17 ms·

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generat

by gortok 2mo ago

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?

coderatlarge 2mo ago
i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc
- otterley 2mo ago
  The benefit and promise of social media, at least early on, was that it was supposed to be authentic - that when someone posted, it was really coming from them. Engagement was truly personal, at least for a little while. It still is for most. In the book-publishing context, ghost writers have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.
- account42 2mo ago
  Are you implying that one should not be offended by that? It's commonly mocked when it becomes apparent.
  - coderatlarge 2mo ago
    well it’s widely understood that any large scale social media account is managed by a team and not the individual being represented and we seem broadly ok with that. what those teams produce is often vapid manipulative corporate bs which i don’t find any less offensive for it being typed by humans earning a salary as compared to tensors assembling copy via gpu. the current anti AI sentiment strikes me as a bit of a high-minded pose when the actual underlying behaviors have been in place for a while.
sailfast 2mo ago
It is offensive and reviling. But people do it anyway. People are lazy. And often don’t care about you, the reader.
fluidcruft 2mo ago
It's like when you type a search in Google and get a wall of SEO spam. I do feel like there is some middle ground where AI helps, but there's this one guy who keeps emailing everyone with walls of dumbass text and does not integrate or understand the feedback he gets when we are telling him what he needs to do. He just runs it though the LLM and replies and then forgets half of it in the next email engagement which functions as /clear on his end apparently. Like... dude I have ChatGPT and Claude, too. Actually read your goddamn emails.
- paimapi 2mo ago
  I was going to say, the acceptance of bottom-of-the-barrel and subsequent capital investment in SEO as some industry-standard practice has pretty much lowered our standards for writing and comprehensibility across the board it probably doesn't help that the US education system is so deeply broken with how rooted it is in segregation-era practices [0][1][2]. the average gets dragged down quite a bit when some districts receive so much money that they're flying their Spell Bowl teams to nationals and putting them up in hotels while another one a few miles away can't afford to pay for textbooks. average reading levels suffer and consequently so too does the effort that people put into writing well and reading critically [0] https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding [1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/shared-future-interdependence-housing-and-school-segregation https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/s... [2] https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/ https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/
m463 2mo ago
AI;WR
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
ModernMech 2mo ago
I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that? If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?
- dspillett 2mo ago
  > If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over? Depends on his countenance and how good a mood I'm feeling in! In any case I might well ask how much time went into at least reviewing the output. Or I say (rather than a flat AI;WR) "I'll scan that and have an AI summerise it for me later".
- quickthrowman 2mo ago
  > If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over? I would crumple up the flyer, throw it on the ground, and then ask for another one. Then I would crumple up that flyer, throw it on the ground, and ask for another one. I would repeat this until he refuses to give me another flyer.
- Calazon 2mo ago
  Is there something in particular I'm trying to glean from that information? If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it. If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.
  - ModernMech 2mo ago
    > If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it. Right, exactly, that's what you'd do whether he spend 10 hours on it or 10 minutes.
- 2mo ago
venzaspa 2mo ago
People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.
- cheschire 2mo ago
  What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.
  - rockinghigh 2mo ago
    Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.
    - jackjeff 2mo ago
      There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.
      - thatjoeoverthr 2mo ago
        I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander. Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."
        johnnyanmac 2mo ago
        >Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good." Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet). For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.
tpoacher 2mo ago
I completely agree in principle, but to play devil's advocate, if an "author's" prompting technique is better than mine such that they generate a more useful article than what my own AI session might produce on average, then maybe there's value in some generated articles. The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.
- mediaman 2mo ago
  It's possible, but I've experimented with different style guides and prompt methods and have never gotten it to output what I'd call "good" writing. It is almost always low information density. Sometimes I can get it to remove most of the extraordinarily cliche phrases it injects into everything, along with the tortured, gauche prose (especially Claude). But what remains is an expansion algorithm: it takes a simple idea and expands it like polyurethane foam to fill however much space it can take, the volume filled mainly by grammatical syntax and only traced with any actual semantic meaning.
  - tpoacher 2mo ago
