5 ms·

I fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write. I know the author of this article tells you never to

by S-E-P 15d ago

I fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write. I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used. This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful. If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.

boplicity 15d ago
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.
- derektank 15d ago
  >I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives
  - boplicity 15d ago
    Not sure. I don't like LLMs inserting itself into human to human communication, as it can shape our thinking in many ways. Delegating this also makes it much harder for a person to become a subject-matter expert, which is a real loss.
- loloquwowndueo 15d ago
  > compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely? There’s zero value in sharing ai-generated output unless your ai has access to something nobody else’s does on which to base things. If all it’s doing is web research you should share your prompt instead. That way people don’t have to deal with ai-written walls of text.
  - boplicity 15d ago
    > What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely? Well, they don't have the many other pieces of the business in place that makes this work meaningful. They certainly could try, though. If they succeeded, this aspect wouldn't be what made the difference, though.
jakeinspace 15d ago
Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest. Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.
- sixtyj 15d ago
  There is a recent PISA research that students slowly decline in understanding the long reads. E.g. in one country, 21% of high school students do not even achieve “sufficient reading literacy”… So the question should be - what are we going to do with this? LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway… About PISA research for example here: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on-international-exam-both-in-the-united-states-and-abroad/2026/09 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on...
  - watwut 15d ago
    > LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway LLM generated text oftentimes just do not have the point to be understood. LLM is training you to NOT read, because trying to do close reading of LLM generated text is usually a mistake. There is no deeper there. Either it was correct on the surface things or it is a gibberish.
  - yorwba 15d ago
    PISA is a statistical measurement tool designed for sensitivity to differences in student performance. So it uses questions that some students are expected to get right and some are expected to get wrong, and places the result on a bell curve fit to a reference population. It's not clear what you mean by "sufficient reading literacy," but I guess it's one of the PISA proficiency levels. Those are simply equally-spaced intervals on the bell curve. For example, level 1c in reading is 2.4 to 3.1 standard deviations below the reference mean and 21% of participants in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon scored at that level. Relative to the baseline, they are definitely close to the bottom. However, even they must've gotten some questions right, or they would've ended up in the "below level 1c" bucket (like 3% in Iraqi Kurdistan and 5% in Lebanon did). (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en/full-report/results-for-countries-and-economies_33854635.html#annex-d1e69716-8107cecc98 https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... Table I.B1.2a.11) If you wanted to know how many people achieve "sufficient reading literacy," you would need a test specifically designed for measuring it (i.e. not PISA), where people with sufficient ability can be expected to get all questions right. For example, the literacy rate is typically defined via the ability to "read and write a simple statement about everyday life," a test which 99% of adults in wealthy countries pass, 92% in Lebanon and 84% in Iraq: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?country=Europe+and+Northern+America+%28SDG%29~IRQ~LBN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra... Of course a test that 99% pass just becomes table stakes and boring, whereas PISA with its large differences between individuals is much more exciting, but you shouldn't let that mislead you into thinking that students scoring relatively low on PISA necessarily must be lacking even those table-stakes skills.
beebmam 15d ago
I don't ever watch TV or streaming shows anymore. It's been a huge improvement in my life. It's the same with reading. Reading is mostly a waste of my time, with some notable exceptions. I'm glad I spend way less time doing each of these!
- S-E-P 15d ago
  It's sad that reading has become that way for you. I love reading, but I mostly read non-fiction and I'm a bit of an amateur history buff. Last time I read a fiction book I was left feeling like I was preached to by an alien about how life doesn't really matter (sci-fi authors will often do that). The state of literature is pretty dire.
  - antonvs 14d ago
    It’s hard to find good new literature - it may be out there, but it’s hard to find. But there’s lifetimes worth of good older literature, that’s much easier to find, that you haven’t read yet.
NuclearPM 15d ago
Agreed completely. (This reply took me 0.4 seconds to generate.)
shimman 15d ago
