9 ms·

Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

• Arch-TK 26d ago
  I see, we are trying to re-establish ownership over the em-dash. This brings me joy.
• embedding-shape 26d ago
  What baffles me, isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right? And realize how what they put out sounds exactly the same? Or did people completely stop reading what they've "wrote" before hitting that magical submit button?
  • IshKebab 26d ago
    Yeah I don't quite understand it either. Where's the intersection between people producing AI slop and people that have never read AI slop? I guess it's bigger than we thought... Or maybe they just don't give a shit. That's probably it.
    • NateEag 26d ago
      I suspect people who are putting out LLM "writing" are people who weren't trying to communicate in the first place. They were likely hunting for a better job, chasing the thrill of a million views, or similar - seeking a side effect of writing, rather than seeking to help someone else understand what was in their head.
  • jjice 26d ago
    It blows my mind. A customer of ours, whom I respect the technical opinion of, drops fully unedited Claude posts on LinkedIn now. I don't get how he thinks they read like anything but slop.
  • luxuryballs 26d ago
    if they had been half decent at writing before they would notice the quality issue, not being able to see it is also a writing skill issue, now it's just kind of spammy as people are just reaching for the tool in ai nighsosis
  • anigbrowl 26d ago
    People like this generally don't read, for pleasure or edification. Their posts are advertising, designed to work by repetition. They're not necessarily looking to persuade smart people; they're going after the same sort of people who want to fix problems with this one weird trick (doctors hate him!).
  • zahlman 25d ago
    > isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right? This style emerged from a large number of people explicitly preferring it over alternatives when offering feedback. There is genuinely no accounting for taste (and if there were, many people would be in crippling debt).
• theandrewbailey 26d ago
  That's a suspicious number of em-dashes for something that's allegedly against LLMs.
  • TomGarden 26d ago
    I was thinking that, but the use of em-dashes is different from the normal LLM use. If this is straight out of an LLM I am impressed
  • jLaForest 26d ago
    Addressed in the article...
  • imtringued 26d ago
    You think it's the em dashes and not the absurd Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon analogy?
• throwrioawfo 26d ago
  Has any research been done to try and determine the percentage of the population that are able to detect obvious LLM-generated text?
  • TomGarden 26d ago
    Interesting question for sure, but for now the writing is just bad. So people might not know it's LLM prose, they just notice its poorly written and engage with the ideas less
  • dominotw 26d ago
    majority of population dont read anything at all. Most they a read is perhaps labels and signs at a supermarket.
    • StilesCrisis 26d ago
      I think there's probably a large chunk who "read" Facebook and skim the linked articles poorly.
      • asdff 26d ago
        People are still on facebook?
  • raincole 26d ago
    > obvious Who decide what is obvious or not?
• draw_down 26d ago
  [dead]
• layer8 26d ago
  Amusingly, there’s a plane rental company called OpenFly.
• dominotw 26d ago
  I was fired from my job at spotify for taking fmla when i my dad was dying from cancer. I've been marking the my directors posts on linkedin as 'looks like ai slop'.
  • theandrewbailey 26d ago
    Talk to a lawyer about that firing. You might have a case.
    • dominotw 26d ago
      i did. They said i had no case since i wasnt fired during fmla and there was no proof that it was the cause.
• Vishal_Max 26d ago
  You are right in every sense, but it seems you used llm to write this post, lol!
  • StilesCrisis 26d ago
    What makes you say that? It reads naturally to me and Pangram flags it as 100% human. I've never heard an AI use the "fly is open" analogy.
  • zenlot 26d ago
    [dead]
• dynm 26d ago
  I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't. (The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)
  • visarga 26d ago
    Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.
    • deleted 26d ago
      [deleted]
  • masswerk 26d ago
    I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well. There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader. And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
• aviperl 26d ago
  When I log into LinkedIn, it seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand. Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting. There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.
  • pxmpxm 26d ago
    So much this. My average linkedin in exprience is a sprinkling of updates from people i personally know, in an oceon of inane "content" by ~$0 net worth people with 40 word self professed titles. I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.
  • tempodox 26d ago
    > branding suicide. Or not. I mean, if you had no voice and nothing to say before, you can amplify that signal 10x now. Basically, you’re boosting your brand as a tasteless brainless schlub.
• ciupicri 26d ago
  Why was the title truncated and its casing changed? The original title is > Your intellectual fly is open which makes more sense. Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.
  • Jtariiiii 26d ago
    I assume the filter deletes "Your" if its at the start of the title.
  • frogulis 26d ago
    I believe HN does some automated editing of titles to avoid clickbaity titles being displayed. May be that.
    • jjgreen 26d ago
      It does, submitters can edit/revert those changes and they stick
  • crabmusket 25d ago
    The title of this submission has been on a real journey.
