3 ms·

Over the past few years, I had helped Ed with some difficult nuances around the obscure technical aspects of serving LLMs (e.g. benchmarks and model caching); h

Over the past few years, I had helped Ed with some difficult nuances around the obscure technical aspects of serving LLMs (e.g. benchmarks and model caching); he has also shouted myself and Simon Willison out positively multiple times. I stopped assisting him because he repeatedly misused said advice to the most cynical interpretation ("how can this be interpreted to make AI boosters sound crazy?) and often made it misleading at best. Nowadays I suspect he views me as one of those crazy AI boosters. Not challenging him was a mistake in hindsight, and I own it. Going forward I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias.

hypfer 1mo ago
This reads slightly weird and more like a pledge of alignment than a statement from the heart. But apart from that, I guess that's always the learning? Journalists (or people labeling themselves as such) often have their own story they want to tell, and usually do so by building it out of little blocks of reality stacked together to form the desired picture. I would predict a similarly frustrating experience being equally probable even without the "clear anti-AI bias" attribute set.
- minimaxir 1mo ago
  That's an unfair characterization of tech journalists in general. When BuzzFeed News was around, I worked closely with them on technical aspects and projects to ensure that everything was correct and accurate, and there were very receptive to it; it was not a "directionally correct" thing, the journalists wanted to avoid any unintentional. That was also one of the reasons I was open-minded to helping Ed even though we ideologically disagree: the truth is what's important. BuzzFeed News incidentally was how I first came across Ed on Twitter from his tech PR work about 9 years ago, back when he was writing guest editorials on Gizmodo about Person of Interest (which is very very funny in hindsight). It's from the heart that I'm a bit bummed out that things turned out this way.
  - ChickeNES 1mo ago
    > back when he was writing guest editorials on Gizmodo about Person of Interest (which is very very funny in hindsight) Sometimes life has a sense of humor
  - hypfer 1mo ago
    Not to dunk on your friends and all, but wasn't Buzzfeed the exact outlet at the forefront of dismantling the credibility of the word "journalism"? Like.. they surely had valid pieces, but I remember them also being the ones smashing the system and trust to pieces by being very social-media-engagement-native (for the lack of a better term). __ The LLM as this beautiful straight man default human simulator tells me that BuzzFeed News was some kind of investigative journalism daughter company of Buzzfeed the destroyer of worlds, and with that these would for sure be two unconnected entities, not to be judged like that. And, for all legal intents and purposes, I am of course sure it is completely right. I could almost bet that this exact trick is why there even was a legit journalism daughter company with the same name in the first place. So that one could well-actually all the bad words away, by pointing at it and either saying "Hey it's a different thing!!!111" or "Hey but we're also doing good work in that branch!!!!1111". Always depending on which is more opportune. Association or disassociation. __ Anyway. I do believe you that your friends were trying to do the right thing. I just have doubts as to why the place they were in even existed in the first place. Certainly to enable them to do great journalistic work, but maybe not because the corporate superstructure actually cared by heart about great journalistic work. At least I do not see it around no more, which might indicate that it outlived its corporate usefulness as a moral shield.
    - physicles 1mo ago
      They really were separate. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer in 2021 (source: Wikipedia). It's unfortunate that they shared the same name.
      - hypfer 1mo ago
        [flagged]
polski-g 1mo ago
He made a blog post, literally last month, and it said that AIs have no use outside of coding. It just shows he's done zero research on the things he talks about all day. Radiologists are using them, ad firms, artists, translators, law firms, auditors... It's hard to think of a white collar firm not using them.
- DiogenesKynikos 1mo ago
  One thing I've noticed is that since LLMs came out, scientific papers with poor English have essentially disappeared. Just one of the many ways that AI is changing the world. People are using AI in all kinds of fields.
  - delis-thumbs-7e 1mo ago
    Oh c’mon. You must be trolling. Great, now we have have scientific papers with formally correct English, but data and sources of which are fabricated and most of the paragraphs are utter nonsense. And publications are drowning on these. Oh thanks for changing the world!
    - DiogenesKynikos 1mo ago
      AI has been great for scientific research. It writes code, it can help solve difficult mathematical problems, you can bounce ideas off of it, you can learn background info on a scientific question quickly, etc. I haven't noticed any uptick of trash papers in quality journals, or even on the arXiv. I know submissions are way up to all the journals, but peer review appears to still be working to filter out obvious junk. And yes, papers being written in understandable English is important. Most scientists around the world are not native speakers of English, and now they can all suddenly write in perfect English.
      - delis-thumbs-7e 1mo ago
        I am not saying LLM-based software is not useful. For instance, you can use it to verify claims made on HN: What we find is sobering. Submission volume has risen by 42% since November 2022. At the same time, submission writing quality also began to decline at the end of 2022, with Flesch Reading Ease (a standard measure of writing quality) 1.28 standard deviations (SD) lower in January 2026 relative to January 2021. Submissions that are heavily AI-generated account for nearly all of these trends. The quality of reviews has also dropped sharply since November 2022, driven by an increase in heavily AI-generated reviews. These reviews, in addition to being of worse quality, are also narrower in their emphasis, focusing more on theory and less on data. In short, more research is being submitted, with more AI writing that is lower in quality—not better.[1] AI researchers themselves are saying that gaming the peer-review system with barrage of AI is extremely frustrating and pointless: Peer review is unpaid work that we do (often on nights and weekends) because peer review on our own work is so valuable. Spending hours going through a submission and then realizing that there are hallucinated citations is infuriating as it is a waste of our time! If you haven’t spent enough time with your work to even get the references correct, then a.) why should we spend time reviewing it for you, and b.) what are you hoping to accomplish with the submission in the first place? Learning from reviews requires reflecting on your work, and you need to spend time with your work in order to do this.[2] There’s also serious concern whether the peer-review system can survive the slop-era [3]. So excuse me if I found your comment on ”better English” and ”great for scientific research” rather amusing. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot and celebrating how much you will save on shoes. [1] https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2026.ed.v37.n3 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2026.ed.v37.... [2] https://geospatialml.com/posts/reviewing-ai-slop/ https://geospatialml.com/posts/reviewing-ai-slop/ [3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/peer-review-is-overwhelmed-can-it-survive-in-the-ai-era/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/peer-review-is-overw...
kbelder 1mo ago
>I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias. Take out the 'anti-AI' qualification, and you've got a decent general principle.

