4 ms·

I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article

I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article. AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-collected language was used to build that” or at a meal and saying “this was cooked in a kitchen with a modern temperature-controlled oven” or at a paper and saying “this was obviously typeset in LaTeX, not roff or plain TeX.” So what? Give me a shop full of power tools and I can’t build any furniture, give me Python and a bunch of libraries and I can’t write Mercurial, and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece. Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”? This is like walking through a modern art museum and seeing some obvious-looking piece and saying “I could have done that.” Well, you didn’t.

scared_together 1mo ago
> AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. This is not entirely accurate if we consider agentic loops. > Asking it requires skill. Considering the realm of writing a blog post instead of programming, what is the skill? I suspect there is extremely little. But I could be wrong, tell me what skill you think went into this. > and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece. Prompt your LLM of choice to generate 100 articles about different aspects of joining a new role, then you won’t need to provide the insights into the specific situations the author described. All you need to do is pay for the tokens. > Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”? Yes. > Well, you didn’t. Do you know that? What’s stopping someone from asking an LLM to generate an entire HN front page worth of articles, and reading that list instead of HN? This really is a problem with the health of the site in my opinion. If there are a flood of AI generated articles in the top spot, the value proposition of HN as a site is diminished.
- tuckerwales 1mo ago
  Author here: I dictated this article into my phone and got a model to transcribe and clean up / reword. I'd argue that counts as using AI as a tool for conveying my original thoughts.
  - scared_together 1mo ago
    Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond to feedback. I believe there is a societal problem here, not specific to your particular actions. The expectation that communications should be “cleaned up” and “professional” in the first place comes from a bygone era. In the 2010s and earlier removing all typos, fixing wording, formatting the text and adding images were all signals that someone put extra care into sending their message. But in the present that just indicates use of AI. You mentioned in another comment that your hand-drawn images would be “far worse”. Leaving aside whether any images were needed at all, a hand-drawn scribble in the 2010s might be unprofessional but in the present day there’s an AI generated image on every visible surface. A hand-drawn image, even a bad one, would actually make you stand out. Even if you want to present the cleaned up version, you could also provide the original audio.
    - tuckerwales 1mo ago
      Appreciate the feedback and I don't necessarily disagree with your points - the societal argument is an interesting one. I do think it's interesting that some people are immediately turned off of something because of the whiff of AI even if they like the actual idea or content. Will likely experiment with different ways of writing in the future!
      - trueno 1mo ago
        broadly speaking AI has shown itself to be unreliable in a lot of domains so even if its strongest feature is in fact language, it still carries a readers predisposed experiences with the tech. That is just one problem. You also have to contend with the onslaught of AI generated content that is being used in deliberately fake articles, online personas and the mountains and mountains of things people and entities are trying to push to make a buck. Scams, misinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, a lot of things that are arguably bad for society. So if you consider that, you must also accept that you are making a choice to use a linguistic style that is used by many websites that are vectors that do harm or deliberately mislead (which also does harm). Even if the ideas are of your own merit, you can't expect readers to always do the literary surgery it will take to identify that.That's extra investigative work and assessment that was never a part of anyones reportoire before all this took off. But at this point i don't think you should be surprised that AI writing isn't met with open arms, AI writing has become a pain point for a lot of people in their personal lives and their work lives, a lot of organizations are wounding themselves as people throw their ideas around curated in AI and everyone's eyes are glazing over. It's become synonymous with "this guy does not understand the claude proposal he just sent me". And the choice is yours if you still want to use it knowing that, I just don't think you should be surprised if it doesn't get the reception you hoped for. Plus, you should lean into whatever your monologue is to write. Even if you're afraid it's not pro enough, like. That's writing. It's a journey it has crossover with your ability to communicate it defines you as a person. Keep sharpening that tool and you have untold ways to convey ideas exactly the way you want people to experience them for the first time.
AllegedAlec 1mo ago
AIDR
eudamoniac 1mo ago
Why would I not just type in "how do I correctly balance towards action in a new role" into chatgpt and read that instead? I have no signal that the author did anything beyond that himself.
- tuckerwales 1mo ago
  Apart from years of experience and thinking about this problem, dictating my thoughts into my phone and transcribing and posting...
  - eudamoniac 1mo ago
    How would I discern that from the AI slop images and AI formatting? What you just said is not signal, it's things you privately know. There are a lot of blogs out there. You need to appear superficially worth reading before I know your biography and work processes.
    - tuckerwales 1mo ago
      Respectfully, I don't need to do anything. You can choose to read or choose not to read. Have a great day!
      - eudamoniac 1mo ago
        "You need to..." implies "for me to read it", me possibly being a proxy for others, and nothing more. So responding to "You need to do X for me to read it" with " I don't need to do anything. You can choose to read or choose not to read." is just restating my comment tautologically. I think you are taking my criticism personally, but it's not personal or even related to the content because I don't know you and I didn't read it. I am just giving you the feedback that AI writing is a negative signal that is going to make a lot of people not read the thing, not because it's annoying to read, but just because there's no inherent indication that anyone thought through this text like there usually is when something is published. Also, you engaged with my comment, not I with yours, and I attempted to converse with you, but you then exited superciliously (below) without engaging with or even acknowledging my point. You don't need to say goodbye online if you don't want to discuss what I'm saying.