• delichon 26d ago
  Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around. I know it isn't that easy to detect because I get falsely accused of it. To some people it seems to mean text written in complete sentences without glaring errors and maybe a few uncommon word choices. It has become an all purpose excuse for declining to engage with the meaning. One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA president, who refused to even acknowledge it, on the grounds that it was written too well and so must have been AI assisted. I don't know if that was true, and don't much care, because I do know it contained valid issues that deserved a response.
  • hypfer 26d ago
    > Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around Not.. really? I kinda see the point you seem to want to make, but the "no U" opener makes it hard to do that. Beside that, HOAs - from what I heard of them - will use any reason they can make up to ignore what you want from them, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with LLMs.
• lsofzz 26d ago
  Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM. I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item. I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead. So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it.
  • Jtariiiii 26d ago
    Some people actually want to enjoy their moment to moment existence on this planet and not read garbage someone shat out. It's just digital pollution.
    • lsofzz 26d ago
      I hear ya. However, that ship has sailed a long time ago and succumbing to this very idea is exactly why puritans in any form will not survive the next 50 years.
      • Jtariiiii 26d ago
        I don't think my survival hinges on my reluctance to read AI slop. The ship has not sailed, I can just find a human who wrote words, and read them. And if they aren't human words, I will just, not read them.
  • bigstrat2003 26d ago
    > Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM. No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.
  • simonw 26d ago
    > Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. I just can't. LLM assisted posts are often so long, and the hints are usually obvious right at the start. They're so unpleasant to read. "It's not X, it's Y" etc are bad because the comparisons rarely add anything at all to the message. It's filler that wastes my time. At that point I'd rather see your original prompt. Why should I invest several minutes of my day reading something if I've already seen evidence that the author doesn't respect my time? It's not that an LLM wrote it so much as the author couldn't be bothered to clean it up and remove the garbage cliches before publishing it.
• raincole 26d ago
  (2025) Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously. [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-reader/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re... [1] https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reaction-to-ai-blog-posts https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reaction-to-ai-blog...
  • bcantrill 26d ago
    And in that piece, I think I explained why it's important to take it seriously even though (and in fact, because!) it's self-reported?
    • raincole 26d ago
      No, you explained why the selection bias doesn't matter, which I agree. The self-report data still is completely worthless in the first place though. People are really, really good at lying to themselves, let alone to an online poll. They'll tell you that they prefer imperfect or even bad writing as long as it's not AI slop, just like how they'll tell you they like healthier food, they prioritize personality instead of look for potential dates, how they use LLM "only as a spellchecker", and how they use tiktok for educational videos. As long as there is no stake, people will just say what make they feel better. Self-reporting data for human behavior is just noise.
      • bcantrill 26d ago
        I mean, fine, it's anecdotal -- but the numbers are also overwhelming (and don't seem to disagree with the tenor here). And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely worthless" and just slop your way to success -- all I'm doing is trying to explain why you shouldn't expect me (and people like me) to read what you create.
• siskiyou 26d ago
  I worked at LinkedIn (briefly, before retirement) and the product had been useful to me for years before that, so I used it a fair bit but not much anymore since it doesn't serve any of my current needs. There were always awful million-view posts written by humans, useless influencers promoted by the algorithm. That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success, because engagement, so the LLM tries to replicate that garbage, does a mediocre job, and the result is this sort of weird garbage. Basically the LLM appears to be high on its own supply. Problem is the viral stuff was always what made me want to run out of the room and lock the door, so even if the LLMs did a better job of replicating that garbage, it would still be garbage, just a little less weird.
  • asdff 26d ago
    Part of it also with seeing the feed is that it is basically useless for me. The only interesting thing is when it automatically tells me someone I know got a new job someplace. All the rest is pure and I mean pure slop. No one I actually know ever posts anything to linked in. It would be like making a facebook status update these days. Like who does that, other than the influencer types of course?
  • zahlman 25d ago
    > That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success Well, no; they looked like success to the people doing the RLHF.
• strenholme 26d ago
  The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the prose is AI-generated; EDIT: I also link to the original article, and an archived copy if available). Now that archive.org doesn’t mirror many press articles, and now that archive.today is having a lot of reliability problems (right now its CAPTCHA is down because it has gone beyond Google’s limit for CAPTCHA use), an AI summary of a news article (along with a link to the real article) is the only way to guarantee the reader will get this gist of the article I’m commenting on. I also use AI to colorize old black and white pictures when discussing historical events in my blog, as well as the occasional AI enhancement of an old grainy and/or blurry photo.
  • timcobb 26d ago
    So does Fair Use in the states?
