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>But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... Not the same burden. The value of the

by coldtea 2mo ago

>But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... Not the same burden. The value of the person is digesting and giving the materially important stuff in the answer (including their expertise and opinion). Not the AI diarrhea.

nchmy 2mo ago
I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying. The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.
- jorisw 2mo ago
  My problem isn't who wrote it, but the pretense of something having written by a person while it wasn't. There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something. Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
    - ModernMech 2mo ago
      > I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc I agree with everything here, and do the same, but in my experience people will still interpret doing this as “profoundly disrespectful towards the receivers”. The sibling to your comment seems to express that sentiment: “There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case.”
      - nchmy 2mo ago
        Yeah, Ive had similar negative responses a few times to things that are obviously Ai assisted, but also obvious that human thought was guiding it. Frankly, it says more to me about that person than it does about me - they seem to be the same sort who were/are staunchly anti-ai for coding, which reveals someone who has little ability for judgment, discernment etc. Just black and white. Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate. I had such an experience last week, and in hindsight I probably should have written the issue differently. I used Ai there primarily to help me be more thorough and have the whole thing be better-formatted than I would have otherwise done myself (ain't no one got time for markdown tables etc). I should have made it less thorough and more plainly formatted, because it did, admittedly, scream AI. That undermined an otherwise thoughtful and important issue. Though, the people who actually mattered didn't take exception and replied thoughtfully - perhaps partly because I had already gained some degree of trust with them, via thoughtful, useful issues and PRs. In the end, Ai is a magical tool that can be enormously helpful with almost anything. But we have to use it consciously, like anything.
        ModernMech 2mo ago
        > Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate. I'm at the point where I don't even want to interact with that mentality. I get it, as I too don't like to see endless slop so there's got to be a quality bar and standards. But when the standard is set to zero tolerance, the whole vibe of the community plummets as the example I pasted shows. Originally I was for the policy, as there was a lot of low quality content. But now people are finding their way around the tools and they have gotten a lot better, none of that can be appreciated. Instead, people post a project, they get hissed at, and banned. It can cause a lot of hurt feelings, the rules are fuzzy and don't match how they're applied while the mods say they're crystal clear and even handed. Meanwhile you go to a programming language community that is pro AI and people are just talking about programming languages and AI. There's not all these weird witch hunts and purity tests. I'd rather just stay away from all that, I prefer AI slop to that. Not to mention the coolest people I've met in the past 2 years have all been hacking away at AI tech. Creative, enthusiastic, chill people I'm happy to associate with.
  - salawat 2mo ago
    There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case. There's something profoundly disrespectful about forcibly scraping the human corpora without asking for permission first, or considering compensation in anyway, or just setting out that "yeah, we're doing this, and damn the consequences". There's something profoundly disrespectful about then taking this device running on investor money chasing the promise of a value that just can't conceivably be delivered, and employing it to do all the unethical things you could imagine just because you can engineer the "No" out of the model. Of course the level of moral disengagement that's rife around here generally precludes any recognition of such things, as that might be construed as "harshing the vibe on the innovation, man". So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect until this type of thing hits enough of a critical mass that a societal ethics framework begins to manifest around it and not be ignored.
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      I agree. But this is a separate conversation, which (unfortunately) seems to be pointless at this point.
    - jorisw 2mo ago
      > So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect Nope. Because the individual end user still and already has a choice. A choice to write an email (or whatever) on their own. Be it supported by AI research or whathaveyou, or not.
- je42 2mo ago
  For me, being quite "dyslectic" - LLM generated sentences have the advantage of being spelled correctly and being grammartically correct. I rather prefer iterating over LLM text than writing it by myself. Example: Typing this simple text above by myself was not straight forward.
