I have always had a very idiosyncratic way of expressing myself, one that many people do not understand. Just as having a smartphone has changed my relationship to appointments - turning me into a prompt and reliable "cyborg" - LLMs have made it possible for me to communicate with a broader cross section of people.
I write what I have to say, I ask LLMs for editing and suggestions for improvement, and then I send that. So here is the challenge for you: did I follow that process this time?
Here's my guess- your post reflects your honest opinion on the matter, with some LLM help. It elaborated on your smartphone analogy, and may have tightened up the text overall.
I would be interested to see an example of a before and after on this. I do think LLMs as editors and rewriters can be useful sometimes, but I usually only ever see them used as a means to puff out an idea into longer prose which is really mostly counterproductive.
I don't disagree, but LLMs happened to help with standardizing some interesting concepts that were previously more spread out as concepts ( drift, scaffolding, and so on ). It helps that chatgpt has access to such a wide audience to allow that level of language penetration. I am not saying don't have voice. I am saying: take what works.
The HN moderation system seems to hold, at least mostly. But I have seen high-ranking HN submissions with all the subtler signs of LLM authorship that have managed to get lots of engagement. Granted, it's mostly people pointing out the subtle technical flaws or criticizing the meandering writing style, but that works to get the clicks and attention.
Frankly, it only takes someone a few times to "fall" for an LLM article -- that is, to spend time engaging with an author in good faith and try to help improve their understanding, only to then find out that they shat out a piece of engagement bait for a technology they can barely spell -- to sour the whole experience of using a site. If it's bad on HN, I can only imagine how much worse things must be on Facebook. LLMs might just simply kill social media of any kind.
He doesn't link many examples, but at the end he gives the example of an author pumping out +8 articles in a week across a variety of topics.
https://medium.com/@ArkProtocol1
I don't spend time on medium so I don't personally know.
How do you know? A lot of the stuff I see online could very much be produced by LLMs without me ever knowing. And given the economics I suspect that some of it already is.
I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday.
It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem.
There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences.
Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive.
One could absolutely push algorithms that personalize towards what the user wants to see. I think LLMs could be amazing at this. But that's not the maximally profitable algorithm, so nobody does it.
As so many have said, enragement equals engagement equals profit.
All my social media accounts are gone as well. They did nothing for me and no longer serve any purpose.
TBF Bluesky does offer a chronological feed, but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site.
> I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday.
I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter. My joke is I am waiting until they become good. They are still shitty and toxic from what I can tell from the outside, so I'll wait a little longer ;-)
> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive.
I’m not the biggest Twitter user but I didn’t find it that difficult to get what I wanted out of it.
You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people who are talking a lot about Brexit
If you want to see more of something, engage with it. Click like. Follow those people. Leave a friendly comment.
On the other hand, some people are better off deleting social media if they can’t control their impulses to engage with bait. If you find yourself getting angry at the Brexit content showing up and feeling compelled to add your two cents with a comment or like, then I suppose deleting your account is the only viable option.
an interesting thing about Twitter, I find, is that plenty of rage bait and narcissism bait surface, but amid very highly technical information which is also published there, and extremely useful (immunology, genomics, and of course computational) to me.
i've learned pretty well how to 'guide' the algorithm so the tech stuff that's super valuable (to me) does not vanish, but still get nonsense bozo posts in the mix.
No, there needs to be control over the algorithms that get used. You ought to be able to tune it. There needs to be a Google fuu equivalent for social media. Or, instead of one platform one algorithm, let users define the algorithm to a certain degree, using llms to help with that and then you can allow others to access your algorithms too. Asking for someone Facebook to tweak the algorithm is not going to help imo.
That's the same algorithm Youtube has and is more blatant. Phone mics and your coworker's proximity does a great job at picking up things you've said even after disabling mic access plus airplane mode just by process of elimination.
I'll only use an LLM for projects and building tools, like a junior dev in their 20s.
I eliminated twitter when a certain rich guy took over.