Just read people you can trust. Why are you giving yourself all this busy work? Just make your own tree of material to read. You should have a couple dozen writers/journalists you admire, look at who these people read then start reading those people, then you repeat the cycle. Don't waste your time reading anything new, most new things are bad. Most ideas we struggle with, are ideas we have been discussing since the written record was invented out of necessity. Anything new worth reading will assuredly make your way to you if you are at all connected.
- CuriouslyC 15d ago
  If everyone followed this advice it would turn influencer culture to 11, rich get richer, with no "social mobility"
  - shimman 15d ago
    No it really wouldn't. I like the authors Jeff VanderMeer and Peter Watts. They have had multiple interviews where they talk about their peers, who they respect from the past, and who they like in our current age. I have found maybe subsequent authors + journalists to read from these two. Try to think a little more critically here. If you can't trust the opinion of people you supposedly like, already established in their craft, who can you trust? Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way. My advice for you is to pull the plug and read books that are older than 125 years.
    - CuriouslyC 15d ago
      For everyone that you consider "good" there are at least a dozen people who are equally "good" but without the social proof. What you describe played out exactly in music and art pre-AI. The record exec and the gallery owner were the people you "trusted" who king-made and gate-kept what we saw based on what they thought was most marketable. > Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way. This is a personal attack that is unsubstantiated by what I wrote, read the guidelines and follow them or go elsewhere.
iqp 15d ago
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? 100%. We're producing more content, faster, than ever before but ... most of it is just click-producing garbage that won't stand the test of time.
- CuriouslyC 15d ago
  The thing is, that was the internet before AI. In fact, generative AI almost certainly raised the AVERAGE quality of stuff on the internet, human slop was/is absolute trash, whereas AI slop is just bland and meandering. The problem here is that the volume of low-mid content is making it harder to find the best content.
matheusmoreira 15d ago
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Because the information in the post could be valuable regardless of human or LLM involvement.
- californical 15d ago
  But how much slop are you willing to wade through, hoping to find a nugget of insight?
  - matheusmoreira 15d ago
    More than the average person, I suppose. For some reason, AI writing isn't as irritating to me as it seems to be for everyone else. I treat it the same way I treat human writing: by speed reading most of the article so I can find the points the author is trying to make and decide whether I should read the entire thing.
  - theasisa 15d ago
    I guess the answer to this is feeding the LLM generated content to another LLM and telling it to summarise it
ferngodfather 15d ago
People on my FOSS project couldn't see the issue with their AI slopped documentation contributions. On one hand I'm like, yeah fair enough it needed writing and something is better than nothing. On the other I know nobody wants to read it now because it's just word vomit rather than how a human would write something they'd like another human to read. I hate it so much.
- LtWorf 15d ago
  On Debian we recently voted whether to permit or forbid llm usage (spoiler, AI usage at will won). One person was arguing that they need llm because english isn't their first language and then it helps them write better and be understood. I was incapable of reading their (extremely long) email of arguments; I tried but my mind just went elsewhere as my eyes were moving through the lines. At the very end there was a disclaimer that llm had been used to "aid" in writing that very email. Poor guy thinks he's communicating better but all he's doing is making his emails completely unreadable. It's a sad state of affairs.
  - vlfig 15d ago
    There is now increased evolutionary pressure for rules protecting scarcity to become norm. Communication media will likely adopt limits on the size and throughput of messages.
  - dist-epoch 15d ago
    It kind of makes sense that if English is not their first language, the can't review the LLM English output also. However most likely they just don't understand what good communication looks like, LLMs are perfectly capable of turning anything into clear concise communication, in fact an easy tell that something is LLM written is that it's just too precise and clear, humans are much more rambling.
siscia 15d ago
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Because the value of writing are not the words on a piece of paper but the idea they convey. Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them? Teacher assistant homeworks are not worth to do, because they are made by a TA and not by the course professor? Of course there are writing as: "Hey ChatGPT write me a piece around coding with LLMs" and yeah, those are not worth reading. But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.
- graemep 15d ago
  "Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them?" It often makes them less informative and a lot less sincere.
  - andrewflnr 14d ago
    Yeah, it's phrased like a reductio ad absurdum but it's close to being literally true. It's not technically "copywriters" but their words are "polished" for pleasantness, often with the explicit guidance of consultants, until most of the truth or novelty is gone.