    Fair enough, but to be fair, that just sounds like bad defaults to me. Most of the things you describe mostly go away with a nice customised system prompt.
  - elendilm 2mo ago
    One can give details of a product and ask the ai to generate the documentation.
  - gowld 2mo ago
    "Good" is subjective, but I found this OOTB sufficiently information-dense and easy-to-customize: https://claude.ai/share/ac747c6d-2a62-40b7-b33e-06a94cf34344 https://claude.ai/share/ac747c6d-2a62-40b7-b33e-06a94cf34344
BeetleB 2mo ago
> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link". But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content. (And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.) > If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you. To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.
- watwut 2mo ago
  > If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content. No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not.
  - BeetleB 2mo ago
    > No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not. Meet "the masses". Sorry, but no. Sending me a link as an alternative to having a conversation is totally not OK.
    - watwut 2mo ago
      I recommend this great book, blog or whatever is completely fine in the middle of the conversation. And it is not the same as "I had AI generate this".
      - 2mo ago
noman-land 2mo ago
You and I and everyone else need to make it clear to people who do this that we don't like them doing this and we think they are uncool.
- dspillett 2mo ago
  Me calling someone uncool would be rather hypocritical in afraid! I've done some interesting things, cool even, but that doesn't necessarily make conversation with me interesting/cool! I'll go with letting them know I find it dickish and perhaps even a tad offensive.
  - sebastiennight 2mo ago
    Counterpoint: if you're uncool yourself, you might be uncool enough to call out uncoolness, from a "game recognizes game" point of view
    - blitzar 2mo ago
      lame recognises lame
      - dspillett 2mo ago
        That I shall have to purloin.
dspillett 2mo ago
> that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour (I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them): "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't". My more considered reaction is pretty much exactly the same. For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI. I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).
- account42 2mo ago
  > I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them That it is plausible to have come from any of the major ones just means that they all should be avoided. Which is of course not a very practical insight. > unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later That would be the point where our friendship is over (or rather I acknowledge the fact that it was already over) and I delete & block the contact.
giancarlostoro 2mo ago
This is why even if I ask GPT or Claude or whatever to rewrite an email, I still rewrite it by hand with my own words, what I look for is, did the AI remove sentences where I repated myself or that were too wordy? Perfect, I'll ommit those details.
- jaredsohn 2mo ago
  Could probably ask the AI what changes they'd make to the email.
scarecrowbob 2mo ago
Getting an AI response from folks has a very "let me google that for you" kind of feel. If you're not familiar with the concept... https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy
godwinson__4-8 2mo ago
Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale. None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself. Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question. Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination. People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway. No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.
thih9 2mo ago
> If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it? You are likely not the target audience anymore and they don't care if you're going to read it.
sobellian 2mo ago
A few thoughts. - I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection. - I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response. - In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify. - The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.
- dhorthy 2mo ago
  > AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt this a thousand times this LLMs are information transformers. if you're trying to take some rough idea and blow it out into something that "feels" substantive, you're just combining your high-signal idea / prompt with a bunch of meaningless bloat and noise from the model weights.
- metobehonest 1mo ago
  >The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. I think we're already there. We started having database issues after a rushed deploy (the PR diff had +100k lines). Everyone was pasting random Fable output as gospel and grasping at straws running random "create index concurrently" statements directly in production while I was slowly reading library documentation, testing hypotheses, gathering logs. One colleague was completely in denial that his vibe coded "optimizations" that went into the update could have anything to do with the problem. I eventually found that the "optimizations", naively trying to optimize for page "first contentful paint" were prefetching pages whenever users hovered over anything and creating a barrage of requests. And people seem really proud of what they "generate" too, not at all worried that they might be offloading the consequences to others. It's a stupid, tiring time to be working in software.
blitzar 2mo ago
Is Ai really any more offensive than the templated influencer slop of the past few years? If your favourite creator is engaged in generating this style of content, then I think it says more about your tastes than their morals. Don't smash the like button, don't share and unsubscribe.
- edaemon 2mo ago