    • strenholme 26d ago
      Actually, it’s because, as per Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., facts cannot be copyrighted. This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are uncopyrightable facts, the only part of the article which can be copyrighted is the stylistic writing. Let me quote from a recent legal opinion on AI summaries (The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al 2025): >>> Exhibit 11 to the CIR complaint provides website links to articles that CIR alleges were unlawfully abridged by defendants in their ChatGPT and Copilot outputs. (CIR, FAC Ex. 11.) Examining the similarities between those outputs and the corresponding CIR articles, including the “total concept and feel, theme . . . sequence, pace, and setting,” Williams v. Crichton, 84 F.3d 581, 588 (2d Cir. 1996), the Court concludes that the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar to CIR’s copyrighted works as a matter of law. The alleged abridgments are detailed summaries, usually in bullet point form, of the facts contained in CIR’s articles. Those summaries—which differ in style, tone, length, and sentence structure from CIR’s articles—are not “substantially similar” to CIR’s copyrighted works. They present the “facts in a different arrangement”—bullet point lists or short summary paragraphs—“with a different sentence structure and different phrasing.” Nihon, 166 F.3d at 71. In short, the abridgments in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar, qualitatively or quantitatively, to the original CIR articles as a matter of law. The Court therefore grants OpenAI’s motion to dismiss CIR’s claim of direct infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 insofar as it relates to the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11.<<<
• andy99 26d ago
  So many people seem completely blind to LLM writing, they are fine sharing it on social media or at work. I think it’s people who are “not details people” and are used to judging something without reading it based on superficial cues which is what LLMs are optimized for. And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory. On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.
• jgrahamc 26d ago
  I think the most important line in this post is: But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you. When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
  • mtabini 26d ago
    I published a magazine for ten years, and this was by far the hardest editing challenge we had; our authors were from all over the world, and some of them had to be pretty heavily edited because English was very much not their first language. Thankfully, we had really good editors who did a fantastic job of it… nothing would have killed us faster than a heavy-handed attempt at “normalizing” the content to a house style. That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either. On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
    • jgrahamc 26d ago
      I take a different stance on your final point. I think people should absolutely not use AI tools for functional communication as a crutch because they struggle with writing clearly. They need to learn to write clearly. I believe there's a direct connection between clear thought and clear words.
      • mtabini 26d ago
        I think it's good to be pragmatic about these things. To me, it's similar to wondering whether we insist that doctors learn to write well, or we just give them a computer so that the pharmacist doesn't have to play philologist with their scripts. The vast majority of communication is routine, and can probably be improved with automated tools. Now, I also see the counterargument that, in the doctor example, the computer is simply a tool that improves a process rather than a crutch that replaces the underlying knowledge, but I suspect that, in a lot of cases, that's probably OK.
• its-summertime 26d ago
  Personally I wouldn't be writing an open letter to what is effectively a bunch of spam bots. I don't think they'll read it, or care.
• Brendinooo 26d ago
  I'm not morally/philosophically opposed to someone generating text with AI. I just don't want to read something that isn't really "owned" by the person creating it (that is, the writer knows what he is sending me and endorses all of its contents), and because I can't discern that from people I don't know, I tend to view it with suspicion by default.
  • CrimsonRain 26d ago
    This is perfectly valid position to have. I also feel the same way. Unless I'm directly interacting with the LLM, someone should endorse the content.
• classified 26d ago
  The HN title ("Intellectual Fly Is Open") made me think it's about some startup starting to sell subscriptions. That title should be de-editorialized. Was it LLM-generated?
• sajithdilshan 26d ago
  Whenever I see a cringe post on LinkedIn, I medically block that person or mark that post as not interested. That’s the only way you can judge the algorithm not to show those posts
• rglover 26d ago
  I can always tell when someone uses an LLM to write and never gave the LLM proper context on how to write (i.e., writing samples, skills files specific to writing, etc). These are also the people who tend to complain about AI's writing style. You can get pretty good results if you take the time to tune it. Tropes and the like still sneak in but if you take the time to edit and rework things, it ends up being a pretty good workflow (especially for stuff that's more procedural, not artistic).
  • zahlman 25d ago
    > These are also the people who tend to complain about AI's writing style. What? No, the complaints come from the people who end up expected to read the result.
• f0e4c2f7 26d ago
  This feels like satire / parody. Praising LinkedIn. The text itself containing multiple LLM tells, especially in the parts complaining most about LLM writing. Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot. Funny in either case.
• Dlemlo 26d ago
  No clue why people use linkedin posts serious? I mean, i check it to see if a recruiter has something interesting but otherwise?
• manlymuppet 26d ago
  This post uses far too much punctuation. Makes it jarring to read.
  • manlymuppet 26d ago
    Perhaps the author is trying to distinguish themselves from LLMs.
• Hasz 26d ago
  LLMs are not defacto bad at writing and are not defacto distinguishable from human writers. Lots of people are just lazy, never customize anything, and tell chatgpt to make them a post about x to be a "thought leader". Most are even lazier and blatantly rip off some else for their own means. However, it is perfectly possible to have an LLM imitate an existing corpus of writing (yours or someone else) and with a good prompt, idea, and editing, to produce high quality writing (in every sense of the word) with an LLM.
  • patrickmay 26d ago
    If you're going to put that level of effort in, just write the thing yourself. It will be a comparable level of effort and you'll learn something doing it. Your readers will also appreciate hearing your real voice.
