I don't think this is accurate. The key sentence is "don’t use AI to write things for you that you present as your own work". This leaves many other ways to use AI.
When I write something heavily edited by AI - I mention that I use AI assistance (not AI led thinking). I will probably remove that because the perception is quite different. Its like applying one applying to an engineering job but write "a pychic, a medium" in a corner of their resume.
It is very common to see that any interesting thought gets immediately tagged like AI slop and the real AI slop wins. Try an A/B test and you shall see that AI actually wins because of the people who hate AI. Most people cannot distinguish between a human and a AI written post and yet those same people want to be judgemental. And the people who are against AI and say "its just the next token generator and I don't use it" and yet use autocomplete on their mobiles are just duplicit. And yes AI is the next-token-generator, we have no proof that most humans were not brainwashed to become the same.
The problem lies with people trying to claim credit without doing the work: writing. AI is a fantastic tool that catches flow errors, grammar problems and punctuation misuse, just like a copywriter. But copywriters don't get bylines.
My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.
I think the argument is misguided, even if I agree with the principle: it is based in the effort one puts in and how it's similar to a sport.
I don't care whether my favorite author sweated for months facing a typewriter, of he effortlessly dictated the final form of the book in one sitting to a secretary while sipping mojitos.
I think my issue with AI has more to do with the signal it sends: reading takes effort, particularly literature, and I use the author's name as a proxy to judge whether to invest that effort myself. Nothing bad in selling dollar store crap, but it's bad to put 'Nike' on it.
Your individuality is what you sell as an author. I can get access to the LLM without you.
I would never use AI for something where I need my own voice, say a blog post or a personal letter.
But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with a recruiter to turn this:
1. I just said I'm hard of hearing and prefer text.
2. If it's only two minutes you can darn well send email.
into this:
As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me —
I find I miss things and it's frustrating for both sides. If it's just a
couple of minutes' worth of information, an email works great and I can
give you a thoughtful response. Happy to go from there!
I'm not ashamed, I think I'm right, and I'll do it again. This recruiter didn't deserve my authentic voice or my personal toil, not for this task.
If it makes James Bach think I'm a liar, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
> My policy is that I never let AI draft anything for me that has my name on it. Not one sentence. Nothing. Ever.
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
So using author's logic, I should not trust them when they say they never use AI for writing, because all we have is their word.
> “I’m a skilled liar. I frequently tell lies. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t lie to you!”
Interesting how saying you used any amount of AI instantly labels you as "a skilled liar" to the author.
The conclusion conflicts oddly with the author's arguments and interests. Attributing LLM usage would actually help the author avoid articles even touched by LLMs, but they indirectly admit being haphazardly dismissive.
Their arguments are mostly addressed by proper, clear attribution. "My sister helped with my homework essay" deserves distrust withour further clarification.
Comparing LLM usage to lying is a fun perspective, but most of the lying happens in attribution. Their moral against lying also seems silly.
We should be better than genAI. For me, with things like coding and writing, I think I'm better than it. For painting? It wins over me. But I'd never in a million years claim creation of a painting I prompted, even if I went and modified it after. Same with code or writing, for that matter.
For the record, I never use AI in writing. First, it's no fun, and that's really reason enough. It'd be like sending a bot to watch a movie for me. Second, I'm better than it is, and it would just be an exercise in frustration micromanaging its every word. I might as well just type what I want it to say.
And third, most importantly, who would read anything I wrote if they could just generate it themselves? The goal is to be better.
> And third, most importantly, who would read anything I wrote if they could just generate it themselves?
This should be embarrassingly obvious to everyone, but allegedly there are hoards of vibecoders and other slop producers to whom it never occurs (if it's not astroturfers pretending to be that). If prompt slinging is your only expertise, you already are redundant.
On the other hand, you might be better than AI if given maximal time, attention, and energy.
But the question is how often are you better at all the tasks where you don’t have maximal time, attention, and energy - and it would make no sense to invest it.
If an LLM is used in the drafting of an article, this should, at least, be disclosed, preferably at the beginning of the article. For example, I recently came across this article ( https://thedispatch.com/article/affordability-crisis-healthc... ). The LLM voice was suppressed well enough until this inane passage:
"One number. Four completely different stories. The number is engineered to include all of them, because including all of them is what produces the 49 percent."
