7 ms·

> The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are

> The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

bell-cot 5mo ago
Mnemonic: geLL-Mann amnesia effect
dvt 5mo ago
Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. One book a month is hardly an aspirational goal. You don't even have to read Melville or Hemingway or Chaucer or Shakespeare, just pick up any popular NYT best seller, and it'll be significantly better than anything an LLM can generate.
- xienze 5mo ago
  > I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbreviations and emojis exclusively. LLM prose is significantly better than what the average person can produce.
  - sublinear 5mo ago
    Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook? At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.
    - cryzinger 5mo ago
      I think it's both true that most LLM writing ("writing") sucks and that it's better than what a lot of people can produce unassisted. Which to me doesn't mean that we should roll over and accept LLM output as a lesser evil... it just means that the bar is so low it might as well be in hell, and rapidly getting lower :')
      - TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
        It's nowhere close to good writing, but it's better than the dreck many self-published writers produce and sell - successfully. But that's the real problem with LLMs. Culture is aspirational. It has a consistent goal - find the best, highlight it and distribute it so others can build on it. LLMs are the opposite - produce as much of everything as possible at the lowest possible barely-acceptable-if-you're-lucky quality. This was already a problem before LLMs. Mass market content farms - Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad, Spotify, social media in general - give everyone an equal voice, with mass popularity and "likes" as the only metric. Now LLMs are automating the creation process, so everyone gets more of everything. Except inspiration. Not so much of the "That's astounding, I wonder if I can learn from that and reach for something in that league."
    - solumunus 5mo ago
      It’s acceptable for someone to buy a ready meal or takeout if it’s better than what they can cook. Why wouldn’t it be? Is that the greatest choice for their personal development? Probably not, but life is complex and folk have limited capability and bandwidth for acquiring skills.
    - xienze 5mo ago
      Tell me your thoughts on the quality of LLM-generated code. I've never understood this attitude where people are absolutely disgusted by the slightest whiff of AI prose but will happily slurp up AI-generated code by the bucketful and proudly proclaim that it's OK because it's better than the average developer can produce.
      - 5mo ago
  - xtracto 5mo ago
    Someone way more eloquent than me should write a column titled "Why do we read?" Way back in the past (around 30 years ago) I remember reading an article on "how to read a book" or a similar subject. They argued that, you should not skip the acknowledgments, preface and other "personal" related sections of a book, because it was there where you got a glimpse of the person that was writing the book. The idea being that, you should had in mind that the person writing was explaining something through you. Carl Sagan even has a video where he argues Books/Writing is some sort of communication through time. Now, this has been the case historically: A person writes some text (even in botched language like my writing, as English is not my first language) with thinking that someone else in the future will read the ideas and reason about them. But what about text written by an LLM? Does it have inherent intention? When reading LLM text, it feels like looking at those "this is not a person" photos. Yeah, they are words, yeah they form sentences and paragraphs but... they lack "soul".
    - devin 5mo ago
      It's not "Why do we read?" but something related that is coming up a lot in my thinking lately is Walter J. Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought".
      - avador 5mo ago
        Isn’t “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought” another way of saying that “feedback has an effect”? If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion. For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds. I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title. —- Okay, I got through the first paragraph of Walter’s writings. While I nod to the bitterness (I assent to the existence of it), I do not bow.
        fcarraldo 5mo ago
        Do you think the first paragraph is enough of a basis to form an opinion from?
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    ...or read. At least in the USA: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [1]. 1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
    - torginus 5mo ago
