6 ms·

I'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written b

I'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written by a human for at least a full month.

flyingcoder 2mo ago
This seems like a load bearing issue. Would you like me to put together a plan to put human-written text in your daily routine?
- throwaway67743 2mo ago
  Oh you.
stavros 2mo ago
The need is that writing is expensive. An LLM is around a hundred times cheaper than a human, so this kind of article that doesn't provide tons of value just makes sense to write with an LLM. I hate LLM writing, but the economics checks out.
- iLoveOncall 2mo ago
  How about not writing the article at all then?
  - stavros 2mo ago
    Because people will read it if you write it, hence us being here.
    - frizlab 2mo ago
      Meh. I read the comments on HN, rarely the articles /(semi-)s
      - stavros 2mo ago
        What would we comment on if there were no article?
        bluGill 2mo ago
        There is the headline. In the typical case someone can write a comment (sometimes off the headline, sometimes have read the article) and it quickly becomes obvious that person is more knowledgeable that whoever wrote the article in the first place. Thus in many cases reading the comments is more valuable than the article.
        deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
- throwaway67743 2mo ago
  That might apply to some things, but there is little to no value in this article, so the economics are the same as the spam - cheap to spew garbage while providing no value and wasting the readers time. It's not something that should be encouraged. RIPE should know better.
- mrweasel 2mo ago
  > The need is that writing is expensive. That's the thing, good writing is expensive, massively so, much more than people think. Letting the machine do the writing however shows us that many people have no idea why writing is expensive, nor do they respect that perhaps it needs to be expensive. Communication is incredibly hard, very few master it. I'd even go so far as to say that clear, precise and readable communication is so hard that we do not have sufficient training data to build an LLM that can do it. Letting a person write article, like this one, doesn't necessarily improve the quality, but it does show us that some thought and effort have at least been put into it. There was a cost and you deemed that cost worth it for conveying your message. Without the cost there's nothing stopping you from wasting peoples time.
ferngodfather 2mo ago
> The domains didn't disappear; they moved. I stopped reading at this point. I cannot emphasize how much I HATE this AI writing style.
- gr 2mo ago
  Wait, what makes it AI and hateful, the `;` there?! Is this in the same vein as using — em dashes? Are people with minimal regard to typography and style doomed to lower their standards because the masses can't even?
  - xtracto 2mo ago
    To me, what makes it hateful is that it is EVERYWHERE. Reddit is full of it, LinkedIn is full of it, the web is full of it. Shit, even Facebook has it now. It's kind of sad. I compare it to when Memes started becoming popular as communication tools on the internet (mid 2000s from what i recall): Instead of writing text to convey the idea they wanted, people just pasted a meme (my face when ... whatever). Now with AI, everyone write everything in the same way.
    - joquarky 1mo ago
      Why take a negative view of what is occurring? I'm looking at this as having the potential to destroy one of the most harmful technologies to have been invented: social media. If it gets sloppy enough, people may revert to more humane communications.
  - ferngodfather 2mo ago
    It's the semicolon and the phrasing together. I can't explain but after you use AI a little you just notice the way it 'writes'.
- cube00 2mo ago
  > Dictionary-based classification has a ceiling, and I want to be honest about where it is. I stopped here, anytime an author (or likely AI) feels the need to tell me they're being honest or "genuine" I don't need to read any further. I'll assume honesty but the minute you explicitly tell me, you've probably got an angle that I'm too dumb to see, but I'm not dumb enough to keep reading.
mherdelight 2mo ago
Are we even sure the actual stuff in the article is real? What if it's just the usual LLM hallucinations
jstummbillig 2mo ago
> Is everyone really this lazy now? Everyone should aim to be this lazy. Everyone is trying to maximize their time. This is what software has always done. It helps people be lazy in some respect, and then, so far, we have always found new stuff to do with the time we freed up. LLMs got decent at writing, and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back. Of course, this is contingent on your current goal: If you want to get better at writing, you should do the writing, just like you want to do the math, if you want to learn multiplication. Writing is fine as a tool just to get information across. It needn't be more than that for everyone.
- bastawhiz 2mo ago
  And soon, I'll be lazy and use an LLM to do the reading for me. Eventually the LLMs will train on the state of the world and decide to be lazy also, and the "writer's" LLM prompt will just be shared with the "reader": nobody actually needed all those words anyway! Maybe someday we'll get rid of the links on HN and we can just share and consume headlines.
- bilekas 2mo ago
  Efficiency and lazyness are two very distinct things. As is quality and quantity.
- mc32 2mo ago
  The ability for people to communicate is paramount. Without the ability to communicate there is no progress. We might as well be deaf, dumb and perhaps blind. Delegating this task to automation serves to undermine all the masters and indeed strengthen the servants. Short term this offload is good for people; long term it’ll lead to mental rot where people are hard pressed to put their ideas forward and give up in exasperation when they don’t have the assistance of their servants. Their ability to even make the proper requests to the servants may deteriorate enough that their existence may come to rely on the benevolence of their servants.
- RobotToaster 2mo ago
  >LLMs got decent at writing, Judging by people's response, that doesn't seem to be the case. > and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back. I'll read articles written by them if and when that happens, but not before.
cryo32 2mo ago
I have people writing emails to me with an LLM now. We've gone from meetings where "this could have been an email" to emails where "this could have been a few carefully chosen words, not a rambling diatribe which would test the most hardcore Tolstoy fan". Kill me. With a spoon. Slowly.
- tsukikage 2mo ago
  You’re supposed to use an AI on your end to get the original few words back, so the providers get paid twice for the same email as is their right
  - cryo32 2mo ago
    As a cheap ass I just delete it. They DM me later to ask why I haven't responded to their email, to which the response is "did you write it?".
frereubu 2mo ago
I really wish there was an HN guideline that I could point to which says that you shouldn't complain about LLM writing, in the same way that's there's guidance on site annoyances: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." LLM-written content is now too common to be interesting and complaining about it does not make it stop, it just derails comment sections. The reptitive complaints are getting as annoying as the LLM-written content!
- ViktorRay 2mo ago
  Wait isn’t there actually the opposite HN guideline? In that LLM generated content is not allowed here?
  - zenoprax 2mo ago
    Comments are for humans but I don't think there is any reason for HN to police the submissions as a policy. If any article lacks credibility or merit to the extent that one can't even finish reading it then just ignore it and move on. Vote for something else. If "LLM aversion" is your rationale, so be it. Personally, I usually check the comments before deciding to read something so I appreciate that others have saved me the trouble of reading this article in particular. If the author doesn't care enough to use human time to write it then I am not going to use human time to read it.
    - bahmboo 2mo ago
      Wow. That's outsourcing a lot of thought, overriding your individual interpretation. I guess it's pretty common here.
      - esterna 2mo ago
        This also applies to reading restaurant reviews before visiting. Or for that matter, reading any published book you outsource judgement to the publishing house (what books they pick up). Or, if you are easily convinced by jargon: Exploration has a non-zero opportunity cost.