  - coldtea 2mo ago
    Write yourself and tell the AI: "Fix the spelling and grammar. Do not change the structure or meaning" then.
    - ModernMech 2mo ago
      Agreed that’s a good practice but for some very hardline people even that’s not considered acceptable. It’s very hard to understand what people consider right and wrong so I’ve just stopped listening. Also people are weirdly hypocritical about it. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/svUzbNy2oj https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/svUzbNy2oj No tolerance policy for 77 of 10k lines, but exceptions made for language with unashamed use of large swaths of LLM code because it’s popular with the author. People just aren’t being consistent at all. Even when they draw hard lines.
      - christophilus 2mo ago
        Well, those people would be opposed to using spellcheck and grammar tools, too, I guess. I don’t think there’s a reasonable argument against using AI to spellcheck/check your grammar other than that it’s hugely inefficient.
        ModernMech 2mo ago
        The argument as I've heard it explained to me by someone with a banhammer: "One use of AI no matter how benign is not acceptable because usage is infectious; after even the most minimal use of AI, we can't tell what was AI and what wasn't, therefore the only acceptable position is no AI whatsoever"
- bayindirh 2mo ago
  The thing is, I expect the person who sent me something to know about and understood what they have sent me. I don’t expect the other person to copy my response to the same chat and paste the AI response back even without reading it. Don’t be a meat proxy.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    Well, In any healthy organization or relationship, there should be no problem with someone not knowing about/understanding something. If someone is feigning competence, that's the fundamental problem, not AI
    - bayindirh 2mo ago
      I don’t agree. I have seen many knowledgeable people fall into AI so hard that they are happy that they are not writing code, reading things and using their brains to understand or produce something. These people know (or knew) what they were talking about so well, and was very passionate about their area as well. Not knowing something is alright, but surrendering their whole knowledge and passion to a statistical model is not. Now they are almost meat proxies, which is sad.
      - nchmy 2mo ago
        It's sad that this has happened, but having knowledge/skill doesn't mean you have wisdom, integrity, discernment, etc... Those are an entirely different plane of understanding, and are what guard against our worst impulses and temptations. Unfortunately there isn't much focus on these things anymore (and, in fact, they're often denigrated and attacked). The result that you've observed is inevitable. I genuinely worry even more about young people, who are being formed in this anti-thinking, anti-responsibility environment. I'm sure there's some who are strongly resisting it and seeking out genuine knowledge and connections. But surely most are happy to just vibe their way through school and life.
        duskdozer 2mo ago
- coldtea 2mo ago
  >I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. Theoritically yes. In practice: - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise, and who know to edit AI responses and not just paste them. - I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
  - whstl 2mo ago
    > Theoritically yes. In practice: I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it. We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, how can it be bad?". Until their boss sat down and forced them to read the verbal diarrhea and they finally admitted that it was 90% hallucinations and AI-filling-the-blanks.
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      Yes, so the issue here was not AI but a lack of competence, prudence, integrity, responsibility, discernment etc. It's the equivalent of vibe coding vs Ai assisted coding. Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing.
      - whstl 2mo ago
        Maybe you’re defending something that nobody here has a problem with. Using AI to rephrase things is perfectly fine.
        2mo ago
- croon 2mo ago
  > The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. While I agree with your overall distinction, I believe the scenario you portray is so unrealistic that you will never encounter it. Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years. The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback, but an AI will at best have some memory/skill/prompt nudge for next time that might have a shallow/localized band-aid effect, but will never stop doing similar mistakes elsewhere.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    > if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years. Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. You might say that the "can't be bothered" part is the entire issue, and I'll again say that what matters is the final result - a master chef or chief architect is not doing all the grunt work...
    - croon 2mo ago
      > Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. Isn't this contradictory? Why do you need to take over if it's doing such a good job?