    • snk 25d ago
      Well, no. If I can get an LLM to write like Asimov, that's better than I will ever do, honest.
• jeremyjh 26d ago
  These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt. Reviewing gives you the chance to ensure the arguments connect solidly, that references are accurate (even informal references) and gives you the time to consider counter-arguments you aren't addressing. None of this matters much on LinkedIn, but it matters a lot in our work. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.
  • jampekka 26d ago
    > Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt. I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there's other work to writing too. The biggest one is that you have to communicate non-interactively to an unknown audience. Having to (literally) put it in someone else's assumed terms does help giving different perspectives into the matter, but doesn't necessarily help one's own thinking that much. Instead you have to do some of the reader's thinking for them. You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents. Not all writing is thinking and not all thinking is writing.
    • iterateoften 26d ago
      > You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents. Hard disagree. Constraint is the driver of creativity. Also rewording sentences to sound better or make sense can make you reconceptualize the whole concept you are expressing
• cjauvin 26d ago
  I think this is due to the fact that the language game that we have collectively decided to play, with AI, is not yet mature enough. In the language game of “giving a gift”, for instance, there is a distinction between giving a gift that you made yourself, and one that you bought at the store, but it is not that great, nobody cares a lot anymore. Right now, the language game of publishing words on the internet is strongly associated with the notion that these are “my words”, and the fact that they might have been written by a machine instead, introduces some discomfort. But it’s possible to imagine a future where this language game will have evolved enough that the notion of authorship by a particular machine entity, will not in itself be such an important issue, anymore.
• Kiro 26d ago
  I remember when I saw it the "list with things prefixed with emojis" the first time, and started doing it myself thinking it was a great way to break down things visually. Looking back at the things I wrote then people would definitely assume it's LLM. I sometimes see posts on LinkedIn that look LLM generated but also makes me think it's someone who has seen a post, thinking it's a great way to convey a point and tries to adapt the style, without realizing it's a smell.
  • zahlman 25d ago
    As they say, there's no accounting for taste.
• CrimsonRain 26d ago
  LLMs write better than most journalists. It also writes better than majority people in the world when it comes to English as majority are really bad in writing. And of course, LLMs write as you prompt. Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.
  • wavemode 26d ago
    > LLMs write better than most journalists In my personal experience I strongly disagree. Curious what publications you read wherein this is the case.
    • anon84873628 26d ago
      I suspect the commenter prefers the concise, factual summary of an LLM. It is true that modern journalism on the web is trying to get ad impressions. After all, this is how we ended up with clickbait. Sure you still have the Economist and Atlantic (which aren't beyond criticism), but your local county paper is an absolute mess. The content is stretched, meandering, and designed to keep you scrolling through more impressions.
      • zahlman 26d ago
        > concise, factual summary of an LLM. Pardon; the what?
  • jampekka 26d ago
    > LLMs write better than most journalists. I used to think this, but now that I've been trying to use them to help with writing, it turns out they are not necessarily that great on the deeper level. The grammar and the surface style are impeccable, but they often struggle with continuity and carrying on a point or an argument.
    • deleted 26d ago
      [deleted]
• jan_m_savage 26d ago
  Much like our voices, DNA, odor, and personalities are unique, so is our writing style. When I read a wholly-human writing, I get a sense of what kind of a human I'm dealing with. Using LLMs will distort this signal, so readers worth their salt will easily skip the piece, because we don't want to acquire LLM-like writing 'style' (reading affects writing). As soon as I sense Slop, I'm done, this person refused to think when writing, why should I waste my time reading it then?
• deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway_fange 26d ago
  Even worse in the corporate world. Most emails about some launch announcements are now entirely written by AI. TTFED (Time to first em dash) is usually like 30 words or less. What once has been a thoughtful email trying to describe in few words why something is launched and how it might help you etc. is now almost a novel with more paragraphs than substance within the tool being launched. This makes it almost impossible to stand out as well. Where in the past someone could create a grea looking announcement (eye-candy) and think deeply about what to write there, and then hopefully stand out in the sea of mediocre ones, now every little email seems like it's a multi-million $ SaaS being launched. Just last week we launched an internal tool which was in development for months, and literally a handful of people even bothered clicking the links within the announcement. This is being one-upped still by leaders writing big project plans for 4-5 months ahead, using AI. Everything from the inception of the project(s) is AI. It has bizzare timelines, more codenames than actual people working on it, the vaguest descriptions of what the things will do etc. Then this is trickled down into the teams, and they... to no ones surprise, throw more LLM at it. Now they start working on the LLM project plan using claude etc. The end-effect is baffling in all sorts of ways (quality, ui/ux, all pages looking different), AI generated images and more. And then, finally, they colaborate on big announcement emails using AI. And if you don't share the optimism and try to explain why this is silly, you're an AI sceptic... True story from within one of the biggest companies in the world.
• sharanharsoor 26d ago
  I love the analogy. Thanks for sharing!
• deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
• m3kw9 26d ago
  it's all about money, they write some attractive stuff, they get some views, likes follows, maybe someone will say "this dude is smart". but most times you get idiots liking the stuff, and likely detrimental because a smart person would see is slop, and they also know you don't know people know is slop.
• deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
• duckydude20 26d ago
  ai slop is sh8t. but using ai to write thoughts in readable way, with flow, no issues on my side. my english writing is quite bad. if i write article i myself cannot read it. ai helps with the flow, review editing. nowadays i record audio, stt and then let ai flow it properly. i hate blog.md like this, given a topic and it does everything.
• ericbarrett 26d ago
  If I may compare written work to restaurants, a title and byline are like the storefront; I get an idea of what's being served, and if I'm hungry, I'll walk in and order. Sometimes the meal is amazing. Usually it's pretty good. Occasionally it's bland, or even bad, but not often enough to discourage future ventures; of course, I'm unlikely to revisit that particular proprietor. With LLM writing there's an additional outcome. I walk in and the walls are pleasant, if beige. I follow the smell and promise of food down a hallway. At the end is an unmarked door, which I open and peek through. Myriad hallways lead away, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Say I am very hungry and have the guts to explore; I may find that I can never actually reach the food, that it's just an endless hall of mirrors, presenting structure but with nothing at its core. Sometimes I do find food, but it's never better than bland. The facade of these places, at first glance, still looks like human-run restaurants, though we're all learning the tells. Nowadays, when I open the first door and see more hallways, I'll turn around and look elsewhere.
• rulesmen 26d ago
  This is basically the main argument of On Writing Well, Zinsser, William Amazing book.
• bibimsz 26d ago
  the 1900s called, they want their political references back
• rahuldracula 26d ago
  I don't agree. Good writing and good ideas are entirely different things. Just read all the beautifully written, inaccurate stuff by the NYT or the Guardian. Also, non-native English speakers have to use LLMs to share their views so that they are not judged on their writing. This post is also a good example; it's well written, and I enjoyed it. The idea could have been expressed simply as: "People can smell LLMs in your writing, it makes you look disingenous"
  • relevant_stats 26d ago
    > I don't agree. Good writing and good ideas are entirely different things. Just read all the beautifully written, inaccurate stuff by the NYT or the Guardian. I'd be very curious of some examples when great ideas are being presented in bad writing (or bad speaking for that matter). > Also, non-native English speakers have to use LLMs to share their views so that they are not judged on their writing. weird statement. If they use LLMs they will be then judged for both their inability to write in English and for their usage of AI. Not good.
    • SatvikBeri 26d ago
      One example that comes to mind is math textbooks – the early textbooks in a field are usually much worse than later ones that come along. To pick on one, I think most people who've read both would agree that the commutative algebra section of Lang's Algebra is much worse than Atiyah & McDonald's Commutative Algebra book, despite covering basically the same ideas, theorems, etc.
• jtrn 26d ago
  Interesting quick read/take. Especially the LinkedIn analogy. Even though I am WAY high on the AI fanboy and low on the LinkedIn side of the bell curve, I can see what the author mean.
• NishanStepak 26d ago
  LLM writing is boring. Write it yourself. You are more interesting than a LLM because you make mistakes, do stupid things, don't go for the average content, and can be ridiculous in a way that an LLM can never be. LLMs are great for large tasks which would take you several hours or several days to complete that are routine or tedious. Even then, you have to make it human by putting in your own viewpoint and misguided ideas. I really liked the article. I use LinkedIn a lot, I think it is a better platform than he is describing. There is some dumbing down so it meets the average person. That is its strength and weakness.
  • theturtletalks 26d ago
    You’ve made me realize that LLM’s greatest strength is iteration. It helps you iterate really fast, but it’s not original. It doesn’t help you think of new ideas. So writing about the things you know is great and using AI to learn about things you don’t know and then writing about them is also great. The way I explain it to young people is that AI is a force multiplier. Everyone gets the benefit of that force multiplier, but it’s that initial force that you need to build up now. Preliminary knowledge of domains, things that the AI doesn’t really understand. AI can help you increase that initial force. So use it to learn new things, not just do things for you. I was blown away by the fact that AI solved an unsolved math problem, but it made complete sense when it was Terrence Tao, someone who has a PhD in math, that was guiding that agent to that solution, so that initial force is important more than ever.
• qarl 26d ago
  [flagged]
• tipsytoad 26d ago
  Is LinkedIn a normal social network? It seems like an absolute dumpster fire to me (it even has shorts now!)
• WindyTree 26d ago
  It’s the best guy around who tells you when your fly is down, thanks. I did writing courses as elective in college, the biggest lost truth is that there is no one correct writing style, (you build) being a writer at any capacity means cultivating your own writing voice, (yours) which is an expression of who you are. (voice)
• Twoheroes78 26d ago
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• a-dub 26d ago
  writing well still works. it also still can be quite hard depending on the circumstance.