I'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written by a human for at least a full month.

flyingcoder 2mo ago

This seems like a load bearing issue. Would you like me to put together a plan to put human-written text in your daily routine?

throwaway67743 2mo ago
Oh you.

stavros 2mo ago

The need is that writing is expensive. An LLM is around a hundred times cheaper than a human, so this kind of article that doesn't provide tons of value just makes sense to write with an LLM. I hate LLM writing, but the economics checks out.

iLoveOncall 2mo ago
How about not writing the article at all then?
- stavros 2mo ago
  Because people will read it if you write it, hence us being here.
  - frizlab 2mo ago
    Meh. I read the comments on HN, rarely the articles /(semi-)s
    - stavros 2mo ago
      What would we comment on if there were no article?
      - bluGill 2mo ago
        There is the headline. In the typical case someone can write a comment (sometimes off the headline, sometimes have read the article) and it quickly becomes obvious that person is more knowledgeable that whoever wrote the article in the first place. Thus in many cases reading the comments is more valuable than the article.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
throwaway67743 2mo ago
That might apply to some things, but there is little to no value in this article, so the economics are the same as the spam - cheap to spew garbage while providing no value and wasting the readers time. It's not something that should be encouraged. RIPE should know better.
mrweasel 2mo ago
> The need is that writing is expensive. That's the thing, good writing is expensive, massively so, much more than people think. Letting the machine do the writing however shows us that many people have no idea why writing is expensive, nor do they respect that perhaps it needs to be expensive. Communication is incredibly hard, very few master it. I'd even go so far as to say that clear, precise and readable communication is so hard that we do not have sufficient training data to build an LLM that can do it. Letting a person write article, like this one, doesn't necessarily improve the quality, but it does show us that some thought and effort have at least been put into it. There was a cost and you deemed that cost worth it for conveying your message. Without the cost there's nothing stopping you from wasting peoples time.

ferngodfather 2mo ago

> The domains didn't disappear; they moved. I stopped reading at this point. I cannot emphasize how much I HATE this AI writing style.