Actually, I deleted my account there before, as twitter
sent me spam mail trying to lecture me what I write. There
was nothing wrong with what I wrote - twitter was wrong.
I can not accept AI-generated spam by twitter, so I went
away. Don't really miss it either, but Elon really worsened
the platform significantly with his antics.
> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive.
Yeah, I can relate to this, but mostly what annoyed me was that
twitter interfered "we got a complaint about you - they are right,
you are a troublemaker". I don't understand why twitter wants to
interfere into communication. Reddit is even worse, since moderators
have such a wild range of what is "acceptable" and what is not.
Double-standards everywhere on reddit.
100%. I miss trackers and napster. I miss newgrounds. This mobile AI bullshit is not the same. I don't know why, but I hate AI. I consider myself just as good as the best at using it. I can make it do my programming. It does a great job. It's just not enjoyable anymore.
Not quite dead yet. For me the rise of LLMs and BigTech has helped me turn more away from it. The more I find Ads or AI injected into my life, the more accounts I close, or sites I ignore. I've now removed most of my BigTech 'fixes', and find myself with time to explore the fun side of hacking again.
I dug out my old PinePhone and decided to write a toy OS for it. The project has just the right level of challenge and reward for me, and feels more like early days hacking/programming where we relied more on documentation and experimentation than regurgitated LLM slop.
Nothing beats that special feeling when a hack suddenly works. Today was just a proximity sensor reading displayed, but it invloved a lot of SoC hacking to get that far.
I know there are others hacking hard in obscure corners of tech, and I love this site for promoting them.
I'm not sure. Okay, lots of companies will use these automated blog generators that charge a few to automate content and posting. Fine. But who'll read that? Nobody. So I think the internet will eventually balance back to favouring actual human work, curated lists, etc.
In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them.
There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that they are a rare breed.
But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that many great ideas have gone unshared because the thinker couldn't quite figure out how to express it.
In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing, but also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared.
Of course, I love a good, unique voice. It's a pleasure to parse patio11's straussian technocratic musings. Or pg's as-simple-as-possible form.
And I hope we don't lose those. But somehow I suspect we may see more of them as creative thinkers find new ways to express themselves. I hope!
Hits close to home after I've caught myself tweaking AI drafts just to make them "sound like me". That uniformity in feeds is real and it's like scrolling through a corporate newsletter disguised as personal takes.
what if we flip LLMs into voice trainers? Like, use them to brainstorm raw ideas and rewrite everything by hand to sharpen that personal blade. atrophy risk still huge?
Social media is a reminder we are losing our voice to mass media consumption way before LLMs were a thing.
Even before LLMs, if you wanted to be a big content creator on YouTube, Instagram, tiktok..., you better fall in line and produce content with the target aesthetic. Otherwise good luck.
Not sure if it's an endemic problem, just yet, but I expect it to be, soon.
For myself, I have been writing, all my life. I tend to write longform posts, from time to time[0], and enjoy it.
That said, I have found LLMs (ChatGPT works best for me) to be excellent editors. They can help correct minor mistakes, as long as I ignore a lot of their advice.
I just want to chime in and say I enjoy reading your takes across HN, it's also inspiring how informative and insightful they are. Glazing over, please never stop writing.
Process before product, unless the product promises to deliver a 1000% return on your investment. Only the disciplined artist can escape that grim formula.
I've been thinking about this as well, especially in the context of historical precedents in terms of civilization/globalization/industrialization.
How LLMs standardize communication is the same way there was a standardization in empires expanding (cultural), book printing (language), the industrial revolution (power loom, factories, assembly procedures, etc).
In that process interesting but not as "scale-able" (or simply not used by the people in power) culture, dialects, languages, craftsmanship, ideas were often lost - and replaced by easier to produce, but often lesser quality products - through the power of "affordable economics" - not active conflict.
We already have the English 'business concise, buzzwordheavy language' formal messaging trained into chatGPT (or for informal the casual overexcited American), which I'm afraid might take hold of global communication the same way with advanced LLM usage.