      Hasn't this always been an intelligence thing? I think across all societies and eras we find that generally a a rather alarmingly large section of population is unable to grasp basic written instructions - and that section usually increases to the majority of people, when we start getting into things like an employment contract, or mortgage document.
    - watwut 5mo ago
      In an international comparisons, USA comes out somewhere in the middled of developed countries - as it always did. And the differences between countries are not that large. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level is simply not a some kind of catastrophe and it does not mean those people cant read. There is this idea that 6th-grade level is almost like not knowing how to read, but that is simply not the case at all.
- gchamonlive 5mo ago
  Really hard to take your comment serious when the only post on dvt.name is a hello world page, because at least OP is trying to publish and you are lacking moral high ground to judge him thinking LLM writing is good.
  - dvt 5mo ago
    Lol my blog was hacked recently and I've been lazy about moving my backed-up mySQL DB to the new WP installation. Not sure where moral high ground enters the picture. If I really wanted to be an asshole, I'd cite a book I co-wrote and another I edited.
    - gchamonlive 5mo ago
      > Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. How do you think the author of the page would read this? That sounded pretty asshole-like for me. If it's not for you I'm really sorry for you, you must have to endure really screwed up people.
      - dvt 5mo ago
        Maybe you're right and I was a bit too snarky, apologies to the author if he/she was offended. Writing anything implies some vulnerability, and criticism should be constructive.
        gchamonlive 5mo ago
        I know, and we've all been there. It's comfortable to criticize, only when I had a very divisive publication hit front page that I've seen how hurtful dismissive or sarcastic comments can be (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346) And sorry about your blog :/ didn't know it was hacked. Looking at the comment section of the hello world though it gets pretty obvious LOL. You should consider removing it from your HN about though.
  - 5mo ago
- torginus 5mo ago
  I haven't used these things for writing recreationally for a while (since the Claude 3.X days), so my opinions might be outdated - but they definitely weren't bad - after all they had a huge library of witticisms to pull from, and like Stable Diffusion that pulls from master artists, so do LLMs from skilled writers. Pro writers did come up with an absolute dearth of interesting ideas, and there are mountains of skillfully written prose out there - and its all in the training data, and AI is quite good at pulling from it. The advantage of the writing vs images, is that it takes longer to absorb the whole with text, so its less apparent that the whole thing doesn't quite come together. My problems was with Claude's prose and ideas is that it kept recycling the tropes and phrases after a while - something that has been observed that these models have very strong statistical biases - when asking for a random number for example, LLMs are far more predictable than even humans, this shows up in unguided writing exercises. But as for actually crafting text that is both terse and to the point - such as oneliner explanations, or writing summaries - these models are quite bad. The best I have seen is they could turn a given length of prose into an even longer version - with generally some loss in the tonal accuracy or the points made in there. As such they are a terrible tool for professional communication, but unfortunately, lots of people have started using them for exactly that.
  - Applejinx 5mo ago
    Um. Perhaps 'pro writers did come up with an absolute crapload of interesting ideas' would be better writing than 'dearth', which means scarcity and famine? I get that it sounds clever but that's the damn problem!
    - torginus 5mo ago
      Sorry, not a native speaker, so I guess I had that word misfiled, thanks for correcting me. It does sting a bit but that's a hell of a lot better than going through life mixing up words.
- lurquer 5mo ago
  Depends on the type of writing. Blogs and the like? LLM generates prose that, to me anyway. is unbearable. However, in fiction I’ve found it a useful collaborator. There have been more than a few occasions when, given some notes of how I want a character’s arc to develop in a particular scene, that the LLM gives some excellent pointers and ‘new’ ideas I hadn’t considered. As far as editing my prose, I use it as a ‘thesaurus of phrases.’ When lazy, I can give it a rough sketch of the paragraph, giving it the gist of what I want, and have it generate a dozen or so versions. I usually can find nuggets of good phrases therein that are useable… much as I would refer to Roget’s to find a more precise word. That said, one has to resist tbe temptation of using a chunk of generated text verbatim; no matter how good it sounds in isolation, the repetitive grammatical structure and other LLM-smells add up quick and become nauseatingly obvious if used frequently. In any case, I think LLM’s get a bad wrap for writing… when used correctly, it is incredibly useful. And, it’s tiresome to hear pretentious snobs assume that an author who uses LLM simply lacks the taste to appreciate how bad the prose sounds. Not true in all cases.