  Volume is the problem. There's so much more of it now. Many platforms I used to enjoy are just overwhelmed with valueless content.
  - blitzar 2mo ago
    On platforms where you can not curate what you are fed, the healthiest option is to leave.
    - a96 2mo ago
      Yes. Volume is rarely the problem unless there's too little. Filter/search is the problem if desired material exists.
    - account42 2mo ago
      The problem is unless it becomes socially unacceptable might run out of platforms. It's not just influencers doing this, it goes as far as "normal" posters in old-school forums.
- crab_galaxy 2mo ago
  Everyone is fighting OP on this extremely reasonable take when some of us are dealing with coworkers that copy slack messages/JIRA ticket comments/PR feedback into Claude and respond with the pasted output as is back like that’s completely acceptable. Like I don’t need to be placated by someone else’s AI agent when I call out something in a PR, especially when they have such an aversion to conciseness and resolution
  - 2mo ago
bdangubic 2mo ago
while i might not have written it, i used my masters in prompt engineering to carefully guide its creation :)
- LPisGood 2mo ago
  If this is not sarcastic, which school gives such a masters
  - bdangubic 2mo ago
    was joking but there are (way too many) “agentic” things at Unis already (Virginia Tech, MIT…)
Insimwytim 2mo ago
I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation. LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say. They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1] So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763
- notahacker 2mo ago
  I believe you've just described 95% of things posted to LinkedIn...
  - Quekid5 2mo ago
    LinkedIn was overtaken by LLM nonsense at about the release of ChatGPT 3... I mean it was incredibly stupid and transparent engagement slop before that, but still. I remember talking to a business type who was so incredibly proud that GPT could turn his incredibly vapid thoughts into bland pointlessness on LinkedIn... not realizing that everyone in his feed was doing the same thing. We never did business with him for ... reasons, obviously :)
- deleted 2mo ago
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- yoyohello13 2mo ago
  Wow! that comment you linked speaks to me. I was watching a review video for a game yesterday that was so obviously written by AI it was actually painful to listen to. I started reading the comments and there were several people praising this Youtuber on their great use of metaphor. Literally "subbed because you're such an amazing writer." It actually shook me to my core. If those were real people making those comments, there is no hope for us. I need to believe those were mostly bot comments just to maintain my sanity.
throwaway98797 2mo ago
it’s not that it’s ai generated it’s that it’s bad.
fragmede 2mo ago
It takes energy to generate the LLM response. If you read the already generated response instead of generating your own, we burn less coal.
- account42 2mo ago
  Now add the energy needed by the human to read the response (not to mention his finite lifetime) to your calculation.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    ...yes? It is up to the human as to how to interpret it. They can choose to not actually read it, but focus on whether or not it was written by AI, or instead they could focus on what the text is saying, AI or human generated. If the sky is red, does it matter if the AI generated those three words vs a human? The sky is red! So it's a good point to make, but it's on them too decide how they want to use it.
ithkuil 2mo ago
Don't get me wrong, I loathe the AI style as the next person. But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output. That's an added value Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read
- LPisGood 2mo ago
  They don’t review the output. That’s the thing. No one is reading this stuff, not all of it at the least.
- oblio 2mo ago
  It's still a lower effort contribution and because the surface is plausible and the content is usually verbose, it's a bigger waste of time for the other party than a low effort 100% human contribution.
- gspr 2mo ago
  Steered it?! If I'm gonna read it, I want someone to have written it, not bloody "steered" it! "Why are you upset with this restaurant meal? Okay it wasn't actually cooked here per se, but the chef certainly reheated it and carefully monitored the microwave oven while doing so!" This crap just needs to end. "Steering" words at another human being is incredibly disrespectful.
  - ithkuil 2mo ago
    big restaurants have many cooks that are trained and monitored by the chef, but the chef is certainly not necessarily prepairing your meal. The chef is however responsible for the outcome so you're absolutely right to complain if the meal sucks and most of this AI written crap definitely sucks to read. That said, it's not about the "principle" of having your meal cooked by the chef / the text written word by word by the human. It's about the outcome. People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose) and it's absolutely despicable that so many people are so eager to lower our standards in quality just because everybody else seems to be doing it.
cyanydeez 2mo ago
ok, what part of the last decade led you to believe that communication decency has radically improved.?
Aramgutang 2mo ago
There's an old meme tweet that goes like this: > the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past. But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously. It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.
xdennis 2mo ago
> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.
- tom_ 2mo ago
  It's typically referred to as CE to indicate the speaker's personal lack of belief in the divinity of Jesus, that might be implied by using the term anno domini. Nobody is under any illusion about whose birth began this era.
- account42 2mo ago