>How LLMs standardize communication is the same way there was a standardization in empires expanding (cultural), book printing (language), the industrial revolution (power loom, factories, assembly procedures, etc).
Explain to me how "book printing" of the past "standardized communication" in the same way as LLMs are criticized for homogenizing language.
I’ve realized that if you say that pro AI commenters are actually bot accounts, theres not really much that can be done to prove otherwise.
The discomfort and annoyance that sentence generates, is interesting. Being accused of being a bot is frustrating, while interacting with bots creates a sense of futility.
Back in the day when Facebook first was launched, I remember how I felt about it - the depth of my opposition. I probably have some ancient comments on HN to that effect.
Recently, I’ve developed the same degree of dislike for GenAI and LLMs.
There are deterministic solutions for grammar and spellcheck. I wouldn't rely on LLMs for this. Not only is it wasteful, we're turning to LLMs for every single problem which is quite sad.
"Over time, it has become obvious just how many posts are being generated by an LLM. The tell is the voice. Every post sounds like it was posted by the same social media manager."
I'd love to see an actual study of people who think they're proficient at detecting this stuff. I suspect that they're far less capable of spotting these things than they convince themselves they are.
Everything is AI. LLMs. Bots. NPCs. Over the past few months I've seen demonstrably real videos posted to sites like Reddit, and the top post is someone declaring that it is obviously AI, they can't believe how stupid everyone is to fall for it, etc. It's like people default assume the worst lest they be caught out as suckers.
The global alignment also happens through media like tv shows and movies, the internet overall.
I agree I think we should try to do both.
In germany for example, we have very few typical german brands. Our brands became very global. If you go Japan for example, you will find the same product like ramen or cookies or cakes a lot but all of them are slighly different from different small producers.
If you go to an autobahn motorway/highway rest area you will find local products in japan. If you do the same in germany, you find just the generic american shit, Mars, Modneles, PepsiCo, Unilever...
Even our german coke like Fritz cola is a niche / hipster thing even today.
I call it the enshittification fix-point. Not only are we losing our voice, we'll soon enough start thinking and talking like LLMs. After a generation of kids grows up reading and talking to LLMs, that will be only way they'll know how to communicate. You'll talk to a person and you couldn't tell the difference between them and LLMs, not because LLMs became amazing, but because our writing and thinking style become more LLM-like.
- "Hey, Jimmy, the cookie jar is empty. Did you eat the cookies?"
- "You're absolutely right, father — the jar seems to be empty. Here is bullet point list why consuming the cookies was the right thing to do..."
It's still an editor I can turn to in a pinch when my favorite humans aren't around. It makes better analogies sometimes. I like going back and forth with it, and if it doesn't sound like me, I rewrite it.
Don't look at social media. Blogging is kinda re-surging. I just found out Dave Barry has a substack. https://davebarry.substack.com/ That made me happy :) (Side note, did he play "Squirrel with a Gun??!!!")
The death of voice is greatly exaggerated. Most LLM voice is cringe. But it's ok to use an LLM, have taste, and get a better version of your voice out. It's totally doable.
There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it
As soon as I know something is written by AI I tune out. I don't care how good it is - I'm not interested if a person didn't go through the process of writing it
Here's my take - art has value because of the context it is created in. The author's history, current events that we live through as groups, the reactions to a work being released, availability of materials - all these things are fundamentally human. I believe the reason art has value to us is because of the empathy and humanity that we all share despite major differences in beliefs.
That's not to say computers can't generate beautiful things, but unless you expand the context out to include the history of how a program that can create such art came to be, the output is not meaningful. This is why people do not react well to AI art made from simply throwing prompts at a model, or writing that does not feel like it has style, struggle, or any personal flavor.
I've always believed that LLMs will be able to fake it perfectly one day. But as a music fan, no fully computer-generated music will ever bring me the range of emotion and joy that another human's story and creative process through that story does.
109 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 72.4 ms ] threadI have always had a very idiosyncratic way of expressing myself, one that many people do not understand. Just as having a smartphone has changed my relationship to appointments - turning me into a prompt and reliable "cyborg" - LLMs have made it possible for me to communicate with a broader cross section of people.