- chungusamongus 5mo ago
  This is just the last domain people can desperately cling to because style is totally subjective.
skydhash 5mo ago
I dabble in drawing and I find LLM images (and maybe some non LLM one) abhorrent. As for why, the reason I can think of are: no consistency (perspective, small details, and color theory) and too much details making it a visual noise. In most painting, the artist will have a subject that is most detailed (to draw the eyes) and from there, the lost of details will follow some kind of logic. This is how you pinpoint what the artist is most interested in. LLM looks like a filter applied to a montage of pictures.
- gchamonlive 5mo ago
  It's like a gross looking slice of pizza, it's mindbending because at first it looks good, after all it's pizza, but something in it makes it really disgusting
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Maybe we're looking at different pizza slices, but all I see is bread, tomato sauce and cheese, and it all looks delicious.
    - gchamonlive 5mo ago
      Yes https://downtownlongbeach.org/wp-content/uploads/Broadway-Pizza-GOOD.jpg https://downtownlongbeach.org/wp-content/uploads/Broadway-Pi... but https://i.chzbgr.com/full/10412716544/h06A6A341 https://i.chzbgr.com/full/10412716544/h06A6A341 And both come from ovens.
flatline 5mo ago
I don't disagree about the probability, but the current frontier models are not completely useless for writing even in areas where I have significant knowledge. I would not have said that a year ago. You have to watch them like a hawk -- they are good at spitting out plausible sounding nonsense that is hard even for an expert to discern. But the dice roll going on behind the scenes is continually more biased towards being correct/useful than not.
- Aperocky 5mo ago
  On factual things, potentially. But if I want to read your writing, wouldn't I be trying to pick your brain? Otherwise why don't I read wikipedia or usage documentation?
ryandrake 5mo ago
> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have the 2. "AI constantly produces poor code needing rework, makes mistakes, has to be babysat, and ultimately costs me time!" camp, with a spectrum in between those. How could the output of the same product be seen so differently? Well, I have bad news for camp 1...
- kybernetikos 5mo ago
  I think there are some factors beyond just skill too - the kinds of tasks you're giving the AI, and how involved you are in ensuring the output is good (via either extensive planning guidance, extensive review/testing, or a combination).
- tempest_ 5mo ago
  It isnt though. The industry largely has selected for camp 1 long ago. If you don't get immediate negative feedback camp 1 can go quite a ways before problems surface.
  - bitwize 5mo ago
    Camp 1 is winning because we did it. We built an artificial brain. Frontier models can think, reason, and produce code better than the average human programmer. (You have not met many actual programmers slaving away on enterprise code bases if you do not understand that this is the case; the self-selecting HN crowd does not represent the profession as a whole by a long shot.) It's just a matter of, how committed are you (is your organization) to really learning and leveraging the tools?
- onion2k 5mo ago
  Well, I have bad news for camp 1.. It's bad if they work in a part of the industry where code quality or efficiency matters. That's maybe 10% of the total though.
cortesoft 5mo ago
So what does this mean in practice, though? Let's say you are correct. You ask an LLM to write something for you, and to you it looks really, really good. So based on your conjecture, that means I am not a very good writer. Ok, but how does that change what I should do? If I am not a very good writer, that means an LLM IS actually better than me, even if it might not be objectively good to an expert writer. My two choices are to keep producing my own crappy writing, or use an LLM to create better (but not great) writing. Wouldn't it make sense to use an LLM? It seems to me your premise leads you to the same conclusion you would reach even if your premise was false; if me thinking an LLM is good at a task means I am very bad at that task, I am probably better off having an LLM do it. On the other hand, if you are wrong, and I think an LLM is good at something because it actually IS good at that thing, then I should also use the LLM to do the task. Either way, the LLM is better than me at the thing.
- soneca 5mo ago