  > we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god I like how this could be offensive to both Christians (Jesus isn't god) and anti-Christians.
- queenkjuul 2mo ago
  Hard to believe in this the year 2026 CE that somebody cares enough to cry about the letters used to denote the year
- unethical_ban 1mo ago
  The fact that the number is still based on the birth of Christ shows people are not pretending it isn't based on that. The term CE was adopted to lessen the implied endorsement of said religion via the terms Christ and "the year of OUR lord".
freetime2 2mo ago
What's astonishing to me is how quickly people at my workplace have adopted this habit. Six months ago my manager was vociferously complaining about his boss asking him to review a lengthy document that was clearly AI generated, saying that his boss wasn't even capable of understanding the document the LLM had created. Now the majority of technical communication I get from my manager is just a transcript exported directly from ChatGPT. Recently on a call with a junior coworker where they asked me to look at some changes they had made, they were completely unable to answer any questions that I asked on their own. The way the conversation went was: I ask a question, they type my question into a ChatGPT prompt, we read the output together and discuss whether it makes sense. This is a person I've had great discussions with in the past, and who has frequently had really good insights, but seems to have completely tapped out. To be fair, the outputs from ChatGPT tend to be quite good. It's the inputs people give it where problems most often arise - and people seem far too eager to charge ahead with a vibe coded solution built on invalid or incomplete inputs/assumptions. And it's shocking to see how quickly and willingly people have handed over control to LLMs.
- Twirrim 2mo ago
  I've been wondering lately if this is about the end of the road for me for a career in tech (I've had a good long one, so.. maybe?). I'm so tired of AI Slopped architecture documents, code, messages in slack, emails etc. I'm close to flat out rejecting any architecture doc I get that's written by an LLM, because I'm not sure the engineers even understand what they're proposing. The code is often a nightmare under the hood, even if it works. I've got smart coworkers who now just copy paste everything via an LLM giving themselves something approaching a lobotomy in the process.
  - freetime2 2mo ago
    I've decided to leave my current company. It's mostly the result of burnout from working many years at an unsatisfying job, but the advent of AI has certainly exacerbated things. I no longer need the income (although it's certainly nice), and recently have begun to dread the start of every work day. It's time for a change. I may just get out of the tech industry altogether. But I'm also tempted to try my hand at an indie dev project that I have in mind. With AI, it seems like it would be easier than ever to get a new project off the ground. And I don't really mind AI-assisted development personally. It's mainly all the organizational and interpersonal disruption that is giving me a headache at the moment.
fhe 2mo ago
maybe it's not so absolute. if someone else has the talent or takes the effort to come up with a clever prompt that got an interesting response from an LLM, I'd want to read it too. Treating LLMs as a tool, this is not so different from someone else using Blender to create an interesting animation.
jerezzprime 2mo ago
To play devil's advocate here, it is possible for someone to simultaneously use AI to write and also not be a meat proxy. I'm not saying that is the norm, but I have written docs where the vast majority of the words come from AI, but I also spent multiple days on the substance and content.
- Ampersander 2mo ago
  Maybe if you only use the LLM to proof read or something? I don't know if LLMs are actually any good for this purpose, but it's something I came to think of when trying to answer your question. I do think that it is very difficult to not be a meat proxy when you utilize an LLM for writing tasks. These tools are computer programs that generate text, so what else would you do with it than have it write for you? This is being a meat proxy. Trying to avoid being a meat proxy can quickly eat the supposed productivity gains of using an LLM in the first place. Like say I need to write an article about some subject and it would take me the entire day to complete this task without an LLM. I can get some sort of article out of an LLM by simply asking, I don't need to think about the subject myself at all. The LLM productivity promise is also fulfilled, because I did an entire days work in a minute or so. Now if I also need to read and understand the work, and be able to defend it or explain it to others as if I produced it myself, then this will take a lot of time. If on top of this I need to edit the text to sound like me rather than an LLM, then I probably still need the whole day for this task and I have lost all the productivity increase that I sought from using the LLM. It's the thinking that takes time when you write, not typing. But you can't do the thinking and avoid doing it at the same time. The same idea applies to coding too. Doing code review and requiring the author and reviewer to read and understand the code basically eliminates all the productivity gains that using the LLM was supposed to provide. Throw out the reviewing, reading, and understanding and we can have each developer producing a thousand kloc per day, over 1000x productivity. If we don't throw those out, we are comparatively in the exact same spot as not using LLMs at all.
  - account42 2mo ago
    Yes, it's like people have forgotten that junior contributors you can't trust yet often have net negative productivity due to the time you need to invest to review and guide them.
scotty79 2mo ago
I'd rather read something novel but AI generated, than the opinion I've seen few times already. Like yours.