hypfer 1mo ago

This reads slightly weird and more like a pledge of alignment than a statement from the heart. But apart from that, I guess that's always the learning? Journalists (or people labeling themselves as such) often have their own story they want to tell, and usually do so by building it out of little blocks of reality stacked together to form the desired picture. I would predict a similarly frustrating experience being equally probable even without the "clear anti-AI bias" attribute set.

minimaxir 1mo ago
That's an unfair characterization of tech journalists in general. When BuzzFeed News was around, I worked closely with them on technical aspects and projects to ensure that everything was correct and accurate, and there were very receptive to it; it was not a "directionally correct" thing, the journalists wanted to avoid any unintentional. That was also one of the reasons I was open-minded to helping Ed even though we ideologically disagree: the truth is what's important. BuzzFeed News incidentally was how I first came across Ed on Twitter from his tech PR work about 9 years ago, back when he was writing guest editorials on Gizmodo about Person of Interest (which is very very funny in hindsight). It's from the heart that I'm a bit bummed out that things turned out this way.
- ChickeNES 1mo ago
  > back when he was writing guest editorials on Gizmodo about Person of Interest (which is very very funny in hindsight) Sometimes life has a sense of humor
- hypfer 1mo ago
  Not to dunk on your friends and all, but wasn't Buzzfeed the exact outlet at the forefront of dismantling the credibility of the word "journalism"? Like.. they surely had valid pieces, but I remember them also being the ones smashing the system and trust to pieces by being very social-media-engagement-native (for the lack of a better term). __ The LLM as this beautiful straight man default human simulator tells me that BuzzFeed News was some kind of investigative journalism daughter company of Buzzfeed the destroyer of worlds, and with that these would for sure be two unconnected entities, not to be judged like that. And, for all legal intents and purposes, I am of course sure it is completely right. I could almost bet that this exact trick is why there even was a legit journalism daughter company with the same name in the first place. So that one could well-actually all the bad words away, by pointing at it and either saying "Hey it's a different thing!!!111" or "Hey but we're also doing good work in that branch!!!!1111". Always depending on which is more opportune. Association or disassociation. __ Anyway. I do believe you that your friends were trying to do the right thing. I just have doubts as to why the place they were in even existed in the first place. Certainly to enable them to do great journalistic work, but maybe not because the corporate superstructure actually cared by heart about great journalistic work. At least I do not see it around no more, which might indicate that it outlived its corporate usefulness as a moral shield.
  - physicles 1mo ago
    They really were separate. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer in 2021 (source: Wikipedia). It's unfortunate that they shared the same name.
    - hypfer 1mo ago
      [flagged]