  Well, practice to get better at writing (and, therefore, judging writing) yourself. It seems obvious. Your skills are not frozen in time and set in stone.
- soledades 5mo ago
  Well, no. The LLM is just better than you in a narrow band that appears wider to someone below than above. From above, or from below with adequate exposure, it feels facile and hollow. It is good at weaving grammatical structures. It is not good at thinking in words in a way that invites a fellow human along for the journey. Because it doesn't think.
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  > My two choices are to keep producing my own crappy writing, or use an LLM to create better (but not great) writing Are you also an LLM or do you have the capacity to learn and grow?
- mrob 5mo ago
  >If I am not a very good writer, that means an LLM IS actually better than me If you're not a very good writer, I'll at least skim your work to see if it contains any good ideas. If it's slop, I'll just close the tab. You already told me it's not worth caring about, so I'll agree with your decision.
robgibbons 5mo ago
Cuts very close to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
saaaaaam 5mo ago
I partly write words for a living. Claude is really really bad at writing prose that doesn’t make me want to vomit. I rarely write code, and only once for a living. But I feel like I’m a superhuman and one step away from being a zillionaire when Claude gives me a bunch of code it has written in seconds. I WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!! And then I remember that Claude can’t write words that don’t make me want to break things and I’m good at writing words but bad at writing code. So then I delete the code and go back to doing more profitable things than being the next zuckerfuck.
- ninjalanternshk 5mo ago
  I’ll take “what is Dunning–Kruger” for $200 Alex.
  - saaaaaam 5mo ago
    I don’t understand this comment. It might be a pop-culture reference that has gone over my head. But I think (I think?!) you might have misinterpreted ny comment, because I’m saying “yes, I Dunning-Kruger myself regularly with AI! BUT then I wake up from the psychosis and realise what an idiot I am and go back to my normal life”. AI makes everyone think they are brilliant. The skill is recognising when you’re just another idiot.
NoboruWataya 5mo ago
It's basically just another instance of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Ask an LLM to discuss a topic you are an expert on, and you will realise it is full of errors, but ask it to discuss a topic you know nothing about and you will, mysteriously, assume it is very intelligent and correct.
byzantinegene 5mo ago
the other day there was a hackernews comment about ai-generated music, and this poster claimed that a friend generated ai music and got as much enjoyment as actual ones composed by musicians. I suppose this falls under the same camp..
userbinator 5mo ago
That's because LLM output is "average"; so if you're below, it will obviously look better than what you can do, and vice-versa. It will be interesting to see what happens when current LLM output becomes the bottom, as everyone worse has pulled themselves up to that level.
glouwbug 5mo ago
You can triangulate. Ask it the same thing in different ways and with different LLMs. Operate in domains where the output is verifiable, like in the sciences but in terms of numerical computing. Study the output, graph it, learn it, reason with it, rinse, and repeat until your mental model makes practical sense.
thefz 5mo ago
> What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively. This is why code generation is a disaster waiting to happen. Hunderds of thousands of "programmers" with no idea of what they are pushing to production.
dropbox_miner 5mo ago
> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. Naah I disagree with this. I think LLM's are good at gas-lighting you into thinking that good writing only comes in one flavor. And LLMs prefer a very "textbook/technical-manual" coded flavor of writing because maybe that way they are more useful to us humans. But human writing is not just about crafting the most elegant sentences. Sometimes great writing is just this doggo-drawing meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2160304-the-winner-of-this-contest-was-chosen-through-likes https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2160304-the-winner-of-this-c...
MrScruff 5mo ago
This is true, but what is also true is that with each new generation of models (and not just for code generation) it becomes less and less true.
- svelle 5mo ago
  IMO LLM writing hasn't significantly improved since maybe GPT4. It still does the exact same "It's not x, it's actually y" tropes and many of the other common LLM smells. Most LLM generated text is immediately discernible as such.
  - MrScruff 5mo ago
    You can avoid the smells with a prompt. I have a benchmark involving short story writing within specific styles and the level of sophistication achievable is increasing over time, in my opinion.