• aspicytaco4me 26d ago
  Gerald Ford references - pop culture wow.
• softwaredoug 26d ago
  It’s never been easier to differentiate yourself as a writer. You just write with some personality. People don’t want writing that doesn’t look average, but looks novel. I despair much less for human writers than a did maybe a year ago.
  • embedding-shape 26d ago
    > just write with some personality I think that's the first time someone claims that "write with some personality" is some easy thing you just learn somehow. There are authors out there, even ones that make a living on their writing, who still haven't learned to "write with some personality". What exactly does that mean and how concretely can people actually do this in practice? A few "tips and tricks" might be more helpful than "just write better" or similar stuff.
    • softwaredoug 26d ago
      Some things that help me. 1. Be vulnerable and share your mistakes. Avoid a triumphalist “everything works” PoV 2. Write about your actual lived personal experiences. 3. Try to have a sense of humor 4. Have an informed opinion or PoV - strong opinions held weakly. 5. Be casual. Don’t treat a blog like it’s a research paper.
      • embedding-shape 26d ago
        Thanks a bunch! I actually tried "writing more personal" just some weeks ago, and the feedback I received so far been relatively OK I think, except some people apparently think the part about the drugs to be childish. May I ask what you think of it, if it does sound like it's written with actual personality? https://emsh.cat/en/the-people-are-still-there/ https://emsh.cat/en/the-people-are-still-there/ I won't claim to be a professional author or even good, but lately I've been trying to get more into the "it's a person who writes actually" direction and this was an exploration into that, so any sort of feedback would be most welcome, if you have the time!
      • patrickmay 26d ago
• JGregoryH 26d ago
  It's been odd as I've seen colleagues I generally thought of as intelligent and self aware post glaringly AI generated cliche LinkedIn corporate slop, even accounts from generally respectable and innovative tech companies. I don't know whether they think no one can tell or that they don't care if it is obviously AI? It's truly bizarre and now seems to be the vast majority of posts there.
• luxuryballs 26d ago
  sometimes I feel like just writing in all lowercase without fully proper punctuation to signal that it's a real human mind
• kittikitti 26d ago
  I guarantee you people dislike my writing way, way more than they would if it was AI generated. People need to look in the mirror before telling others not to utilize LLM's for writing.
• arbirk 26d ago
  LinkedIn is also suppressive. The algo for maximizing non-confrontational screen time is strongly tuned against: critical posts and comments. Real bringing of information from outside the bubble. Links are severely suppressed.
• etoyruben 26d ago
  I wanted to share my project, but for some reason, the site won't let me... I guess my karma is too low—ha ha ha! We're all like kids trying to get a good grade.
  • eks391 26d ago
    I think one of my first posts ever was a share. My guess is there probably a new account timeout to prevent spam, and you are affected for having made your account today
• jcims 26d ago
  We hired a new guy at work that's leading a specific platform initiative. In person he's very articulate, able to communicate abstract thoughts clearly, states clear goals and how he's learning about the business to develop a plan. But dear lord everything he writes in email and slack reads like it's copy paste from chatgpt. It's unnerving.
  • ingvay7 25d ago
    Had a similar experience when my talented lead engineer, who usually grunts in monosyllables and writes terse responses to my apparently intellectually frivolous questions, started adding flowery emojis to his email.
• joe_the_user 26d ago
  I wouldn't ever use an LLM for my own writing. But I'd use, after edits, for letters to bureaucrats, landlords and other types I'm forced to deal with. The thing is, the author may care about Linkedin but the relationship that many people have with linkedin is as a place they have to be. "Hmm, I need a blog to enhance my career but writing, urg. I know just the thing...". Which is to say, it's not strange Linkedin is going to be filled with crap. None of my actual friends on Facebook post crap 'cause there's no incentive.
• JBAnderson5 26d ago
  To me, LLMs struggle with the most important aspect of technical writing - conciseness. As Einstein put it: “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough”
• SoftTalker 26d ago
  > with LinkedIn we know that we’re getting something ... that isn’t totally crooked Citation desperately needed.
• instinct007 26d ago
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• sdcfgy 26d ago
  I’d rather be embarrassed by my writing than embarrassed by an LLM speaking for me.
  • djeastm 26d ago
    Same here. I remember the first time my email client made an unsolicited suggestion about how to compose a thank you note to my grandmother. After seeing what it had autocompleted I thought, "oh, wow that's a lot better than I could do" for a split second before realizing, "wait, what the hell is wrong with me getting a computer to write a thank you note to my grandmother!" I've never even tried to use AI to write since. I'd be so embarrassed.
• peteridah 26d ago
  I have found LLM’s to be a really good thinking partner for writing. I start with a rough idea then proceed to argue for hours challenging ourselves and throwing away a lot of drafts until something materially useful emerges. It is a very different approach to writing… much morel like attaching a debugger to my thought process.