gr 2mo ago
Wait, what makes it AI and hateful, the `;` there?! Is this in the same vein as using — em dashes? Are people with minimal regard to typography and style doomed to lower their standards because the masses can't even?
- xtracto 2mo ago
  To me, what makes it hateful is that it is EVERYWHERE. Reddit is full of it, LinkedIn is full of it, the web is full of it. Shit, even Facebook has it now. It's kind of sad. I compare it to when Memes started becoming popular as communication tools on the internet (mid 2000s from what i recall): Instead of writing text to convey the idea they wanted, people just pasted a meme (my face when ... whatever). Now with AI, everyone write everything in the same way.
  - joquarky 1mo ago
    Why take a negative view of what is occurring? I'm looking at this as having the potential to destroy one of the most harmful technologies to have been invented: social media. If it gets sloppy enough, people may revert to more humane communications.
- ferngodfather 2mo ago
  It's the semicolon and the phrasing together. I can't explain but after you use AI a little you just notice the way it 'writes'.
cube00 2mo ago
> Dictionary-based classification has a ceiling, and I want to be honest about where it is. I stopped here, anytime an author (or likely AI) feels the need to tell me they're being honest or "genuine" I don't need to read any further. I'll assume honesty but the minute you explicitly tell me, you've probably got an angle that I'm too dumb to see, but I'm not dumb enough to keep reading.

mherdelight 2mo ago

Are we even sure the actual stuff in the article is real? What if it's just the usual LLM hallucinations

jstummbillig 2mo ago

> Is everyone really this lazy now? Everyone should aim to be this lazy. Everyone is trying to maximize their time. This is what software has always done. It helps people be lazy in some respect, and then, so far, we have always found new stuff to do with the time we freed up. LLMs got decent at writing, and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back. Of course, this is contingent on your current goal: If you want to get better at writing, you should do the writing, just like you want to do the math, if you want to learn multiplication. Writing is fine as a tool just to get information across. It needn't be more than that for everyone.

bastawhiz 2mo ago
And soon, I'll be lazy and use an LLM to do the reading for me. Eventually the LLMs will train on the state of the world and decide to be lazy also, and the "writer's" LLM prompt will just be shared with the "reader": nobody actually needed all those words anyway! Maybe someday we'll get rid of the links on HN and we can just share and consume headlines.
bilekas 2mo ago
Efficiency and lazyness are two very distinct things. As is quality and quantity.
mc32 2mo ago
The ability for people to communicate is paramount. Without the ability to communicate there is no progress. We might as well be deaf, dumb and perhaps blind. Delegating this task to automation serves to undermine all the masters and indeed strengthen the servants. Short term this offload is good for people; long term it’ll lead to mental rot where people are hard pressed to put their ideas forward and give up in exasperation when they don’t have the assistance of their servants. Their ability to even make the proper requests to the servants may deteriorate enough that their existence may come to rely on the benevolence of their servants.
RobotToaster 2mo ago
>LLMs got decent at writing, Judging by people's response, that doesn't seem to be the case. > and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back. I'll read articles written by them if and when that happens, but not before.

cryo32 2mo ago

I have people writing emails to me with an LLM now. We've gone from meetings where "this could have been an email" to emails where "this could have been a few carefully chosen words, not a rambling diatribe which would test the most hardcore Tolstoy fan". Kill me. With a spoon. Slowly.

tsukikage 2mo ago
You’re supposed to use an AI on your end to get the original few words back, so the providers get paid twice for the same email as is their right
- cryo32 2mo ago
  As a cheap ass I just delete it. They DM me later to ask why I haven't responded to their email, to which the response is "did you write it?".

frereubu 2mo ago

I really wish there was an HN guideline that I could point to which says that you shouldn't complain about LLM writing, in the same way that's there's guidance on site annoyances: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." LLM-written content is now too common to be interesting and complaining about it does not make it stop, it just derails comment sections. The reptitive complaints are getting as annoying as the LLM-written content!

ViktorRay 2mo ago
Wait isn’t there actually the opposite HN guideline? In that LLM generated content is not allowed here?
- zenoprax 2mo ago
  Comments are for humans but I don't think there is any reason for HN to police the submissions as a policy. If any article lacks credibility or merit to the extent that one can't even finish reading it then just ignore it and move on. Vote for something else. If "LLM aversion" is your rationale, so be it. Personally, I usually check the comments before deciding to read something so I appreciate that others have saved me the trouble of reading this article in particular. If the author doesn't care enough to use human time to write it then I am not going to use human time to read it.
  - bahmboo 2mo ago
    Wow. That's outsourcing a lot of thought, overriding your individual interpretation. I guess it's pretty common here.
    - esterna 2mo ago
      This also applies to reading restaurant reviews before visiting. Or for that matter, reading any published book you outsource judgement to the publishing house (what books they pick up). Or, if you are easily convinced by jargon: Exploration has a non-zero opportunity cost.