bell-cot 5mo ago

Mnemonic: geLL-Mann amnesia effect

dvt 5mo ago

Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. One book a month is hardly an aspirational goal. You don't even have to read Melville or Hemingway or Chaucer or Shakespeare, just pick up any popular NYT best seller, and it'll be significantly better than anything an LLM can generate.

xienze 5mo ago
> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbreviations and emojis exclusively. LLM prose is significantly better than what the average person can produce.
- sublinear 5mo ago
  Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook? At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.
  - cryzinger 5mo ago
    I think it's both true that most LLM writing ("writing") sucks and that it's better than what a lot of people can produce unassisted. Which to me doesn't mean that we should roll over and accept LLM output as a lesser evil... it just means that the bar is so low it might as well be in hell, and rapidly getting lower :')
    - TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
      It's nowhere close to good writing, but it's better than the dreck many self-published writers produce and sell - successfully. But that's the real problem with LLMs. Culture is aspirational. It has a consistent goal - find the best, highlight it and distribute it so others can build on it. LLMs are the opposite - produce as much of everything as possible at the lowest possible barely-acceptable-if-you're-lucky quality. This was already a problem before LLMs. Mass market content farms - Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad, Spotify, social media in general - give everyone an equal voice, with mass popularity and "likes" as the only metric. Now LLMs are automating the creation process, so everyone gets more of everything. Except inspiration. Not so much of the "That's astounding, I wonder if I can learn from that and reach for something in that league."
  - solumunus 5mo ago
    It’s acceptable for someone to buy a ready meal or takeout if it’s better than what they can cook. Why wouldn’t it be? Is that the greatest choice for their personal development? Probably not, but life is complex and folk have limited capability and bandwidth for acquiring skills.
  - xienze 5mo ago
    Tell me your thoughts on the quality of LLM-generated code. I've never understood this attitude where people are absolutely disgusted by the slightest whiff of AI prose but will happily slurp up AI-generated code by the bucketful and proudly proclaim that it's OK because it's better than the average developer can produce.
    - 5mo ago
- xtracto 5mo ago
  Someone way more eloquent than me should write a column titled "Why do we read?" Way back in the past (around 30 years ago) I remember reading an article on "how to read a book" or a similar subject. They argued that, you should not skip the acknowledgments, preface and other "personal" related sections of a book, because it was there where you got a glimpse of the person that was writing the book. The idea being that, you should had in mind that the person writing was explaining something through you. Carl Sagan even has a video where he argues Books/Writing is some sort of communication through time. Now, this has been the case historically: A person writes some text (even in botched language like my writing, as English is not my first language) with thinking that someone else in the future will read the ideas and reason about them. But what about text written by an LLM? Does it have inherent intention? When reading LLM text, it feels like looking at those "this is not a person" photos. Yeah, they are words, yeah they form sentences and paragraphs but... they lack "soul".
  - devin 5mo ago
    It's not "Why do we read?" but something related that is coming up a lot in my thinking lately is Walter J. Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought".
    - avador 5mo ago
      Isn’t “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought” another way of saying that “feedback has an effect”? If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion. For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds. I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title. —- Okay, I got through the first paragraph of Walter’s writings. While I nod to the bitterness (I assent to the existence of it), I do not bow.
      - fcarraldo 5mo ago
        Do you think the first paragraph is enough of a basis to form an opinion from?
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  ...or read. At least in the USA: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [1]. 1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
  - torginus 5mo ago
    Hasn't this always been an intelligence thing? I think across all societies and eras we find that generally a a rather alarmingly large section of population is unable to grasp basic written instructions - and that section usually increases to the majority of people, when we start getting into things like an employment contract, or mortgage document.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    In an international comparisons, USA comes out somewhere in the middled of developed countries - as it always did. And the differences between countries are not that large. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level is simply not a some kind of catastrophe and it does not mean those people cant read. There is this idea that 6th-grade level is almost like not knowing how to read, but that is simply not the case at all.