• baud9600 26d ago
  We seem to be very sensitive to style. It can be rather distracting. This writing contained 7 exclamation marks and 9 colons. As for em-dashes, there were 7.
• I_dream_of_Geni 26d ago
  Yes, yes, all is true here. But you forget: Half of America is illiterate. "According to data analyzed via the National Literacy Institute, roughly 54% of American adults read below a sixth-grade reading level." So, those folks aren't checking anything, and certainly wouldn't know the difference, or care.
• perarneng 26d ago
  The people who are going to be successful in the coming economy is the ones who can channel all the knowledge and experience of an llm without shame. If you are smart: "... in the style of a my writing"
  • matheusmoreira 26d ago
    I've been doing that. It helps that I have a substantial human writing corpus to draw from. Results are still mixed. Models simply can't resist adding some LLMisms. Pangram still detects some of it but not others, and also misdetects some of my actual writing as AI generated. Honestly, I'd rather the shame and hate just went away instead. It's seriously exhausting and I'm starting to feel tempted to just give up and either start using AI more heavily or stop writing altogether.
• Alien1Being 26d ago
  LLM use is like Instagram use. Both are generally most indulged in, by the intellectually and educationally less fortunate.
• wj 26d ago
  I don’t want to read content written by AI. A feature I would like on LinkedIn would be a 100% verified human content flag for users. LinkedIn can then do the scans and flip that to false for any users it catches posting AI assisted content. Let me filter that out of the feed. If we don’t do something to maintain some standard of discourse, we lose intellectually and as a piece of our humanity. LinkedIn is the only social media I use and it is on thin ice.
  • ciupicri 26d ago
    Under European law don't you have to mark AI generated content as such?
    • wj 26d ago
      Is that self reported? Does it apply to content created by a U.S. based AI model? Posted on a U.S. website? Read by someone in the U.S. I am not anticipating people self identifying slop.
  • asdff 26d ago
    They don't want you to do that because you will realize how quiet and dead these spaces are becoming.
  • biztos 25d ago
    How do you think they will verify this? With AI?
• einpoklum 26d ago
  Just like LLM-generated blurbs are now a cliched trope, so are short blog posts about people experience in a world with a lot of LLM usage. And this is one of those.
• viniciussucupir 26d ago
  [flagged]
• mitxela 26d ago
  Wait, you're complaining about AI-generated content on LinkedIn? The place that was 99.9% organic human content slop even before there were LLMs? It was always all form, no substance.
• Havoc 26d ago
  Why spend time on linkedin? It's an intellectual wasteland. I'd rather read reddit than some ghostwritten thoughtleader piece
• paulpauper 26d ago
  People, such as the author, who are smart and competent--be it writing, math ,coding etc.--I think systematically underestimate the difficulty of said task for a general population. Things they take for granted, such as writing well, are surprisingly difficult for large proportion of the general population
• Suhinnall27 26d ago
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• antonvs 26d ago
  The people posting this content are intellectual eunuchs, so it doesn’t really matter if their fly is open.
• anigbrowl 26d ago
  I'm gonna be contrarian here and say this is a Good Thing. It's very easy to tag to tag this sort of writing, and that makes it an absolutely great signal about hte people who post it. The more vacuous or frequent it is, they less weight you can accord them and the easier it probably is to get past their filters and make use of them for your own ends. Is that morally bad? Guess that depends on exactly how you make use of them and what those ends are. If you an encourage an idiot to praise your competitor's product in order to get a reverse halo effect, that's kinda bad. If you give them some empty flattery in order to bridge a contact with someone you actually want to connect with, that's probably OK. The point is that uncritical LLM repetition tells you something about the person and lets you see past metrics like the apparent amount of wealth they have, the intimidatingly deep resume, or the degree size or centrality of their network. Two things, in fact: they post any old thing that brings in the clicks, and they're cheap. Previously many of these people probably paid someone to ghost-write their commercial affirmations. Conclusory zinger goes here - punch up the dramatic contrast PS I'm reducing your fee to 10c/word, hope that's OK. Inflation
• tejohnso 26d ago
  > anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore Isn't this likely to be a temporary situation though? Are we at peak LLM writing quality?
• cmgriffing 25d ago
  If a human should read it, a human should write it.
• StanislavPetrov 25d ago
  Personally I never use an LLM or "AI" for any reason. Don't find them useful and, like others, don't find their writing compelling or interesting. I can understand using it as a coding tool, but can't fathom anyone wanting or needing to filter their own thoughts and ideas through it. Is it really that difficult for anyone to send a letter or an email without machine assistance?! If someone sent me a machine generated email I would view it as being no different than any other spam message. In my opinion doing so shows a lack of respect for the recipient whose time is being wasted with machine generated trash.
  • snk 25d ago
    If you never used any particular tool, you probably wouldn't find it useful, right? I asked Gemini about my unicycling this morning, and it coached me on weighting the seat; e.g., looking ahead instead of down helps unweight the pedals.