- Planktonne 15d ago
  > But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it. I know lots of AI-enabled writers believe this, but I've never actually seen it be true.
  - Zambyte 15d ago
    How about Anthropic? I've seen people say it's surprising that their blog isn't written with AI, but I think it's far more likely that it is written with AI; they are just good at reviewing and getting a nice prose out of their models.
- 12d ago
JimDabell 15d ago
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word. Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself. Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.
- sm-silversight 15d ago
  How do you know it's not his/her thought? Just because others have had it does not mean he/she did not put effort into considering it.
  - abc123abc123 15d ago
    How do you know it is? Most likely we will never know.
  - nearbuy 14d ago
    In this comment section alone, 5 people have used some variant of that aphorism, and it's used constantly on hn and other sites. They've heard it.
    - Terr_ 14d ago
      How does that matter? Parent-poster asked about sincerity of thought, not originality. If the spouses-to-be at a marriage ceremony say "I do", would you leap up from the audience to denounce them as frauds because obviously they heard the vow-formula before a hundred times? Hopefully not, and not only for reasons of decorum. In contrast, most of the LLM slop I deal with from coworkers involve statements that--while less formulaic--are ones they can't even recall saying and are unwilling to defend when questioned.
wkjagt 15d ago
The way I see it is that a clearly AI generated article is the result of some prompts. So the "author" wrote tens of words, which then got inflated to hundreds and maybe thousands by a computer program. This is a very inefficient way to convey an idea, especially if the reader has access to the same program. I'd rather the author shared their prompts, because maybe there's some originality in it, and I can then decide if I want to explore the idea further, maybe even with an LLM.
- CuriouslyC 15d ago
  What if the prompt for the 1500 word article you're reading is 10k words of research/data collection, thesis testing, etc?
  - wkjagt 14d ago
    Yeah ok good point. I think my thinking around this was too simplistic.
globular-toast 15d ago
Yeah, I'm sticking to pre-2020 works from here on out. Not sure how I'll be able to read about current events, though.
iamkitchjay 15d ago
Strongly agree. Whenever I see an "AI-written" disclaimer, I skip it entirely. And if it's not disclosed, the exact moment I realize it's AI output, I immediately close the tab. It feels like a waste of the reader's time.
plasticchris 14d ago
To focus your point: we fear that with ideas having easier replication that the noise in the signal will increase. But this is what people said about the printing press. And the internet. Less effort to spread the memes. Has it been a net negative? Maybe in some respects. Can you stop it? Probably not.
627467 14d ago
> I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used Im sorry for you. It must be hard to detach yourself with a fixation. I also cant help but spend my attention spotting where the magician is hiding the coin instead of trying to enjoy the show > If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Most people in these threads repeat this question. As if pre-ai all writing was from deep thinkers full of genuine intention.
- cindyllm 14d ago
  [dead]
Gigachad 14d ago
At work the jira tickets have become massive walls of AI slop. What’s worse is they contain huge amounts if useless “thinking” where the LLM explains what it did and checked rather than just giving the final result. As a result, when I see an AI wall of text I just don’t bother reading it and DM the submitter asking what it’s about.
visarga 14d ago
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? I don't think writing it is the whole process, research could be 10 or 100x longer.
chenzhekl 14d ago
Language is meant for sharing information. I don't think there's anything wrong with using AI to write - the real issue is that AI-generated writing can be hard to understand. Once AI solves the readability problem, its writing will actually be better suited for communicating with humans.
- tripledry 14d ago
  Not only hard to understand, but if one uses it without first understanding the topic, it's a disaster. Couple weeks ago I had someone linking to a doc page in my ticket "Made this summary, hope it helps". It was 100% AI generated, the person clearly had no understanding of the problem, it only mentioned UI changes although the thing required changes in many systems. Complete waste of time, I don't think I will humor anyone who makes AI summaries anymore.
Shocka1 13d ago
Agreed. Recently I've made the effort in disclosing on my website posts that 100% of the words are written by me. I do make graphs and share data here and there, and the same applies - I'm transparent if an agent happened to be used in the process. I don't mind if someone used an LLM to write something, but disclosing such is a good rule to go by IMO.
doug_durham 13d ago
Why are you spending your precious time and energy trying to guess if something was written by AI? Does it make you happy? Does it add value to your life? Why do you do this now when there has always been low quality content generated by lazy authors? You admit it is making reading less enjoyable. Why not just enjoy reading?

