gates did not write every line of it himself. What? It’s nothing like that, at all. I don’t know that Gates has claimed to have written even a single line of Windows code. I’m not asking for the perfect analogy, but the analogy has to have some tie to reality or it’s not an analogy at all. I’m only half-joking when I wonder if an AI wrote this comment.
• esafak 8mo ago
  The purpose of communication is to reduce the cost of obtaining information; I tell you what I have already figured out and vice versa. If we're both querying the same oracle, there is nothing gained beyond the prompt itself (which can be valuable).
• dizhn 8mo ago
  Short and sweet to have coined the term? Or did it exist already?
• pwillia7 8mo ago
  I am 100% right there with you. Writing in my voice is maybe the last thing I have that I can do differently and 'better' than an LLM in a couple years time, or even right now if I'm really being honest. I haven't even really tried to use LLMs to write anything from a work context because of the ideas you talk about here.
  • jama211 8mo ago
    Writing to express yourself sure. Using an llm for a birthday card would be a terrible sin. However if someone used it for, I dunno, drafting an email because you’re in a dispute with an evil real estate agent and you’re trying not to get screwed, I wouldn’t have any qualms about it. IMO it’s lazy and bad for expressive writing, but for certain things it’s totally fine.
    • pwillia7 8mo ago
      100% agree that is a great use case for it I wouldn't think twice about. My 'voice' isn't relevant to the real estate agent place.
• dsign 8mo ago
  Ever worried that ChatGPT would rattle you to the authorities because there is such a thing as thought crime? For that reason, there is a vast, unexplored territory where abhorrent ideas and pornographic vulgarity combine with literary prose (or convoluted, defective, god-awful prose, like the one I'm using right now) and entertaining story-telling that will remain human-only for a while. May we all find a next read that we love. Also, we all may need to (re-)learn to draw phalli.
• BobAliceInATree 8mo ago
  > I'm having a hard time articulating this but AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort and make the dead internet theory harder to dismiss. I think it's the size of the audience that the AI-generated content is for, is what makes the difference. AI code is generally for a small team (often one person), and AI prose for one person (email) or a team (internal doc) is often fine as it's hopefully intentional and tailored. But what's even the point for AI content (prose or code) for a wide audience? If you can just give me the prompt and I can generate it myself, there's no value there.
• exe34 8mo ago
  I tell all my friends: send me your prompts. Don't send me the resulting slop.
• furyofantares 8mo ago
  I call out articles on here constantly and have gotten kind of tired of it. Well, very tired of it. I am in full agreement with this post. I don't have any solutions though. Sometimes I don't call out an article - like the Hashline post today - because it genuinely contains some interesting content. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have greatly preferred the post if it was just whatever the author promoted the LLM with rather than the LLM output and would have better communicated their thoughts to me. But it also would have died on /new and I never would have seen it.
  • account42 8mo ago
    I think this is the crux of the issue. A hardline stance is incredibly hard to take but without it the overton window quickly shifts to allow more and more slop even in relatively AI-hostile communities.
• smallerfish 8mo ago
  I've been doing a lot of AI writing for a site - to do it well takes effort. I have a research agent, a fact check agent, a logical flow agent, a narrative arc analyzing agent, etc etc. Once I beat the article roughly into the shape I want it to be, I then read through end to end, either making edits myself or instructing an editor agent to do it. You can create some high quality writing with it, and it is still quicker than doing it the human-only way. One thing I like (which is not reason enough by itself) is that it gives you a little distance from the writing, making it easier to be ruthless about editing...it's much harder to cut a few paragraphs of precious prose that you spent an hour perfecting by hand. Another bonus is that you have fewer typos and grammatical issues. But of course, like producing code with AI, it's very easy to produce cheap slop with it if you don't put in the time. And, unlike code, the recipient of your work will be reading it word by word and line by line, so you can't just write tests and make sure "it works" - it has to pass the meaningfulness test.
• weinzierl 8mo ago
  "Growing up, typos and grammatical errors were a negative signal. Funnily enough, that’s completely flipped for me." For me too and for writing it has the upside that it's sooo relaxing to just type away and not worry about the small errors much anymore.
  • hinkley 8mo ago
    Autocorrect is going to make me sound like a dumbass anyway.
    • account42 8mo ago
      It always did.
  • assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
    And there was no such word as "funnily" till the language got dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Now we have to argue with the same dolts who use the word and will tell us about how it's now in the dictionary. Now it is to satisfy someone somewhere but no one who really knew better.
