4 ms·

Please write in your own words! I’m not inclined to read something if it consists of what you copy and pasted from Claude

obsidianbases1 7mo ago
Interesting complaint, because many might not share any of their ideas if it weren't for LLMs making it easy. Not everyone has the incentive to dedicate a day to producing writing worth publishing. But maybe they would if it took significantly less time. Even considering HNs no LLMs for comments rule, which I mostly agree with, I think we would all lose of the same rule were applied to publishing in general.
- curtisf 7mo ago
  "I would rather read the prompt" https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/ https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/ discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803 All of the output beyond the prompt contains, definitionally, essentially no useful information. Unless it's being used to translate from one human language to another, you're wasting your reader's time and energy in exchange for you own. If you have useful ideas, share them, and if you believe in the age of LLMs, be less afraid of them being unpolished and simply ask you readers to rely on their preferred tools to piece through it.
  - x1798DE 7mo ago
    I have also found that LLMs do not help me communicate my ideas in any way because the bottleneck is getting the ideas out of my head and into the prompt in the first place, but I will disagree with the idea that the output beyond the prompt contains no useful information. In the article you linked the output he is complaining about probably had a prompt like this: "What are the downsides of using Euler angles for rotation representation in robotics? Please provide a bulleted list and suggest alternatives." The LLM expanded on it based on its knowledge of the domain or based on a search tool (or both). Charitably, the student looked it over and thought through the information and decided it was good (or possibly tweaked around the edges) and then sent it over - though in practice they probably just assumed it was correct and didn't check it. For writing an essay like "I would rather read the prompt" LLMs don't seem like they would speed up the process much, but for something that involves synthesizing or summarizing information LLMs definitely can generate you a useful essay (though at least at the moment the default system prompts generate something distinctively bland and awful).
    - chelm 7mo ago
      Pretty balanced take. I think if a human gains information or saves time, it's still worthwhile. Surely, I don't publish those clickbaits. That's AI slop.
  - obsidianbases1 7mo ago
    Sounds reasonable until you consider that the "prompt" might include a million tokens of context, not to mention follow-up/iterations
chelm 7mo ago
Did you read the article?
- bonsai_spool 7mo ago
  > Did you read the article? How else do you think I would have come to write this comment? I got to the second major heading before realizing that there is little human input in this document. I use LLMs but I will never impose on Claude's intellectual musings on another person as some sort of intellectual insight. This is about the same as copying someone else's homework and then presenting the copied work as an example of deep brilliance. The copying isn't great, but the boasting is absurd. Who are we trying to con?
  - chelm 7mo ago
    I think I made it obvious what the article is about: no boasting, not "copying someone else's homework". Which text did you last publish? Can you be more specific? I would be genuinely interested in specific changes you would do if you were the editor.
    - bonsai_spool 7mo ago
      > Which text did you last publish? Never published an LLM text, friend. And if somebody needs Claude to get something published, that person should find a better line of business, one more suited to her or his aptitudes. > I would be genuinely interested in specific changes you would do if you were the editor. This whole thing would get sent back with the kind request to think of an argument and write it out. By hand. Without an LLM.
      - chelm 7mo ago
        I mean "a" text! I was just curious how you write. Do you prefer to write comments?
        bonsai_spool 7mo ago
ikidd 7mo ago
This reads less like LLM output than it does someone just transcribing their brief notes as they did their research. Lot of missing subject nouns, which is not something I'd expect to see from AI output.
- bonsai_spool 7mo ago
  You can ask an LLM to write in a different voice—they don't all sound exactly the same, though this one is no different than other examples. When I use an LLM, it tries to sound like me but there are still tendencies it falls back on, especially when the context window begins to expand. The 'missing subject nouns' is probably the LLM's way of sounding like an authoritative source in a technical field since many programmers like to write that way.
  - bonsai_spool 7mo ago
    Here's a great example of something written by a human that otherwise seems to have a similar structure to the OP: https://lalitm.com/post/building-syntaqlite-ai/ https://lalitm.com/post/building-syntaqlite-ai/ Flags for LLM vs human drafting: - Subtitles have the rhetoric turned to 11 with LLMs. (Note: Who has ever had multiple sentences as a blog post heading? It's bizarre) : - LLM "The Demo Works. Production Does Not." - Human "AI is why this project exist, and why it's as complete as it is" - Sources for claims that call for evidence - LLM "Six months ago, a practitioner could name a preferred OCR engine with confidence. Based on what I read, that confidence is gone." - *What was read?* - Human "AI coding tools and playing slot machines"[ref] - Variable paragraph lengths, where things that need more explanation have longer paragraphs (and vice versa) - LLM *Scroll through—each thing is about the same length* ---- There are lots of tells like this. This is a moment to get good at detecting LLM text in case it's surreptitiously used to your detriment.
    - bonsai_spool 7mo ago
      I'll amend my statement; I think the comparison text was written by an LLM with human editing. As I read it more, there are also some LLM-isms there.