by S-E-P 15d ago

boplicity 15d ago

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.

derektank 15d ago
>I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives
- boplicity 15d ago
  Not sure. I don't like LLMs inserting itself into human to human communication, as it can shape our thinking in many ways. Delegating this also makes it much harder for a person to become a subject-matter expert, which is a real loss.
loloquwowndueo 15d ago
> compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely? There’s zero value in sharing ai-generated output unless your ai has access to something nobody else’s does on which to base things. If all it’s doing is web research you should share your prompt instead. That way people don’t have to deal with ai-written walls of text.
- boplicity 15d ago
  > What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely? Well, they don't have the many other pieces of the business in place that makes this work meaningful. They certainly could try, though. If they succeeded, this aspect wouldn't be what made the difference, though.

jakeinspace 15d ago

Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest. Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.

sixtyj 15d ago
There is a recent PISA research that students slowly decline in understanding the long reads. E.g. in one country, 21% of high school students do not even achieve “sufficient reading literacy”… So the question should be - what are we going to do with this? LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway… About PISA research for example here: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on-international-exam-both-in-the-united-states-and-abroad/2026/09 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on...
- watwut 15d ago
  > LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway LLM generated text oftentimes just do not have the point to be understood. LLM is training you to NOT read, because trying to do close reading of LLM generated text is usually a mistake. There is no deeper there. Either it was correct on the surface things or it is a gibberish.
- yorwba 15d ago
  PISA is a statistical measurement tool designed for sensitivity to differences in student performance. So it uses questions that some students are expected to get right and some are expected to get wrong, and places the result on a bell curve fit to a reference population. It's not clear what you mean by "sufficient reading literacy," but I guess it's one of the PISA proficiency levels. Those are simply equally-spaced intervals on the bell curve. For example, level 1c in reading is 2.4 to 3.1 standard deviations below the reference mean and 21% of participants in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon scored at that level. Relative to the baseline, they are definitely close to the bottom. However, even they must've gotten some questions right, or they would've ended up in the "below level 1c" bucket (like 3% in Iraqi Kurdistan and 5% in Lebanon did). (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en/full-report/results-for-countries-and-economies_33854635.html#annex-d1e69716-8107cecc98 https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... Table I.B1.2a.11) If you wanted to know how many people achieve "sufficient reading literacy," you would need a test specifically designed for measuring it (i.e. not PISA), where people with sufficient ability can be expected to get all questions right. For example, the literacy rate is typically defined via the ability to "read and write a simple statement about everyday life," a test which 99% of adults in wealthy countries pass, 92% in Lebanon and 84% in Iraq: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?country=Europe+and+Northern+America+%28SDG%29~IRQ~LBN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra... Of course a test that 99% pass just becomes table stakes and boring, whereas PISA with its large differences between individuals is much more exciting, but you shouldn't let that mislead you into thinking that students scoring relatively low on PISA necessarily must be lacking even those table-stakes skills.

beebmam 15d ago

I don't ever watch TV or streaming shows anymore. It's been a huge improvement in my life. It's the same with reading. Reading is mostly a waste of my time, with some notable exceptions. I'm glad I spend way less time doing each of these!

S-E-P 15d ago
It's sad that reading has become that way for you. I love reading, but I mostly read non-fiction and I'm a bit of an amateur history buff. Last time I read a fiction book I was left feeling like I was preached to by an alien about how life doesn't really matter (sci-fi authors will often do that). The state of literature is pretty dire.
- antonvs 14d ago
  It’s hard to find good new literature - it may be out there, but it’s hard to find. But there’s lifetimes worth of good older literature, that’s much easier to find, that you haven’t read yet.

NuclearPM 15d ago

Agreed completely. (This reply took me 0.4 seconds to generate.)

shimman 15d ago

Just read people you can trust. Why are you giving yourself all this busy work? Just make your own tree of material to read. You should have a couple dozen writers/journalists you admire, look at who these people read then start reading those people, then you repeat the cycle. Don't waste your time reading anything new, most new things are bad. Most ideas we struggle with, are ideas we have been discussing since the written record was invented out of necessity. Anything new worth reading will assuredly make your way to you if you are at all connected.