gchamonlive 5mo ago
Really hard to take your comment serious when the only post on dvt.name is a hello world page, because at least OP is trying to publish and you are lacking moral high ground to judge him thinking LLM writing is good.
- dvt 5mo ago
  Lol my blog was hacked recently and I've been lazy about moving my backed-up mySQL DB to the new WP installation. Not sure where moral high ground enters the picture. If I really wanted to be an asshole, I'd cite a book I co-wrote and another I edited.
  - gchamonlive 5mo ago
    > Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. How do you think the author of the page would read this? That sounded pretty asshole-like for me. If it's not for you I'm really sorry for you, you must have to endure really screwed up people.
    - dvt 5mo ago
      Maybe you're right and I was a bit too snarky, apologies to the author if he/she was offended. Writing anything implies some vulnerability, and criticism should be constructive.
      - gchamonlive 5mo ago
        I know, and we've all been there. It's comfortable to criticize, only when I had a very divisive publication hit front page that I've seen how hurtful dismissive or sarcastic comments can be (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346) And sorry about your blog :/ didn't know it was hacked. Looking at the comment section of the hello world though it gets pretty obvious LOL. You should consider removing it from your HN about though.
- 5mo ago
torginus 5mo ago
I haven't used these things for writing recreationally for a while (since the Claude 3.X days), so my opinions might be outdated - but they definitely weren't bad - after all they had a huge library of witticisms to pull from, and like Stable Diffusion that pulls from master artists, so do LLMs from skilled writers. Pro writers did come up with an absolute dearth of interesting ideas, and there are mountains of skillfully written prose out there - and its all in the training data, and AI is quite good at pulling from it. The advantage of the writing vs images, is that it takes longer to absorb the whole with text, so its less apparent that the whole thing doesn't quite come together. My problems was with Claude's prose and ideas is that it kept recycling the tropes and phrases after a while - something that has been observed that these models have very strong statistical biases - when asking for a random number for example, LLMs are far more predictable than even humans, this shows up in unguided writing exercises. But as for actually crafting text that is both terse and to the point - such as oneliner explanations, or writing summaries - these models are quite bad. The best I have seen is they could turn a given length of prose into an even longer version - with generally some loss in the tonal accuracy or the points made in there. As such they are a terrible tool for professional communication, but unfortunately, lots of people have started using them for exactly that.
- Applejinx 5mo ago
  Um. Perhaps 'pro writers did come up with an absolute crapload of interesting ideas' would be better writing than 'dearth', which means scarcity and famine? I get that it sounds clever but that's the damn problem!
  - torginus 5mo ago
    Sorry, not a native speaker, so I guess I had that word misfiled, thanks for correcting me. It does sting a bit but that's a hell of a lot better than going through life mixing up words.
lurquer 5mo ago
Depends on the type of writing. Blogs and the like? LLM generates prose that, to me anyway. is unbearable. However, in fiction I’ve found it a useful collaborator. There have been more than a few occasions when, given some notes of how I want a character’s arc to develop in a particular scene, that the LLM gives some excellent pointers and ‘new’ ideas I hadn’t considered. As far as editing my prose, I use it as a ‘thesaurus of phrases.’ When lazy, I can give it a rough sketch of the paragraph, giving it the gist of what I want, and have it generate a dozen or so versions. I usually can find nuggets of good phrases therein that are useable… much as I would refer to Roget’s to find a more precise word. That said, one has to resist tbe temptation of using a chunk of generated text verbatim; no matter how good it sounds in isolation, the repetitive grammatical structure and other LLM-smells add up quick and become nauseatingly obvious if used frequently. In any case, I think LLM’s get a bad wrap for writing… when used correctly, it is incredibly useful. And, it’s tiresome to hear pretentious snobs assume that an author who uses LLM simply lacks the taste to appreciate how bad the prose sounds. Not true in all cases.
chungusamongus 5mo ago
This is just the last domain people can desperately cling to because style is totally subjective.