by gortok 2mo ago

coderatlarge 2mo ago

i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc

otterley 2mo ago
The benefit and promise of social media, at least early on, was that it was supposed to be authentic - that when someone posted, it was really coming from them. Engagement was truly personal, at least for a little while. It still is for most. In the book-publishing context, ghost writers have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.
account42 2mo ago
Are you implying that one should not be offended by that? It's commonly mocked when it becomes apparent.
- coderatlarge 2mo ago
  well it’s widely understood that any large scale social media account is managed by a team and not the individual being represented and we seem broadly ok with that. what those teams produce is often vapid manipulative corporate bs which i don’t find any less offensive for it being typed by humans earning a salary as compared to tensors assembling copy via gpu. the current anti AI sentiment strikes me as a bit of a high-minded pose when the actual underlying behaviors have been in place for a while.

sailfast 2mo ago

It is offensive and reviling. But people do it anyway. People are lazy. And often don’t care about you, the reader.

fluidcruft 2mo ago

It's like when you type a search in Google and get a wall of SEO spam. I do feel like there is some middle ground where AI helps, but there's this one guy who keeps emailing everyone with walls of dumbass text and does not integrate or understand the feedback he gets when we are telling him what he needs to do. He just runs it though the LLM and replies and then forgets half of it in the next email engagement which functions as /clear on his end apparently. Like... dude I have ChatGPT and Claude, too. Actually read your goddamn emails.

paimapi 2mo ago
I was going to say, the acceptance of bottom-of-the-barrel and subsequent capital investment in SEO as some industry-standard practice has pretty much lowered our standards for writing and comprehensibility across the board it probably doesn't help that the US education system is so deeply broken with how rooted it is in segregation-era practices [0][1][2]. the average gets dragged down quite a bit when some districts receive so much money that they're flying their Spell Bowl teams to nationals and putting them up in hotels while another one a few miles away can't afford to pay for textbooks. average reading levels suffer and consequently so too does the effort that people put into writing well and reading critically [0] https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding [1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/shared-future-interdependence-housing-and-school-segregation https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/s... [2] https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/ https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/

m463 2mo ago

AI;WR

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

ModernMech 2mo ago

I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that? If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

dspillett 2mo ago
> If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over? Depends on his countenance and how good a mood I'm feeling in! In any case I might well ask how much time went into at least reviewing the output. Or I say (rather than a flat AI;WR) "I'll scan that and have an AI summerise it for me later".
quickthrowman 2mo ago
> If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over? I would crumple up the flyer, throw it on the ground, and then ask for another one. Then I would crumple up that flyer, throw it on the ground, and ask for another one. I would repeat this until he refuses to give me another flyer.
Calazon 2mo ago
Is there something in particular I'm trying to glean from that information? If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it. If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.
- ModernMech 2mo ago
  > If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it. Right, exactly, that's what you'd do whether he spend 10 hours on it or 10 minutes.
2mo ago

venzaspa 2mo ago

People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.

cheschire 2mo ago
What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.
- rockinghigh 2mo ago
  Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.
  - jackjeff 2mo ago
    There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.
    - thatjoeoverthr 2mo ago
      I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander. Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."
      - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
        >Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good." Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet). For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.

tpoacher 2mo ago

I completely agree in principle, but to play devil's advocate, if an "author's" prompting technique is better than mine such that they generate a more useful article than what my own AI session might produce on average, then maybe there's value in some generated articles. The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.

mediaman 2mo ago
It's possible, but I've experimented with different style guides and prompt methods and have never gotten it to output what I'd call "good" writing. It is almost always low information density. Sometimes I can get it to remove most of the extraordinarily cliche phrases it injects into everything, along with the tortured, gauche prose (especially Claude). But what remains is an expansion algorithm: it takes a simple idea and expands it like polyurethane foam to fill however much space it can take, the volume filled mainly by grammatical syntax and only traced with any actual semantic meaning.
- tpoacher 2mo ago
  Fair enough, but to be fair, that just sounds like bad defaults to me. Most of the things you describe mostly go away with a nice customised system prompt.
- elendilm 2mo ago
  One can give details of a product and ask the ai to generate the documentation.
- gowld 2mo ago
  "Good" is subjective, but I found this OOTB sufficiently information-dense and easy-to-customize: https://claude.ai/share/ac747c6d-2a62-40b7-b33e-06a94cf34344 https://claude.ai/share/ac747c6d-2a62-40b7-b33e-06a94cf34344