CuriouslyC 15d ago
If everyone followed this advice it would turn influencer culture to 11, rich get richer, with no "social mobility"
- shimman 15d ago
  No it really wouldn't. I like the authors Jeff VanderMeer and Peter Watts. They have had multiple interviews where they talk about their peers, who they respect from the past, and who they like in our current age. I have found maybe subsequent authors + journalists to read from these two. Try to think a little more critically here. If you can't trust the opinion of people you supposedly like, already established in their craft, who can you trust? Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way. My advice for you is to pull the plug and read books that are older than 125 years.
  - CuriouslyC 15d ago
    For everyone that you consider "good" there are at least a dozen people who are equally "good" but without the social proof. What you describe played out exactly in music and art pre-AI. The record exec and the gallery owner were the people you "trusted" who king-made and gate-kept what we saw based on what they thought was most marketable. > Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way. This is a personal attack that is unsubstantiated by what I wrote, read the guidelines and follow them or go elsewhere.

iqp 15d ago

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? 100%. We're producing more content, faster, than ever before but ... most of it is just click-producing garbage that won't stand the test of time.

CuriouslyC 15d ago
The thing is, that was the internet before AI. In fact, generative AI almost certainly raised the AVERAGE quality of stuff on the internet, human slop was/is absolute trash, whereas AI slop is just bland and meandering. The problem here is that the volume of low-mid content is making it harder to find the best content.

matheusmoreira 15d ago

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Because the information in the post could be valuable regardless of human or LLM involvement.

californical 15d ago
But how much slop are you willing to wade through, hoping to find a nugget of insight?
- matheusmoreira 15d ago
  More than the average person, I suppose. For some reason, AI writing isn't as irritating to me as it seems to be for everyone else. I treat it the same way I treat human writing: by speed reading most of the article so I can find the points the author is trying to make and decide whether I should read the entire thing.
- theasisa 15d ago
  I guess the answer to this is feeding the LLM generated content to another LLM and telling it to summarise it

ferngodfather 15d ago

People on my FOSS project couldn't see the issue with their AI slopped documentation contributions. On one hand I'm like, yeah fair enough it needed writing and something is better than nothing. On the other I know nobody wants to read it now because it's just word vomit rather than how a human would write something they'd like another human to read. I hate it so much.

LtWorf 15d ago
On Debian we recently voted whether to permit or forbid llm usage (spoiler, AI usage at will won). One person was arguing that they need llm because english isn't their first language and then it helps them write better and be understood. I was incapable of reading their (extremely long) email of arguments; I tried but my mind just went elsewhere as my eyes were moving through the lines. At the very end there was a disclaimer that llm had been used to "aid" in writing that very email. Poor guy thinks he's communicating better but all he's doing is making his emails completely unreadable. It's a sad state of affairs.
- vlfig 15d ago
  There is now increased evolutionary pressure for rules protecting scarcity to become norm. Communication media will likely adopt limits on the size and throughput of messages.
- dist-epoch 15d ago
  It kind of makes sense that if English is not their first language, the can't review the LLM English output also. However most likely they just don't understand what good communication looks like, LLMs are perfectly capable of turning anything into clear concise communication, in fact an easy tell that something is LLM written is that it's just too precise and clear, humans are much more rambling.

siscia 15d ago

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Because the value of writing are not the words on a piece of paper but the idea they convey. Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them? Teacher assistant homeworks are not worth to do, because they are made by a TA and not by the course professor? Of course there are writing as: "Hey ChatGPT write me a piece around coding with LLMs" and yeah, those are not worth reading. But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.

graemep 15d ago
"Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them?" It often makes them less informative and a lot less sincere.
- andrewflnr 14d ago
  Yeah, it's phrased like a reductio ad absurdum but it's close to being literally true. It's not technically "copywriters" but their words are "polished" for pleasantness, often with the explicit guidance of consultants, until most of the truth or novelty is gone.
Planktonne 15d ago
> But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it. I know lots of AI-enabled writers believe this, but I've never actually seen it be true.
- Zambyte 15d ago
  How about Anthropic? I've seen people say it's surprising that their blog isn't written with AI, but I think it's far more likely that it is written with AI; they are just good at reviewing and getting a nice prose out of their models.
12d ago