by coldtea 2mo ago

nchmy 2mo ago

I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying. The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.

jorisw 2mo ago
My problem isn't who wrote it, but the pretense of something having written by a person while it wasn't. There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.
- nchmy 2mo ago
  Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something. Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
  - ModernMech 2mo ago
    > I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc I agree with everything here, and do the same, but in my experience people will still interpret doing this as “profoundly disrespectful towards the receivers”. The sibling to your comment seems to express that sentiment: “There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case.”
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      Yeah, Ive had similar negative responses a few times to things that are obviously Ai assisted, but also obvious that human thought was guiding it. Frankly, it says more to me about that person than it does about me - they seem to be the same sort who were/are staunchly anti-ai for coding, which reveals someone who has little ability for judgment, discernment etc. Just black and white. Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate. I had such an experience last week, and in hindsight I probably should have written the issue differently. I used Ai there primarily to help me be more thorough and have the whole thing be better-formatted than I would have otherwise done myself (ain't no one got time for markdown tables etc). I should have made it less thorough and more plainly formatted, because it did, admittedly, scream AI. That undermined an otherwise thoughtful and important issue. Though, the people who actually mattered didn't take exception and replied thoughtfully - perhaps partly because I had already gained some degree of trust with them, via thoughtful, useful issues and PRs. In the end, Ai is a magical tool that can be enormously helpful with almost anything. But we have to use it consciously, like anything.
      - ModernMech 2mo ago
        > Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate. I'm at the point where I don't even want to interact with that mentality. I get it, as I too don't like to see endless slop so there's got to be a quality bar and standards. But when the standard is set to zero tolerance, the whole vibe of the community plummets as the example I pasted shows. Originally I was for the policy, as there was a lot of low quality content. But now people are finding their way around the tools and they have gotten a lot better, none of that can be appreciated. Instead, people post a project, they get hissed at, and banned. It can cause a lot of hurt feelings, the rules are fuzzy and don't match how they're applied while the mods say they're crystal clear and even handed. Meanwhile you go to a programming language community that is pro AI and people are just talking about programming languages and AI. There's not all these weird witch hunts and purity tests. I'd rather just stay away from all that, I prefer AI slop to that. Not to mention the coolest people I've met in the past 2 years have all been hacking away at AI tech. Creative, enthusiastic, chill people I'm happy to associate with.
- salawat 2mo ago
  There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case. There's something profoundly disrespectful about forcibly scraping the human corpora without asking for permission first, or considering compensation in anyway, or just setting out that "yeah, we're doing this, and damn the consequences". There's something profoundly disrespectful about then taking this device running on investor money chasing the promise of a value that just can't conceivably be delivered, and employing it to do all the unethical things you could imagine just because you can engineer the "No" out of the model. Of course the level of moral disengagement that's rife around here generally precludes any recognition of such things, as that might be construed as "harshing the vibe on the innovation, man". So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect until this type of thing hits enough of a critical mass that a societal ethics framework begins to manifest around it and not be ignored.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    I agree. But this is a separate conversation, which (unfortunately) seems to be pointless at this point.
  - jorisw 2mo ago
    > So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect Nope. Because the individual end user still and already has a choice. A choice to write an email (or whatever) on their own. Be it supported by AI research or whathaveyou, or not.
je42 2mo ago
For me, being quite "dyslectic" - LLM generated sentences have the advantage of being spelled correctly and being grammartically correct. I rather prefer iterating over LLM text than writing it by myself. Example: Typing this simple text above by myself was not straight forward.
- coldtea 2mo ago
  Write yourself and tell the AI: "Fix the spelling and grammar. Do not change the structure or meaning" then.
  - ModernMech 2mo ago
    Agreed that’s a good practice but for some very hardline people even that’s not considered acceptable. It’s very hard to understand what people consider right and wrong so I’ve just stopped listening. Also people are weirdly hypocritical about it. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/svUzbNy2oj https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/svUzbNy2oj No tolerance policy for 77 of 10k lines, but exceptions made for language with unashamed use of large swaths of LLM code because it’s popular with the author. People just aren’t being consistent at all. Even when they draw hard lines.
    - christophilus 2mo ago
      Well, those people would be opposed to using spellcheck and grammar tools, too, I guess. I don’t think there’s a reasonable argument against using AI to spellcheck/check your grammar other than that it’s hugely inefficient.
      - ModernMech 2mo ago
        The argument as I've heard it explained to me by someone with a banhammer: "One use of AI no matter how benign is not acceptable because usage is infectious; after even the most minimal use of AI, we can't tell what was AI and what wasn't, therefore the only acceptable position is no AI whatsoever"
bayindirh 2mo ago
The thing is, I expect the person who sent me something to know about and understood what they have sent me. I don’t expect the other person to copy my response to the same chat and paste the AI response back even without reading it. Don’t be a meat proxy.
- nchmy 2mo ago
  Well, In any healthy organization or relationship, there should be no problem with someone not knowing about/understanding something. If someone is feigning competence, that's the fundamental problem, not AI
  - bayindirh 2mo ago
    I don’t agree. I have seen many knowledgeable people fall into AI so hard that they are happy that they are not writing code, reading things and using their brains to understand or produce something. These people know (or knew) what they were talking about so well, and was very passionate about their area as well. Not knowing something is alright, but surrendering their whole knowledge and passion to a statistical model is not. Now they are almost meat proxies, which is sad.
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      It's sad that this has happened, but having knowledge/skill doesn't mean you have wisdom, integrity, discernment, etc... Those are an entirely different plane of understanding, and are what guard against our worst impulses and temptations. Unfortunately there isn't much focus on these things anymore (and, in fact, they're often denigrated and attacked). The result that you've observed is inevitable. I genuinely worry even more about young people, who are being formed in this anti-thinking, anti-responsibility environment. I'm sure there's some who are strongly resisting it and seeking out genuine knowledge and connections. But surely most are happy to just vibe their way through school and life.
      - duskdozer 2mo ago
coldtea 2mo ago
>I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. Theoritically yes. In practice: - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise, and who know to edit AI responses and not just paste them. - I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
- whstl 2mo ago
  > Theoritically yes. In practice: I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it. We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, how can it be bad?". Until their boss sat down and forced them to read the verbal diarrhea and they finally admitted that it was 90% hallucinations and AI-filling-the-blanks.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    Yes, so the issue here was not AI but a lack of competence, prudence, integrity, responsibility, discernment etc. It's the equivalent of vibe coding vs Ai assisted coding. Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing.
    - whstl 2mo ago
      Maybe you’re defending something that nobody here has a problem with. Using AI to rephrase things is perfectly fine.
      - 2mo ago
croon 2mo ago
> The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. While I agree with your overall distinction, I believe the scenario you portray is so unrealistic that you will never encounter it. Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years. The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback, but an AI will at best have some memory/skill/prompt nudge for next time that might have a shallow/localized band-aid effect, but will never stop doing similar mistakes elsewhere.
- nchmy 2mo ago
  > if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years. Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. You might say that the "can't be bothered" part is the entire issue, and I'll again say that what matters is the final result - a master chef or chief architect is not doing all the grunt work...
  - croon 2mo ago
    > Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. Isn't this contradictory? Why do you need to take over if it's doing such a good job?