    • StanislavPetrov 25d ago
      That's true. I've also never used a wheelchair, or a variety of other tools for people who can't walk, because I can walk without them. The same holds true for communication.
• ricksunny 25d ago
  “…at worst, they will cause people who see it for what it is to question your authenticity entirely.” love it. I mean, if a world is going to exist that treats LLM-assisted writing with serenity, the content creator should consider themselves mandated to describe how they used AI to produce their content. Do I need the prompts? Not necessarily, although bonus points for transparency if they do share prompts. But just a high-level articulation about how they leveraged AI, so I as the reader don’t have to lose time wondering how much of the content & (like expository & analysis for nonfiction, plot elements for fiction is the author’s own and how much is the LLM’s.
• xbmcuser 25d ago
  I personally use an LLM mostly after I have written my posts/thoughts to fix grammar and punctuation.
• olalonde 25d ago
  > When you use an LLM to author a post, you may think you are generating plausible writing, but you aren’t There's some toupee fallacy at play here. The author probably reads a lot of LLM assisted content without batting an eye, but only spots the worse of the LLM outputs. There's a big difference between "write a post about _" vs "improve the grammar/style of my post: _". It's a bit like saying that movie CGI really sucks because you can always tell it's fake.
• anabis 25d ago
  I asked the latest AI model and destroyed consequent amount of water what "fly" is in this context.
• SadErn 25d ago
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• gps372 25d ago
  Another AI-as-amplifier vs AI-as-substitute article. Wondering what happens when tomorrow AI accepts and learns from the feedback and gets trained on all the failed initiative as well. It wouldn't be so hard if failed (something which wasn't right at all or hasn't got the traction) projects and ideas are all listed somewhere for an LLM to scan through. LLM may finally figure out how to add personal scars, hard decisions and personal insights which can be personalized further. Also I don't think it might be so undesirable for an org, if there is a system which observes and present hard facts based on last quarter or year JIRA (pi planning and sprint planning) and commit histories.
• illiac786 25d ago
  Well, sure, but with his fly open the LLM user harvested more wheat. I guess everyone would walk around with fly open if it allowed them to do twice the amount of work or more.
• harrouet 25d ago
  So there are people who actually spend time on the LinkedIn social feed? Man, it has been purely made of fake content, even since before LLM were a thing. And the notifications are so senseless that everyone disable them -- and people don't even answer the private messages. There is nothing social about LI.
• booster-rooster 25d ago
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• 3165149176 25d ago
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• westurner 25d ago
  > the LLM tells are impossible to ignore. Bluntly, your intellectual fly is open: lots of people notice — but no one is pointing it out You are going to be left in the dust with this attitude. People using LLMs will continue to school you; not just because of your disrespectful attitude. To assume that people have not read what they've used an AI to generate is to make a number of mistakes. 1. People using (assistive) LLMs needn't cow to you due to your aesthetic rejection of LLM-generated text. It is impolite for you to assert your superiority to make them feel inferior. 2. Your aesthetic reaction to their prose is not a sufficient estimator of sufficiency. 3. These generations of LLMs are already superhuman in so many dimensions. If you focus on the color of the paint - here, the wording of their reply increase of the substance of their argument - you will have wasted their and your own time. It sounds like you are frustrated that LLMs are besting you in your field and you've chosen to trash talk on your blog to solve the problem. Should people reversing with e.g. GhidraMCP stop and focus on the LLM-generated aesthetics of a watermarked prosaic vulnerability assessment?
• wedesoft 25d ago
  On the one hand LLMs draw from a large pool of knowledge, on the other hand they are not (yet) living in the world in order to make new observations.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 25d ago
  "This article wasn't written by an AI. So what if it had been!" | https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/09/07/this-article-wasnt-written-by-an-ai-so-what-if-it-had-been https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/09/07/this-arti... "It seems to me that the moral panic around writing with AI exists on a different plane of reality. Behind the admonishments to never outsource one's writing is a naive implication that inside everyone rests a hidden Hemingway, and all they need is time and the discipline to sit with a blank page. To do otherwise is loser behaviour. This is a bonkers, elitist vision of the writing world, which is now fuelling a cottage industry of word police, like Claude's watermarking or Pangram's AI-writing score. Neither shows you how to make your draft stronger. They are essentially just scolds in the form of software: You're writing wrong, you cheat. Be better! But how do you write better if you don't know what better writing looks like?" Read Will reading "AI"-generated text (cf. brain-generated text from competent authors) produce competent writers Absent the output of competent writers (cf. "AI" output) will there be more high quality material for aspiring writers to read
• yunwal 24d ago
  > We’re getting something that isn’t totally crooked Is there a secret corner of LinkedIn that I’m not aware of that isn’t just the most shameless promotion of AI, crypto, and various other techno-babble BS you’ve ever seen?
• jkrd 24d ago
  Didn’t read to the end, written by an LLM.
• kestrelquant 21d ago
  [flagged]