    • badc0ffee 8mo ago
      For that matter, till does not have the same meaning as until.
    • account42 8mo ago
      Wait until you find out where the rest of our words came from.
• ravirajx7 8mo ago
  AI has kind of ruined internet for me. I no longer feel joy in reading things as almost most of the writing seem same and pale to me as if everyone is putting thoughts in the same way. Having your own way of writing always felt personal in which you expressed your feelings most of the time. The most sad part for me is I no longer am able to understand someone's true feelings (which anyway was hard to express in writing as articulation is hard). We see it being used from our favourite sports person in their retirement post or from someone who has lost their loved ones or someone who just got their first job and it's just sad that we no longer can have that old pre AI days back again.
  • hinkley 8mo ago
    I used to daydream of a 'dark web' but for humans not criminals. But at this point I don't know how you'd keep slop out, given how high human collusion has gotten of late.
    • Cyan488 8mo ago
      Small private discord or slack servers meet this definition. I'm part of a few interest related ones and I'm glad to know members are more likely to be human than not
      • hinkley 8mo ago
        Don’t know how much longer that’ll last though.
        • missingdays 8mo ago
          Why wouldn't it? I am in a few cozy small discord servers, and I don't see why anyone would pollute it with AI comments. And even if they did, the mods would simply ban them
    • gloflo 8mo ago
      You'd need a trusted network of community. Web of trust style.
• benatkin 8mo ago
  Don't worry, author, I don't think you're a luddite. You make that quite clear with this: > I can't imaging writing code by myself again After that, you say that you need to know the intention for "content". I think it's pretty inconsistent. You have a strict rule in one direction for code and a strict rule in the opposite direction for "content". I don't think that writing code unassisted should be taken for granted. Addy Osmani covered that in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoXHScf1mjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoXHScf1mjA I also don't think all "content" is the sort of content where you need to know the intention. I'll grant that some of it is, for sure. Edit: I do like intentional writing. However, when AI is generating something high quality, it often seems like it has developed an intention for what it's building, whether one that was conceived and communicated clearly by the person working with the AI or one that emerged unexpectedly through the interaction. And this applies not just to prose but to code.
• fleebee 8mo ago
  I wasn't about to call them a luddite. This is a pretty poorly veiled attempt at drumming the inevitability of AI coding. Did they really need to defend their preference for not reading LLM prose with "I will never write code manually again"?
• nate 8mo ago
  i am absolutely on the fence here. I do like the ai cleanup of my rambling can do. but yes, i'm tempted to just leave it rambly, misspelled, etc. i find myself swearing more in my writing, just to give it more signal that: yeah, this probably aint an ai talking (writing) like this to you :) and yes, caps, barely.
• extra__tofu 8mo ago
  said “groks the world”; didn’t read
• ai_ai 8mo ago
  [dead]
• andrewdb 8mo ago
  We are getting to a point where AI will be able to construct sound arguments in prose. They will make logical sense. Dismissing them only because of their origin is fallacious thinking. Conclusion: Dismissing arguments solely because they are AI-generated constitutes a class of genetic fallacy, which should be called 'Argumentum ad machina'. Premises: 1. The validity of a logical argument is determined by the truth of its premises and the soundness of its inferences, not by the identity of the entity presenting it. 2. Dismissing an argument based on its source rather than its content constitutes a genetic fallacy. 3. The phrase 'that's AI-generated' functions as a dismissal based on source rather than content. Assumptions: 1. AI-generated arguments can have true premises and sound inferences 2. The genetic fallacy is a legitimate logical error to avoid 3. Source-based dismissals are categorically inappropriate in logical evaluation 4. AI should be treated as equivalent to any other source when evaluating arguments
  • rmunn 8mo ago