obsidianbases1 7mo ago

Interesting complaint, because many might not share any of their ideas if it weren't for LLMs making it easy. Not everyone has the incentive to dedicate a day to producing writing worth publishing. But maybe they would if it took significantly less time. Even considering HNs no LLMs for comments rule, which I mostly agree with, I think we would all lose of the same rule were applied to publishing in general.

curtisf 7mo ago
"I would rather read the prompt" https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/ https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/ discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803 All of the output beyond the prompt contains, definitionally, essentially no useful information. Unless it's being used to translate from one human language to another, you're wasting your reader's time and energy in exchange for you own. If you have useful ideas, share them, and if you believe in the age of LLMs, be less afraid of them being unpolished and simply ask you readers to rely on their preferred tools to piece through it.
- x1798DE 7mo ago
  I have also found that LLMs do not help me communicate my ideas in any way because the bottleneck is getting the ideas out of my head and into the prompt in the first place, but I will disagree with the idea that the output beyond the prompt contains no useful information. In the article you linked the output he is complaining about probably had a prompt like this: "What are the downsides of using Euler angles for rotation representation in robotics? Please provide a bulleted list and suggest alternatives." The LLM expanded on it based on its knowledge of the domain or based on a search tool (or both). Charitably, the student looked it over and thought through the information and decided it was good (or possibly tweaked around the edges) and then sent it over - though in practice they probably just assumed it was correct and didn't check it. For writing an essay like "I would rather read the prompt" LLMs don't seem like they would speed up the process much, but for something that involves synthesizing or summarizing information LLMs definitely can generate you a useful essay (though at least at the moment the default system prompts generate something distinctively bland and awful).
  - chelm 7mo ago
    Pretty balanced take. I think if a human gains information or saves time, it's still worthwhile. Surely, I don't publish those clickbaits. That's AI slop.
- obsidianbases1 7mo ago
  Sounds reasonable until you consider that the "prompt" might include a million tokens of context, not to mention follow-up/iterations

chelm 7mo ago

Did you read the article?

bonsai_spool 7mo ago
> Did you read the article? How else do you think I would have come to write this comment? I got to the second major heading before realizing that there is little human input in this document. I use LLMs but I will never impose on Claude's intellectual musings on another person as some sort of intellectual insight. This is about the same as copying someone else's homework and then presenting the copied work as an example of deep brilliance. The copying isn't great, but the boasting is absurd. Who are we trying to con?
- chelm 7mo ago
  I think I made it obvious what the article is about: no boasting, not "copying someone else's homework". Which text did you last publish? Can you be more specific? I would be genuinely interested in specific changes you would do if you were the editor.
  - bonsai_spool 7mo ago
    > Which text did you last publish? Never published an LLM text, friend. And if somebody needs Claude to get something published, that person should find a better line of business, one more suited to her or his aptitudes. > I would be genuinely interested in specific changes you would do if you were the editor. This whole thing would get sent back with the kind request to think of an argument and write it out. By hand. Without an LLM.
    - chelm 7mo ago
      I mean "a" text! I was just curious how you write. Do you prefer to write comments?
      - bonsai_spool 7mo ago

ikidd 7mo ago

This reads less like LLM output than it does someone just transcribing their brief notes as they did their research. Lot of missing subject nouns, which is not something I'd expect to see from AI output.

bonsai_spool 7mo ago
You can ask an LLM to write in a different voice—they don't all sound exactly the same, though this one is no different than other examples. When I use an LLM, it tries to sound like me but there are still tendencies it falls back on, especially when the context window begins to expand. The 'missing subject nouns' is probably the LLM's way of sounding like an authoritative source in a technical field since many programmers like to write that way.
- bonsai_spool 7mo ago
  Here's a great example of something written by a human that otherwise seems to have a similar structure to the OP: https://lalitm.com/post/building-syntaqlite-ai/ https://lalitm.com/post/building-syntaqlite-ai/ Flags for LLM vs human drafting: - Subtitles have the rhetoric turned to 11 with LLMs. (Note: Who has ever had multiple sentences as a blog post heading? It's bizarre) : - LLM "The Demo Works. Production Does Not." - Human "AI is why this project exist, and why it's as complete as it is" - Sources for claims that call for evidence - LLM "Six months ago, a practitioner could name a preferred OCR engine with confidence. Based on what I read, that confidence is gone." - *What was read?* - Human "AI coding tools and playing slot machines"[ref] - Variable paragraph lengths, where things that need more explanation have longer paragraphs (and vice versa) - LLM *Scroll through—each thing is about the same length* ---- There are lots of tells like this. This is a moment to get good at detecting LLM text in case it's surreptitiously used to your detriment.
  - bonsai_spool 7mo ago
    I'll amend my statement; I think the comparison text was written by an LLM with human editing. As I read it more, there are also some LLM-isms there.