BeetleB 2mo ago

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link". But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content. (And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.) > If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you. To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.

watwut 2mo ago
> If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content. No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not.
- BeetleB 2mo ago
  > No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not. Meet "the masses". Sorry, but no. Sending me a link as an alternative to having a conversation is totally not OK.
  - watwut 2mo ago
    I recommend this great book, blog or whatever is completely fine in the middle of the conversation. And it is not the same as "I had AI generate this".
    - 2mo ago

noman-land 2mo ago

You and I and everyone else need to make it clear to people who do this that we don't like them doing this and we think they are uncool.

dspillett 2mo ago
Me calling someone uncool would be rather hypocritical in afraid! I've done some interesting things, cool even, but that doesn't necessarily make conversation with me interesting/cool! I'll go with letting them know I find it dickish and perhaps even a tad offensive.
- sebastiennight 2mo ago
  Counterpoint: if you're uncool yourself, you might be uncool enough to call out uncoolness, from a "game recognizes game" point of view
  - blitzar 2mo ago
    lame recognises lame
    - dspillett 2mo ago
      That I shall have to purloin.

dspillett 2mo ago

> that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour (I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them): "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't". My more considered reaction is pretty much exactly the same. For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI. I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).

account42 2mo ago
> I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them That it is plausible to have come from any of the major ones just means that they all should be avoided. Which is of course not a very practical insight. > unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later That would be the point where our friendship is over (or rather I acknowledge the fact that it was already over) and I delete & block the contact.

giancarlostoro 2mo ago

This is why even if I ask GPT or Claude or whatever to rewrite an email, I still rewrite it by hand with my own words, what I look for is, did the AI remove sentences where I repated myself or that were too wordy? Perfect, I'll ommit those details.

jaredsohn 2mo ago
Could probably ask the AI what changes they'd make to the email.

scarecrowbob 2mo ago

Getting an AI response from folks has a very "let me google that for you" kind of feel. If you're not familiar with the concept... https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy

godwinson__4-8 2mo ago

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale. None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself. Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question. Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination. People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway. No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.

thih9 2mo ago

> If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it? You are likely not the target audience anymore and they don't care if you're going to read it.

sobellian 2mo ago

A few thoughts. - I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection. - I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response. - In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify. - The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.

dhorthy 2mo ago
> AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt this a thousand times this LLMs are information transformers. if you're trying to take some rough idea and blow it out into something that "feels" substantive, you're just combining your high-signal idea / prompt with a bunch of meaningless bloat and noise from the model weights.
metobehonest 1mo ago
>The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. I think we're already there. We started having database issues after a rushed deploy (the PR diff had +100k lines). Everyone was pasting random Fable output as gospel and grasping at straws running random "create index concurrently" statements directly in production while I was slowly reading library documentation, testing hypotheses, gathering logs. One colleague was completely in denial that his vibe coded "optimizations" that went into the update could have anything to do with the problem. I eventually found that the "optimizations", naively trying to optimize for page "first contentful paint" were prefetching pages whenever users hovered over anything and creating a barrage of requests. And people seem really proud of what they "generate" too, not at all worried that they might be offloading the consequences to others. It's a stupid, tiring time to be working in software.

blitzar 2mo ago

Is Ai really any more offensive than the templated influencer slop of the past few years? If your favourite creator is engaged in generating this style of content, then I think it says more about your tastes than their morals. Don't smash the like button, don't share and unsubscribe.

edaemon 2mo ago
Volume is the problem. There's so much more of it now. Many platforms I used to enjoy are just overwhelmed with valueless content.
- blitzar 2mo ago
  On platforms where you can not curate what you are fed, the healthiest option is to leave.
  - a96 2mo ago
    Yes. Volume is rarely the problem unless there's too little. Filter/search is the problem if desired material exists.
  - account42 2mo ago
    The problem is unless it becomes socially unacceptable might run out of platforms. It's not just influencers doing this, it goes as far as "normal" posters in old-school forums.
crab_galaxy 2mo ago
Everyone is fighting OP on this extremely reasonable take when some of us are dealing with coworkers that copy slack messages/JIRA ticket comments/PR feedback into Claude and respond with the pasted output as is back like that’s completely acceptable. Like I don’t need to be placated by someone else’s AI agent when I call out something in a PR, especially when they have such an aversion to conciseness and resolution
- 2mo ago

bdangubic 2mo ago

while i might not have written it, i used my masters in prompt engineering to carefully guide its creation :)