JimDabell 15d ago

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word. Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself. Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.

sm-silversight 15d ago
How do you know it's not his/her thought? Just because others have had it does not mean he/she did not put effort into considering it.
- abc123abc123 15d ago
  How do you know it is? Most likely we will never know.
- nearbuy 14d ago
  In this comment section alone, 5 people have used some variant of that aphorism, and it's used constantly on hn and other sites. They've heard it.
  - Terr_ 14d ago
    How does that matter? Parent-poster asked about sincerity of thought, not originality. If the spouses-to-be at a marriage ceremony say "I do", would you leap up from the audience to denounce them as frauds because obviously they heard the vow-formula before a hundred times? Hopefully not, and not only for reasons of decorum. In contrast, most of the LLM slop I deal with from coworkers involve statements that--while less formulaic--are ones they can't even recall saying and are unwilling to defend when questioned.

wkjagt 15d ago

The way I see it is that a clearly AI generated article is the result of some prompts. So the "author" wrote tens of words, which then got inflated to hundreds and maybe thousands by a computer program. This is a very inefficient way to convey an idea, especially if the reader has access to the same program. I'd rather the author shared their prompts, because maybe there's some originality in it, and I can then decide if I want to explore the idea further, maybe even with an LLM.

CuriouslyC 15d ago
What if the prompt for the 1500 word article you're reading is 10k words of research/data collection, thesis testing, etc?
- wkjagt 14d ago
  Yeah ok good point. I think my thinking around this was too simplistic.

globular-toast 15d ago

Yeah, I'm sticking to pre-2020 works from here on out. Not sure how I'll be able to read about current events, though.

iamkitchjay 15d ago

Strongly agree. Whenever I see an "AI-written" disclaimer, I skip it entirely. And if it's not disclosed, the exact moment I realize it's AI output, I immediately close the tab. It feels like a waste of the reader's time.

plasticchris 14d ago

To focus your point: we fear that with ideas having easier replication that the noise in the signal will increase. But this is what people said about the printing press. And the internet. Less effort to spread the memes. Has it been a net negative? Maybe in some respects. Can you stop it? Probably not.

627467 14d ago

> I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used Im sorry for you. It must be hard to detach yourself with a fixation. I also cant help but spend my attention spotting where the magician is hiding the coin instead of trying to enjoy the show > If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? Most people in these threads repeat this question. As if pre-ai all writing was from deep thinkers full of genuine intention.

cindyllm 14d ago
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Gigachad 14d ago

At work the jira tickets have become massive walls of AI slop. What’s worse is they contain huge amounts if useless “thinking” where the LLM explains what it did and checked rather than just giving the final result. As a result, when I see an AI wall of text I just don’t bother reading it and DM the submitter asking what it’s about.

visarga 14d ago

> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it? I don't think writing it is the whole process, research could be 10 or 100x longer.

chenzhekl 14d ago

Language is meant for sharing information. I don't think there's anything wrong with using AI to write - the real issue is that AI-generated writing can be hard to understand. Once AI solves the readability problem, its writing will actually be better suited for communicating with humans.

tripledry 14d ago
Not only hard to understand, but if one uses it without first understanding the topic, it's a disaster. Couple weeks ago I had someone linking to a doc page in my ticket "Made this summary, hope it helps". It was 100% AI generated, the person clearly had no understanding of the problem, it only mentioned UI changes although the thing required changes in many systems. Complete waste of time, I don't think I will humor anyone who makes AI summaries anymore.

Shocka1 13d ago

Agreed. Recently I've made the effort in disclosing on my website posts that 100% of the words are written by me. I do make graphs and share data here and there, and the same applies - I'm transparent if an agent happened to be used in the process. I don't mind if someone used an LLM to write something, but disclosing such is a good rule to go by IMO.

doug_durham 13d ago

Why are you spending your precious time and energy trying to guess if something was written by AI? Does it make you happy? Does it add value to your life? Why do you do this now when there has always been low quality content generated by lazy authors? You admit it is making reading less enjoyable. Why not just enjoy reading?