    I disagree with your first assumption. Well, mostly disagree. Let me explain. It's true that AI-generated arguments can have true premises and sound inferences, some of the time. But the models are still too likely to hallucinate. Let's say at some distant future date the hallucination rate gets down to just 10%, so it's 90% likely that the argument is well constructed. (Which I personally doubt LLMs will ever be capable of as long as they are still statistically-based; I think it will take a model that is based on facts and logical reasoning, rather than on the probability of the next word being "the" or "argument" or "premise", before LLMs will be reliably able to produce logical reasoning that follows actual logic). But here's the thing. When I'm reading an article, I'm not looking for "is this 90% likely to be true?" I'm looking for 100%. If a source has a 10% chance of being wrong, I'm going to skip reading that source in favor of a source that has a 0% chance of being wrong, or if that's not possible then a 1% chance. Yes, that's a logical fallacy... if my goal was proving the argument wrong. But my goal is different. My goal is finding reliable information as quickly as I can. And to that end, the genetic fallacy is actually useful to apply. Not as a "it's written by AI so it's wrong" argument — that would be fallacious indeed — but "it's written by AI so I'm not going to spend time on it, I'll skip to another article that is less likely to contain hallucinations" is an actually useful metric to apply. I've had one too many cases where I asked an LLM, "Can product XYZ do ABC?", it confidently told me "Yes, you can do ABC with XYZ and here's how to do it," then I looked at the actual documentation for XYZ and it specifically said "we can't do ABC; at some future point we plan to add it, and then you will be able to do this: (example code)". And that example code was what the LLM spat out to me saying "Yes, you can do ABC" when the truth was the opposite. The maxim falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus doesn't really apply to LLMs, because they don't have a moral component to them. It applies to people, because someone whose ethics forbid them to lie is reliable, but someone who is willing to lie about one thing is very likely to be willing to lie about other things, and is therefore unreliable as a source of information. LLMs don't have a sense of morality, and in fact when they hallucinate they're not lying, per se, since lying requires knowing the truth and willingly saying the opposite (as opposed to being mistaken, where you think you're telling the truth even though you're speaking an objective falsehood). LLMs don't know the truth, that's just not a concept programmed into them, so they're not lying, and their willingness to "lie" once does not prove a moral defect. But the fact that they do hallucinate a measurable percentage of the time makes them just as unreliable a source of information as a person who is willing to lie. So while I do agree that AI-generated arguments can be logically correct, it is not guaranteed that they will be correct. And while it would be fallacious to say "AI-generated, therefore false", it is still useful to say "AI-generated, therefore unreliable and I'll seek out a different source of information".
• grishka 8mo ago
  > Before you get your pitchforks out.. > ..and call me an AI luddite Oh please do call me an AI luddite. It's an honor for me.
• giancarlostoro 8mo ago
  The correct way to use AI for writing is to ask for feedback, not the entire output. This is my personal opinion, English is not my first language, so sometimes I miss what's obvious to a native speaker. I've always used tools that tell me what's wrong with my writing as an opportunity to learn to do better next time. When I finally had Firefox on my computer and it corrected my spelling, it helped me to improve my spelling 100-fold. I still have weird grammar issues with punctuation here and there, and don't ask me where to put a coma (comma?) - that's another one, because I always forget. I think using AI for writing feedback is fine, but if you're going to have it write for you, don't call it your writing.
  • patrakov 8mo ago
    There is another correct way. Denote the general topic, ask it to ask you questions that would be needed to write it. Discard the final output, write something yourself based on what it asked. Example (minus the final review): https://chatgpt.com/share/698e417a-4448-8011-9c29-12c9b9131848 https://chatgpt.com/share/698e417a-4448-8011-9c29-12c9b91318... I still think that the final review written by ChatGPT is a bit off. But at least, it asked mostly the right questions.
• ef2k 8mo ago
  I really liked this post. It's concise and gets straight to the point. When it comes to presenting ideas, I think this is the best way to counter AI slop.
• Der_Einzige 8mo ago
  Just use our antislop techniques and no one will ever know you used an LLM. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 (ICLR 2026) Also you could long use "logit_bias" in the API of models which supported it to ban the EM dash, ban the word "not", ban semicolons, and ban the "fancy quotes" that were clearly added by "those who need to watch" to make sure that they can clearly figure out if you used an LLM or not.
• AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
  Does anyone remember the Cluetrain Manifesto? They complained about corporate-speak, saying that it sounded "literally inhuman". Well, AIs are at least that bad. AIs trained on all those corporate statements, and learned to write that way, and we hate it just like we hate corporate PR-speak.