LPisGood 2mo ago
If this is not sarcastic, which school gives such a masters
- bdangubic 2mo ago
  was joking but there are (way too many) “agentic” things at Unis already (Virginia Tech, MIT…)

Insimwytim 2mo ago

I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation. LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say. They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1] So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763

notahacker 2mo ago
I believe you've just described 95% of things posted to LinkedIn...
- Quekid5 2mo ago
  LinkedIn was overtaken by LLM nonsense at about the release of ChatGPT 3... I mean it was incredibly stupid and transparent engagement slop before that, but still. I remember talking to a business type who was so incredibly proud that GPT could turn his incredibly vapid thoughts into bland pointlessness on LinkedIn... not realizing that everyone in his feed was doing the same thing. We never did business with him for ... reasons, obviously :)
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yoyohello13 2mo ago
Wow! that comment you linked speaks to me. I was watching a review video for a game yesterday that was so obviously written by AI it was actually painful to listen to. I started reading the comments and there were several people praising this Youtuber on their great use of metaphor. Literally "subbed because you're such an amazing writer." It actually shook me to my core. If those were real people making those comments, there is no hope for us. I need to believe those were mostly bot comments just to maintain my sanity.

throwaway98797 2mo ago

it’s not that it’s ai generated it’s that it’s bad.

fragmede 2mo ago

It takes energy to generate the LLM response. If you read the already generated response instead of generating your own, we burn less coal.

account42 2mo ago
Now add the energy needed by the human to read the response (not to mention his finite lifetime) to your calculation.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  ...yes? It is up to the human as to how to interpret it. They can choose to not actually read it, but focus on whether or not it was written by AI, or instead they could focus on what the text is saying, AI or human generated. If the sky is red, does it matter if the AI generated those three words vs a human? The sky is red! So it's a good point to make, but it's on them too decide how they want to use it.

ithkuil 2mo ago

Don't get me wrong, I loathe the AI style as the next person. But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output. That's an added value Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read

LPisGood 2mo ago
They don’t review the output. That’s the thing. No one is reading this stuff, not all of it at the least.
oblio 2mo ago
It's still a lower effort contribution and because the surface is plausible and the content is usually verbose, it's a bigger waste of time for the other party than a low effort 100% human contribution.
gspr 2mo ago
Steered it?! If I'm gonna read it, I want someone to have written it, not bloody "steered" it! "Why are you upset with this restaurant meal? Okay it wasn't actually cooked here per se, but the chef certainly reheated it and carefully monitored the microwave oven while doing so!" This crap just needs to end. "Steering" words at another human being is incredibly disrespectful.
- ithkuil 2mo ago
  big restaurants have many cooks that are trained and monitored by the chef, but the chef is certainly not necessarily prepairing your meal. The chef is however responsible for the outcome so you're absolutely right to complain if the meal sucks and most of this AI written crap definitely sucks to read. That said, it's not about the "principle" of having your meal cooked by the chef / the text written word by word by the human. It's about the outcome. People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose) and it's absolutely despicable that so many people are so eager to lower our standards in quality just because everybody else seems to be doing it.

cyanydeez 2mo ago

ok, what part of the last decade led you to believe that communication decency has radically improved.?

Aramgutang 2mo ago

There's an old meme tweet that goes like this: > the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past. But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously. It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.

xdennis 2mo ago

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.

tom_ 2mo ago
It's typically referred to as CE to indicate the speaker's personal lack of belief in the divinity of Jesus, that might be implied by using the term anno domini. Nobody is under any illusion about whose birth began this era.
account42 2mo ago
> we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god I like how this could be offensive to both Christians (Jesus isn't god) and anti-Christians.
queenkjuul 2mo ago
Hard to believe in this the year 2026 CE that somebody cares enough to cry about the letters used to denote the year
unethical_ban 1mo ago
The fact that the number is still based on the birth of Christ shows people are not pretending it isn't based on that. The term CE was adopted to lessen the implied endorsement of said religion via the terms Christ and "the year of OUR lord".