skydhash 5mo ago

I dabble in drawing and I find LLM images (and maybe some non LLM one) abhorrent. As for why, the reason I can think of are: no consistency (perspective, small details, and color theory) and too much details making it a visual noise. In most painting, the artist will have a subject that is most detailed (to draw the eyes) and from there, the lost of details will follow some kind of logic. This is how you pinpoint what the artist is most interested in. LLM looks like a filter applied to a montage of pictures.

gchamonlive 5mo ago
It's like a gross looking slice of pizza, it's mindbending because at first it looks good, after all it's pizza, but something in it makes it really disgusting
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Maybe we're looking at different pizza slices, but all I see is bread, tomato sauce and cheese, and it all looks delicious.
  - gchamonlive 5mo ago
    Yes https://downtownlongbeach.org/wp-content/uploads/Broadway-Pizza-GOOD.jpg https://downtownlongbeach.org/wp-content/uploads/Broadway-Pi... but https://i.chzbgr.com/full/10412716544/h06A6A341 https://i.chzbgr.com/full/10412716544/h06A6A341 And both come from ovens.

flatline 5mo ago

I don't disagree about the probability, but the current frontier models are not completely useless for writing even in areas where I have significant knowledge. I would not have said that a year ago. You have to watch them like a hawk -- they are good at spitting out plausible sounding nonsense that is hard even for an expert to discern. But the dice roll going on behind the scenes is continually more biased towards being correct/useful than not.

Aperocky 5mo ago
On factual things, potentially. But if I want to read your writing, wouldn't I be trying to pick your brain? Otherwise why don't I read wikipedia or usage documentation?

ryandrake 5mo ago

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have the 2. "AI constantly produces poor code needing rework, makes mistakes, has to be babysat, and ultimately costs me time!" camp, with a spectrum in between those. How could the output of the same product be seen so differently? Well, I have bad news for camp 1...

kybernetikos 5mo ago
I think there are some factors beyond just skill too - the kinds of tasks you're giving the AI, and how involved you are in ensuring the output is good (via either extensive planning guidance, extensive review/testing, or a combination).
tempest_ 5mo ago
It isnt though. The industry largely has selected for camp 1 long ago. If you don't get immediate negative feedback camp 1 can go quite a ways before problems surface.
- bitwize 5mo ago
  Camp 1 is winning because we did it. We built an artificial brain. Frontier models can think, reason, and produce code better than the average human programmer. (You have not met many actual programmers slaving away on enterprise code bases if you do not understand that this is the case; the self-selecting HN crowd does not represent the profession as a whole by a long shot.) It's just a matter of, how committed are you (is your organization) to really learning and leveraging the tools?
onion2k 5mo ago
Well, I have bad news for camp 1.. It's bad if they work in a part of the industry where code quality or efficiency matters. That's maybe 10% of the total though.

cortesoft 5mo ago

So what does this mean in practice, though? Let's say you are correct. You ask an LLM to write something for you, and to you it looks really, really good. So based on your conjecture, that means I am not a very good writer. Ok, but how does that change what I should do? If I am not a very good writer, that means an LLM IS actually better than me, even if it might not be objectively good to an expert writer. My two choices are to keep producing my own crappy writing, or use an LLM to create better (but not great) writing. Wouldn't it make sense to use an LLM? It seems to me your premise leads you to the same conclusion you would reach even if your premise was false; if me thinking an LLM is good at a task means I am very bad at that task, I am probably better off having an LLM do it. On the other hand, if you are wrong, and I think an LLM is good at something because it actually IS good at that thing, then I should also use the LLM to do the task. Either way, the LLM is better than me at the thing.