• smithza 8mo ago
  Please read through this incredible book review (book is All Things Are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart). It is the kind of philosophy that everyone is looking past. Syntactic vs informational determinacy. LLMs is designed to create copy that is syntactically determinate (it is a complex set of statistics functions). Whereas the best human prose actually is the opposite--it does not converge on syntactic determinacy (see quote below) but instead converges on informational determinacy. The plot resolves as the reader's knowledge grows from abstraction and ignorance to empathy, insight and anticipation. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/one-to-zero https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/one-to-zero Semantic information, you see, obeys a contrary calculus to that of physical bits. As it increases in determinacy, so its syntactical form increases in indeterminacy; the more exact and intentionally informed semantic information is, the more aperiodic and syntactically random its physical transmission becomes, and the more it eludes compression. I mean, the text of Anna Karenina is, from a purely quantitative vantage of its alphabetic sequences, utterly random; no algorithm could possibly be generated — at least, none that’s conceivable — that could reproduce it. And yet, at the semantic level, the richness and determinacy of the content of the book increases with each aperiodic arrangement of letters and words into coherent meaning. Edit: add-on In other words, it is impossible for an LLM (or monkeys at keyboards [0]) to recreate Tolstoy because of the unique role our minds play in writing. The verb writing hardly appears to apply to an LLM when we consider the function it is actually doing. [0] https://libraryofbabel.info https://libraryofbabel.info
• hashstring 8mo ago
  Agree but also getting tired from all these blogs that state more or less the same thing about LLMs. I’ve read this before.
  • allknowingfrog 8mo ago
    I could stand to hear less from both the enthusiasts and the detractors. My HN experience has changed substantially in the last couple of years.
• xpe 8mo ago
  > Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? This is an easy but not very insightful framing. I want to read intelligent, thoughtful text that is useful in some way: to me, to society, to humanity. Ceteris paribus, the source of the information does not necessarily matter; it only matters as a matter of association. To put it another way, “human” vs “machine” is not the core driving factor for me. All other things equal, I would rather read A over B: A. high quality AI content, even if it is “only” the result of 6 minutes of human question framing and light editing [1] B. low quality purely human content, even if it was the result of 60 minutes of effort. There is increasingly less ability to distinguish “human” writing from “AI” writing. Some people fool themselves on their AI-detection prowess. To be direct: I want meaningful and satisfying lives for humans. If we want to reward humans for writing more, we better reflect on why, and if we still really want that, we better find ways that work. I don’t think “buy local” as a PR campaign will be easily transferred to a “read human” movement. [1]: Of course AI training data is drawn from humans, so I do not discount the human factor. My point is that quantifying the effort put into it is not simple.
• yrds96 8mo ago
  Good article. Nothing is more frustate than reading a text that I don't even know if the person who "wrote" it, actually read it. If someone wants to me read a giant text generated by a small and poor prompt, I don't wanna read it If someone wants to fix that by increasing the effort and do a better prompt and express better the ideas, I rather read that prompt over the llm output
• keybored 8mo ago
  > Before you get your pitchforks out.. I know it’s just modern writing style to preempt all responses. But can’t you just plainly state your business without professing your appreciation? People who waste other’s time with bullshit are aholes. I don’t care if it’s My Great Friend And Partner in Crime, Anthropics LLM or it’s a tedious template written in PHP with just enough substitutions and variations to waste five sentences on it before closing it. Actually, saying that it’s the same thing is a bit like saying “guns don’t shoot people”. At least you had to copy-paste that PHP template from somewhere and adapt it to your spam. Back in the day.
• unconed 8mo ago
  >Before you get your pitchforks out and call me an AI luddite, I use LLMs pretty extensively for work. Chicken. Seriously, the degree to which supposed engineering professionals have jumped on a tool that lets them outsource their work and their thinking to a bot astounds me. Have they no shame?
  • account42 8mo ago
    No, we truly live in a post-shame society and that's definitely not a good thing. Shame is (or was) an important tool to enforce social norms and the acceptance of AI slop (both writing and code) is only the latest where a sufficiently large percentage of people think anything goes that it feels literally pointless to speak up at times.
• pevansgreenwood 8mo ago
  [dead]
• brikym 8mo ago
  I've been throwing in typos and shitty grammar for a while just to seem authentic. I suppose now that will be copied.
• stormed 8mo ago
  My issue is that I don't necessarily trust content if it looks generated. I think I might've lost the link, but when I was helping my company with integrating Microsoft Entra with Ubuntu, I noticed the documentation from both Microsoft & Canonical had heavily generated documentation that was flat out wrong and had me going into loops figuring out unnecessary steps that were seemingly hallucinated. ai;dr is what I'm going to start saying, it's just frustrating to see.