freetime2 2mo ago

What's astonishing to me is how quickly people at my workplace have adopted this habit. Six months ago my manager was vociferously complaining about his boss asking him to review a lengthy document that was clearly AI generated, saying that his boss wasn't even capable of understanding the document the LLM had created. Now the majority of technical communication I get from my manager is just a transcript exported directly from ChatGPT. Recently on a call with a junior coworker where they asked me to look at some changes they had made, they were completely unable to answer any questions that I asked on their own. The way the conversation went was: I ask a question, they type my question into a ChatGPT prompt, we read the output together and discuss whether it makes sense. This is a person I've had great discussions with in the past, and who has frequently had really good insights, but seems to have completely tapped out. To be fair, the outputs from ChatGPT tend to be quite good. It's the inputs people give it where problems most often arise - and people seem far too eager to charge ahead with a vibe coded solution built on invalid or incomplete inputs/assumptions. And it's shocking to see how quickly and willingly people have handed over control to LLMs.

Twirrim 2mo ago
I've been wondering lately if this is about the end of the road for me for a career in tech (I've had a good long one, so.. maybe?). I'm so tired of AI Slopped architecture documents, code, messages in slack, emails etc. I'm close to flat out rejecting any architecture doc I get that's written by an LLM, because I'm not sure the engineers even understand what they're proposing. The code is often a nightmare under the hood, even if it works. I've got smart coworkers who now just copy paste everything via an LLM giving themselves something approaching a lobotomy in the process.
- freetime2 2mo ago
  I've decided to leave my current company. It's mostly the result of burnout from working many years at an unsatisfying job, but the advent of AI has certainly exacerbated things. I no longer need the income (although it's certainly nice), and recently have begun to dread the start of every work day. It's time for a change. I may just get out of the tech industry altogether. But I'm also tempted to try my hand at an indie dev project that I have in mind. With AI, it seems like it would be easier than ever to get a new project off the ground. And I don't really mind AI-assisted development personally. It's mainly all the organizational and interpersonal disruption that is giving me a headache at the moment.

fhe 2mo ago

maybe it's not so absolute. if someone else has the talent or takes the effort to come up with a clever prompt that got an interesting response from an LLM, I'd want to read it too. Treating LLMs as a tool, this is not so different from someone else using Blender to create an interesting animation.

jerezzprime 2mo ago

To play devil's advocate here, it is possible for someone to simultaneously use AI to write and also not be a meat proxy. I'm not saying that is the norm, but I have written docs where the vast majority of the words come from AI, but I also spent multiple days on the substance and content.

Ampersander 2mo ago
Maybe if you only use the LLM to proof read or something? I don't know if LLMs are actually any good for this purpose, but it's something I came to think of when trying to answer your question. I do think that it is very difficult to not be a meat proxy when you utilize an LLM for writing tasks. These tools are computer programs that generate text, so what else would you do with it than have it write for you? This is being a meat proxy. Trying to avoid being a meat proxy can quickly eat the supposed productivity gains of using an LLM in the first place. Like say I need to write an article about some subject and it would take me the entire day to complete this task without an LLM. I can get some sort of article out of an LLM by simply asking, I don't need to think about the subject myself at all. The LLM productivity promise is also fulfilled, because I did an entire days work in a minute or so. Now if I also need to read and understand the work, and be able to defend it or explain it to others as if I produced it myself, then this will take a lot of time. If on top of this I need to edit the text to sound like me rather than an LLM, then I probably still need the whole day for this task and I have lost all the productivity increase that I sought from using the LLM. It's the thinking that takes time when you write, not typing. But you can't do the thinking and avoid doing it at the same time. The same idea applies to coding too. Doing code review and requiring the author and reviewer to read and understand the code basically eliminates all the productivity gains that using the LLM was supposed to provide. Throw out the reviewing, reading, and understanding and we can have each developer producing a thousand kloc per day, over 1000x productivity. If we don't throw those out, we are comparatively in the exact same spot as not using LLMs at all.
- account42 2mo ago
  Yes, it's like people have forgotten that junior contributors you can't trust yet often have net negative productivity due to the time you need to invest to review and guide them.

scotty79 2mo ago

I'd rather read something novel but AI generated, than the opinion I've seen few times already. Like yours.