I write what I have to say, I ask LLMs for editing and suggestions for improvement, and then I send that. So here is the challenge for you: did I follow that process this time?
I promise to tell the truth.
I don't disagree, but LLMs happened to help with standardizing some interesting concepts that were previously more spread out as concepts ( drift, scaffolding, and so on ). It helps that chatgpt has access to such a wide audience to allow that level of language penetration. I am not saying don't have voice. I am saying: take what works.
Frankly, it only takes someone a few times to "fall" for an LLM article -- that is, to spend time engaging with an author in good faith and try to help improve their understanding, only to then find out that they shat out a piece of engagement bait for a technology they can barely spell -- to sour the whole experience of using a site. If it's bad on HN, I can only imagine how much worse things must be on Facebook. LLMs might just simply kill social media of any kind.
https://rmoff.net/2025/11/25/ai-smells-on-medium/
He doesn't link many examples, but at the end he gives the example of an author pumping out +8 articles in a week across a variety of topics. https://medium.com/@ArkProtocol1
I don't spend time on medium so I don't personally know.
How do you know? A lot of the stuff I see online could very much be produced by LLMs without me ever knowing. And given the economics I suspect that some of it already is.
It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem.
There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences.
Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive.
As so many have said, enragement equals engagement equals profit.
All my social media accounts are gone as well. They did nothing for me and no longer serve any purpose.
TBF Bluesky does offer a chronological feed, but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site.
I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter. My joke is I am waiting until they become good. They are still shitty and toxic from what I can tell from the outside, so I'll wait a little longer ;-)
I’m not the biggest Twitter user but I didn’t find it that difficult to get what I wanted out of it.
You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people who are talking a lot about Brexit
If you want to see more of something, engage with it. Click like. Follow those people. Leave a friendly comment.
On the other hand, some people are better off deleting social media if they can’t control their impulses to engage with bait. If you find yourself getting angry at the Brexit content showing up and feeling compelled to add your two cents with a comment or like, then I suppose deleting your account is the only viable option.
i've learned pretty well how to 'guide' the algorithm so the tech stuff that's super valuable (to me) does not vanish, but still get nonsense bozo posts in the mix.
I'll only use an LLM for projects and building tools, like a junior dev in their 20s.
Actually, I deleted my account there before, as twitter sent me spam mail trying to lecture me what I write. There was nothing wrong with what I wrote - twitter was wrong. I can not accept AI-generated spam by twitter, so I went away. Don't really miss it either, but Elon really worsened the platform significantly with his antics.
> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive.
Yeah, I can relate to this, but mostly what annoyed me was that twitter interfered "we got a complaint about you - they are right, you are a troublemaker". I don't understand why twitter wants to interfere into communication. Reddit is even worse, since moderators have such a wild range of what is "acceptable" and what is not. Double-standards everywhere on reddit.
I dug out my old PinePhone and decided to write a toy OS for it. The project has just the right level of challenge and reward for me, and feels more like early days hacking/programming where we relied more on documentation and experimentation than regurgitated LLM slop.
Nothing beats that special feeling when a hack suddenly works. Today was just a proximity sensor reading displayed, but it invloved a lot of SoC hacking to get that far.
I know there are others hacking hard in obscure corners of tech, and I love this site for promoting them.
There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that they are a rare breed.
But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that many great ideas have gone unshared because the thinker couldn't quite figure out how to express it.
In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing, but also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared.
Of course, I love a good, unique voice. It's a pleasure to parse patio11's straussian technocratic musings. Or pg's as-simple-as-possible form.
And I hope we don't lose those. But somehow I suspect we may see more of them as creative thinkers find new ways to express themselves. I hope!
what if we flip LLMs into voice trainers? Like, use them to brainstorm raw ideas and rewrite everything by hand to sharpen that personal blade. atrophy risk still huge?
Nudge to post more of my own mess this week...
The few ones who have something important to say they will, and we will listen regardless of the medium.