• written-beyond 8mo ago
  I've had friendships broken because people couldn't understand why I didn't appreciate their "hard work" on writing a series of 10 articles they wrote with Claude. Mind you this person is an excellent writer, they had great success with ghost writing and running a small news website where they wrote and curated articles. But for some reason the opportunity for Claude to write stuff they can never have the time for is too great for them to ignore. I don't care if you used AI for 99.99% of your research for writing the content but when I read your content it should be written by you. It's why I never take any article seriously on linkedin, even before AI, they all lack any personalization.
  • account42 8mo ago
    > I don't care if you used AI for 99.99% of your research I do because you should be manually verifying anything you get out of the stochastic parrot before you present it to others - and that's going to be more than 0.01% of the work.
    • written-beyond 8mo ago
      It's still okay to do that, LLMs models are literally terabytes big I'm sure they've crammed enough information in there and enough verification tools to be extremely accurate. Now whether the information matches your true internal intent, rather than the prompt, is another thing.
• tomsyouruncle 8mo ago
  I think this article overlooks the act of engaging in problem solving with an agent. Personally I find it super helpful to discuss stuff back and forth: It takes a view, explores the code and brings some insight. I take a view and steer the analysis. And together we arrive at a conclusion. By that point the AI’s got so much context it typically does a great job summarising the thought process for wider discussion so I can tweak and polish and share.
• whaleidk 8mo ago
  The author thinks that it’s fine to do this for code, which I find strange. I have big time ai:dr; when a commit comes in for me to review and it’s 300 lines for something that is already built into a single function of the framework we use, or I see a (important) comment they forgot to delete. I should not be expected to become more familiar with the authors code than he is himself, and I certainly shouldn’t be the first one verifying that even works.
• wellpast 8mo ago
  $100 says AI got at least some notes effecting the copy of this post
  • ChadNauseam 8mo ago
    I find AI extremely useful for that. "What did I brush over?" "What did I assume the reader might know when they might not" "can you fact-check every claim for me and provide references." It is incredibly high ROI and I think it makes the final piece better. What I dislike about reading AI writing is that it's dumb but sounds smart. If it were smart I wouldn't mind reading it. Here's an example. It's always full of metaphors that make no sense, like a closet so full of junk that it topples out as soon as you open the door. (see what I mean? the metaphor has a superficial resemblance to the topic at hand but doesn't clarify the subject at all and therefore muddles the waters as you try to understand what I might have been intending to communicate with it.)
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• truelson 8mo ago
  My wife is my favorite editor. She's usually not available. LLM editor is fine. Write it first, quick self edit, then have an LLM edit. Then I edit again. It's most definitely my voice, and I love it.
• danbmil99 8mo ago
  More like,"AI: DW"
  • rmunn 8mo ago
    And the natural followup, "dw;dr".
• raldi 8mo ago
  > Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? You don't; you feed it to an LLM and ask it to read it for you.
• K2h 8mo ago
  I am thrilled that my type-ohs which I haven't been bothered to fix for years now positively indicate I am a human...... PERFECT.
• ashton314 8mo ago
  > I need to know there was intention behind it. That someone wanted to get their thoughts out and did so, deliberately, rather than chucking a bullet list at an AI to expand. This! This is my feeling exactly. I wrote about encountering work slop last year: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2025-08-04_artifical_inanity/ https://lambdaland.org/posts/2025-08-04_artifical_inanity/
• onurkanbkrc 8mo ago
  LLMs are trained on vast portions of the internet. In that sense, they are essentially systems that mimic online content. Therefore, what an AI generates often reflects the perspectives of the people who originally created the training data, rather than the true thoughts of the person prompting it.
• lunias 8mo ago
  Not all AI generated content is bad, not all of it is good. I find a lot of people are taking hardline stances on something much more nuanced. This is Hasty Generalization and Fallacy of Composition.
• etler 8mo ago
  If someone uses AI to help them write, and they reviewed it, and it's high quality writing, I don't care how much they wrote by hand. But, if I can tell it was written by AI that's just a proxy for telling that the author did not put time and care into what they were writing. AI bloats text and every other task it does into convoluted redundant cliches. This is true for text and code. Whether it was written by an AI or not, it's not worth my time. If you wrote it 100% by hand and it still sounds like AI, it's still bad writing and still not worth my time.
• machielrey 8mo ago
  Why should we dislike an AI-assisted post if it is genuinely though-provoking or entertaining? I am the first person to respect craft in many domains, and will continue to do so. I respect it when an actor does their own stunts or when directors choose not to use CGI. But I will still watch the Matrix and think "holy shit that was cool". It's all about the quality of the output.