scared_together 1mo ago

> AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. This is not entirely accurate if we consider agentic loops. > Asking it requires skill. Considering the realm of writing a blog post instead of programming, what is the skill? I suspect there is extremely little. But I could be wrong, tell me what skill you think went into this. > and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece. Prompt your LLM of choice to generate 100 articles about different aspects of joining a new role, then you won’t need to provide the insights into the specific situations the author described. All you need to do is pay for the tokens. > Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”? Yes. > Well, you didn’t. Do you know that? What’s stopping someone from asking an LLM to generate an entire HN front page worth of articles, and reading that list instead of HN? This really is a problem with the health of the site in my opinion. If there are a flood of AI generated articles in the top spot, the value proposition of HN as a site is diminished.

tuckerwales 1mo ago
Author here: I dictated this article into my phone and got a model to transcribe and clean up / reword. I'd argue that counts as using AI as a tool for conveying my original thoughts.
- scared_together 1mo ago
  Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond to feedback. I believe there is a societal problem here, not specific to your particular actions. The expectation that communications should be “cleaned up” and “professional” in the first place comes from a bygone era. In the 2010s and earlier removing all typos, fixing wording, formatting the text and adding images were all signals that someone put extra care into sending their message. But in the present that just indicates use of AI. You mentioned in another comment that your hand-drawn images would be “far worse”. Leaving aside whether any images were needed at all, a hand-drawn scribble in the 2010s might be unprofessional but in the present day there’s an AI generated image on every visible surface. A hand-drawn image, even a bad one, would actually make you stand out. Even if you want to present the cleaned up version, you could also provide the original audio.
  - tuckerwales 1mo ago
    Appreciate the feedback and I don't necessarily disagree with your points - the societal argument is an interesting one. I do think it's interesting that some people are immediately turned off of something because of the whiff of AI even if they like the actual idea or content. Will likely experiment with different ways of writing in the future!
    - trueno 1mo ago
      broadly speaking AI has shown itself to be unreliable in a lot of domains so even if its strongest feature is in fact language, it still carries a readers predisposed experiences with the tech. That is just one problem. You also have to contend with the onslaught of AI generated content that is being used in deliberately fake articles, online personas and the mountains and mountains of things people and entities are trying to push to make a buck. Scams, misinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, a lot of things that are arguably bad for society. So if you consider that, you must also accept that you are making a choice to use a linguistic style that is used by many websites that are vectors that do harm or deliberately mislead (which also does harm). Even if the ideas are of your own merit, you can't expect readers to always do the literary surgery it will take to identify that.That's extra investigative work and assessment that was never a part of anyones reportoire before all this took off. But at this point i don't think you should be surprised that AI writing isn't met with open arms, AI writing has become a pain point for a lot of people in their personal lives and their work lives, a lot of organizations are wounding themselves as people throw their ideas around curated in AI and everyone's eyes are glazing over. It's become synonymous with "this guy does not understand the claude proposal he just sent me". And the choice is yours if you still want to use it knowing that, I just don't think you should be surprised if it doesn't get the reception you hoped for. Plus, you should lean into whatever your monologue is to write. Even if you're afraid it's not pro enough, like. That's writing. It's a journey it has crossover with your ability to communicate it defines you as a person. Keep sharpening that tool and you have untold ways to convey ideas exactly the way you want people to experience them for the first time.

AllegedAlec 1mo ago

AIDR

eudamoniac 1mo ago

Why would I not just type in "how do I correctly balance towards action in a new role" into chatgpt and read that instead? I have no signal that the author did anything beyond that himself.

tuckerwales 1mo ago
Apart from years of experience and thinking about this problem, dictating my thoughts into my phone and transcribing and posting...
- eudamoniac 1mo ago
  How would I discern that from the AI slop images and AI formatting? What you just said is not signal, it's things you privately know. There are a lot of blogs out there. You need to appear superficially worth reading before I know your biography and work processes.
  - tuckerwales 1mo ago
    Respectfully, I don't need to do anything. You can choose to read or choose not to read. Have a great day!
    - eudamoniac 1mo ago
      "You need to..." implies "for me to read it", me possibly being a proxy for others, and nothing more. So responding to "You need to do X for me to read it" with " I don't need to do anything. You can choose to read or choose not to read." is just restating my comment tautologically. I think you are taking my criticism personally, but it's not personal or even related to the content because I don't know you and I didn't read it. I am just giving you the feedback that AI writing is a negative signal that is going to make a lot of people not read the thing, not because it's annoying to read, but just because there's no inherent indication that anyone thought through this text like there usually is when something is published. Also, you engaged with my comment, not I with yours, and I attempted to converse with you, but you then exited superciliously (below) without engaging with or even acknowledging my point. You don't need to say goodbye online if you don't want to discuss what I'm saying.