polski-g 1mo ago

He made a blog post, literally last month, and it said that AIs have no use outside of coding. It just shows he's done zero research on the things he talks about all day. Radiologists are using them, ad firms, artists, translators, law firms, auditors... It's hard to think of a white collar firm not using them.

DiogenesKynikos 1mo ago
One thing I've noticed is that since LLMs came out, scientific papers with poor English have essentially disappeared. Just one of the many ways that AI is changing the world. People are using AI in all kinds of fields.
- delis-thumbs-7e 1mo ago
  Oh c’mon. You must be trolling. Great, now we have have scientific papers with formally correct English, but data and sources of which are fabricated and most of the paragraphs are utter nonsense. And publications are drowning on these. Oh thanks for changing the world!
  - DiogenesKynikos 1mo ago
    AI has been great for scientific research. It writes code, it can help solve difficult mathematical problems, you can bounce ideas off of it, you can learn background info on a scientific question quickly, etc. I haven't noticed any uptick of trash papers in quality journals, or even on the arXiv. I know submissions are way up to all the journals, but peer review appears to still be working to filter out obvious junk. And yes, papers being written in understandable English is important. Most scientists around the world are not native speakers of English, and now they can all suddenly write in perfect English.
    - delis-thumbs-7e 1mo ago
      I am not saying LLM-based software is not useful. For instance, you can use it to verify claims made on HN: What we find is sobering. Submission volume has risen by 42% since November 2022. At the same time, submission writing quality also began to decline at the end of 2022, with Flesch Reading Ease (a standard measure of writing quality) 1.28 standard deviations (SD) lower in January 2026 relative to January 2021. Submissions that are heavily AI-generated account for nearly all of these trends. The quality of reviews has also dropped sharply since November 2022, driven by an increase in heavily AI-generated reviews. These reviews, in addition to being of worse quality, are also narrower in their emphasis, focusing more on theory and less on data. In short, more research is being submitted, with more AI writing that is lower in quality—not better.[1] AI researchers themselves are saying that gaming the peer-review system with barrage of AI is extremely frustrating and pointless: Peer review is unpaid work that we do (often on nights and weekends) because peer review on our own work is so valuable. Spending hours going through a submission and then realizing that there are hallucinated citations is infuriating as it is a waste of our time! If you haven’t spent enough time with your work to even get the references correct, then a.) why should we spend time reviewing it for you, and b.) what are you hoping to accomplish with the submission in the first place? Learning from reviews requires reflecting on your work, and you need to spend time with your work in order to do this.[2] There’s also serious concern whether the peer-review system can survive the slop-era [3]. So excuse me if I found your comment on ”better English” and ”great for scientific research” rather amusing. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot and celebrating how much you will save on shoes. [1] https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2026.ed.v37.n3 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2026.ed.v37.... [2] https://geospatialml.com/posts/reviewing-ai-slop/ https://geospatialml.com/posts/reviewing-ai-slop/ [3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/peer-review-is-overwhelmed-can-it-survive-in-the-ai-era/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/peer-review-is-overw...

kbelder 1mo ago

>I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias. Take out the 'anti-AI' qualification, and you've got a decent general principle.