soneca 5mo ago
Well, practice to get better at writing (and, therefore, judging writing) yourself. It seems obvious. Your skills are not frozen in time and set in stone.
soledades 5mo ago
Well, no. The LLM is just better than you in a narrow band that appears wider to someone below than above. From above, or from below with adequate exposure, it feels facile and hollow. It is good at weaving grammatical structures. It is not good at thinking in words in a way that invites a fellow human along for the journey. Because it doesn't think.
slopinthebag 5mo ago
> My two choices are to keep producing my own crappy writing, or use an LLM to create better (but not great) writing Are you also an LLM or do you have the capacity to learn and grow?
mrob 5mo ago
>If I am not a very good writer, that means an LLM IS actually better than me If you're not a very good writer, I'll at least skim your work to see if it contains any good ideas. If it's slop, I'll just close the tab. You already told me it's not worth caring about, so I'll agree with your decision.

robgibbons 5mo ago

Cuts very close to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

saaaaaam 5mo ago

I partly write words for a living. Claude is really really bad at writing prose that doesn’t make me want to vomit. I rarely write code, and only once for a living. But I feel like I’m a superhuman and one step away from being a zillionaire when Claude gives me a bunch of code it has written in seconds. I WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!! And then I remember that Claude can’t write words that don’t make me want to break things and I’m good at writing words but bad at writing code. So then I delete the code and go back to doing more profitable things than being the next zuckerfuck.

ninjalanternshk 5mo ago
I’ll take “what is Dunning–Kruger” for $200 Alex.
- saaaaaam 5mo ago
  I don’t understand this comment. It might be a pop-culture reference that has gone over my head. But I think (I think?!) you might have misinterpreted ny comment, because I’m saying “yes, I Dunning-Kruger myself regularly with AI! BUT then I wake up from the psychosis and realise what an idiot I am and go back to my normal life”. AI makes everyone think they are brilliant. The skill is recognising when you’re just another idiot.

NoboruWataya 5mo ago

It's basically just another instance of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Ask an LLM to discuss a topic you are an expert on, and you will realise it is full of errors, but ask it to discuss a topic you know nothing about and you will, mysteriously, assume it is very intelligent and correct.

byzantinegene 5mo ago

the other day there was a hackernews comment about ai-generated music, and this poster claimed that a friend generated ai music and got as much enjoyment as actual ones composed by musicians. I suppose this falls under the same camp..

userbinator 5mo ago

That's because LLM output is "average"; so if you're below, it will obviously look better than what you can do, and vice-versa. It will be interesting to see what happens when current LLM output becomes the bottom, as everyone worse has pulled themselves up to that level.

glouwbug 5mo ago

You can triangulate. Ask it the same thing in different ways and with different LLMs. Operate in domains where the output is verifiable, like in the sciences but in terms of numerical computing. Study the output, graph it, learn it, reason with it, rinse, and repeat until your mental model makes practical sense.

thefz 5mo ago

> What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively. This is why code generation is a disaster waiting to happen. Hunderds of thousands of "programmers" with no idea of what they are pushing to production.

dropbox_miner 5mo ago

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. Naah I disagree with this. I think LLM's are good at gas-lighting you into thinking that good writing only comes in one flavor. And LLMs prefer a very "textbook/technical-manual" coded flavor of writing because maybe that way they are more useful to us humans. But human writing is not just about crafting the most elegant sentences. Sometimes great writing is just this doggo-drawing meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2160304-the-winner-of-this-contest-was-chosen-through-likes https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2160304-the-winner-of-this-c...

MrScruff 5mo ago

This is true, but what is also true is that with each new generation of models (and not just for code generation) it becomes less and less true.

svelle 5mo ago
IMO LLM writing hasn't significantly improved since maybe GPT4. It still does the exact same "It's not x, it's actually y" tropes and many of the other common LLM smells. Most LLM generated text is immediately discernible as such.
- MrScruff 5mo ago
  You can avoid the smells with a prompt. I have a benchmark involving short story writing within specific styles and the level of sophistication achievable is increasing over time, in my opinion.