Even before LLMs, if you wanted to be a big content creator on YouTube, Instagram, tiktok..., you better fall in line and produce content with the target aesthetic. Otherwise good luck.
For myself, I have been writing, all my life. I tend to write longform posts, from time to time[0], and enjoy it.
That said, I have found LLMs (ChatGPT works best for me) to be excellent editors. They can help correct minor mistakes, as long as I ignore a lot of their advice.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/
How LLMs standardize communication is the same way there was a standardization in empires expanding (cultural), book printing (language), the industrial revolution (power loom, factories, assembly procedures, etc).
In that process interesting but not as "scale-able" (or simply not used by the people in power) culture, dialects, languages, craftsmanship, ideas were often lost - and replaced by easier to produce, but often lesser quality products - through the power of "affordable economics" - not active conflict.
We already have the English 'business concise, buzzwordheavy language' formal messaging trained into chatGPT (or for informal the casual overexcited American), which I'm afraid might take hold of global communication the same way with advanced LLM usage.
Explain to me how "book printing" of the past "standardized communication" in the same way as LLMs are criticized for homogenizing language.
The discomfort and annoyance that sentence generates, is interesting. Being accused of being a bot is frustrating, while interacting with bots creates a sense of futility.
Back in the day when Facebook first was launched, I remember how I felt about it - the depth of my opposition. I probably have some ancient comments on HN to that effect.
Recently, I’ve developed the same degree of dislike for GenAI and LLMs.
If you really have no metrics to hit (not even the internal craving for likes), then it doesn't make much sense to outsource writing to LLMs.
But yes, it's sad to see that your original stuff is lost in the sea of slop.
Sadly, as long as there will be money in publishing, this will keep happening.
I'd love to see an actual study of people who think they're proficient at detecting this stuff. I suspect that they're far less capable of spotting these things than they convince themselves they are.
Everything is AI. LLMs. Bots. NPCs. Over the past few months I've seen demonstrably real videos posted to sites like Reddit, and the top post is someone declaring that it is obviously AI, they can't believe how stupid everyone is to fall for it, etc. It's like people default assume the worst lest they be caught out as suckers.
I agree I think we should try to do both.
In germany for example, we have very few typical german brands. Our brands became very global. If you go Japan for example, you will find the same product like ramen or cookies or cakes a lot but all of them are slighly different from different small producers.
If you go to an autobahn motorway/highway rest area you will find local products in japan. If you do the same in germany, you find just the generic american shit, Mars, Modneles, PepsiCo, Unilever...
Even our german coke like Fritz cola is a niche / hipster thing even today.
We improve our use of words when we work to improve our use of words.
We improve how we understand by how we ask.
- "Hey, Jimmy, the cookie jar is empty. Did you eat the cookies?"
- "You're absolutely right, father — the jar seems to be empty. Here is bullet point list why consuming the cookies was the right thing to do..."
I suppose when your existence is in the cloud, the fall back to earth can look scary. But it's really only a few inches down. You'll be ok.
Don't look at social media. Blogging is kinda re-surging. I just found out Dave Barry has a substack. https://davebarry.substack.com/ That made me happy :) (Side note, did he play "Squirrel with a Gun??!!!")
The death of voice is greatly exaggerated. Most LLM voice is cringe. But it's ok to use an LLM, have taste, and get a better version of your voice out. It's totally doable.
I don't judge, I'm not an artist so if I wanted to express myself in image I'd need AI help but I can see how people would do the same with words.
As soon as I know something is written by AI I tune out. I don't care how good it is - I'm not interested if a person didn't go through the process of writing it
That's not to say computers can't generate beautiful things, but unless you expand the context out to include the history of how a program that can create such art came to be, the output is not meaningful. This is why people do not react well to AI art made from simply throwing prompts at a model, or writing that does not feel like it has style, struggle, or any personal flavor.
I've always believed that LLMs will be able to fake it perfectly one day. But as a music fan, no fully computer-generated music will ever bring me the range of emotion and joy that another human's story and creative process through that story does.