I decided to fact-check a statement ("CNN’s May 2026 survey found the share of Americans spontaneously naming gas prices as their top economic problem rose from 5 percent to 23 percent in a single year, with food costs cited almost as often") and it was incorrect (food costs were in fact cited more often than gas prices). Since the first thing I checked was wrong, I decided it wasn't worth my time reading the rest of the article. It was, as they say these days, slop.
It felt like a little bit of my time had been stolen. If a disclosure had been at the top, it would have been more of a caveat emptor situation.
basically
disclosed public ai
undisclosed private ai
this only works, any thing public should be disclosed you can do anything when you are working locally as you know but it should be explicitly discloses as soon as it goes public.
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
If the author of this write up actually used AI for writing he would have way more than just word. Because you can definitely tell AI output that somebody put no effort into from output that somebody put in a ton of effort into.
It can be as much of a difference as between artistic photograph and a photo from a photo-trap installed in the forest or from a speed camera.
Unpopular take: if it was never critical or mandatory to disclose who you have read before publishing your own writing then you dont need to disclose ai use.
Let the reader decide the value of what they read at face value.
I honestly feel this ai disclosure thing is just pure mindless elitism and worse - entitlement - from readers. "Crappy" writing has always existed, deal with it. Stop reading as soon as you want
These articles on using AI for writing are all very binary. You can use AI in a variety of ways when writing: improve grammar, correct typos, better organize ideas/concepts/sentence structure/sentences, and dozens of other “how applications (as opposed to “what”).
It’s not like people feel the need to explain that they used a spellchecker or thesaurus or googled the correct use of an idiom, etc.
There seems to be a general need for some people to dunk on valuable AI use by refusing to acknowledge that there are a many ways to use a tool. (Similar story on using AI for coding.)
Echoing a comment from above, why would I care whether a sentence was formulated by AI or John or a ghostwriter or John who asked Jane for feedback before rewriting?
I care about the content. If I don’t like the way it’s written or if I’m irked by how it is written (ooh, an emdash — how embarrassing!) then I don’t need to read it.
Personally, I’m much more annoyed when I click on an article that sounds interesting, and the author tries to show off their penmanship by starting with five pages of “a history of X” or a tangential but redundant personal story before getting to the point. IMHO most non-fiction writing on the web could be accomplished in bullets. But again, that’s just my very personal preference…
Yeah, cool. The only way to get past resume filters now is to have AI write your CV and cover letter. TAs in school will grade you higher on your papers if you use AI so your papers sound like the median of all academic papers - you get down graded if it is "in your own voice".
So, I agree with the moral stance of the article, and I personally take all the Ls from all the CV rejection, and the lower grades because I write the paper myself. Just realize that you are choosing life on hard mode for negative societal and "dominance hierarchy" benefit.
This is a very tiring article. I follow the author on LinkedIn. Their comments are always along the same lines, containing complex criticisms. I'd suggest they use artificial intelligence to summarize exactly what they mean in a shorter way.
24 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] threadBecause in his view, if you use AI and don't disclose it, you're a liar. And if you use AI and disclose it, he won't trust you anyway.
I've put that sentence in the title above because (per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) it seems less misleading.
It is very common to see that any interesting thought gets immediately tagged like AI slop and the real AI slop wins. Try an A/B test and you shall see that AI actually wins because of the people who hate AI. Most people cannot distinguish between a human and a AI written post and yet those same people want to be judgemental. And the people who are against AI and say "its just the next token generator and I don't use it" and yet use autocomplete on their mobiles are just duplicit. And yes AI is the next-token-generator, we have no proof that most humans were not brainwashed to become the same.
My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.
I don't care whether my favorite author sweated for months facing a typewriter, of he effortlessly dictated the final form of the book in one sitting to a secretary while sipping mojitos.
I think my issue with AI has more to do with the signal it sends: reading takes effort, particularly literature, and I use the author's name as a proxy to judge whether to invest that effort myself. Nothing bad in selling dollar store crap, but it's bad to put 'Nike' on it.
Your individuality is what you sell as an author. I can get access to the LLM without you.
But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with a recruiter to turn this:
into this: I'm not ashamed, I think I'm right, and I'll do it again. This recruiter didn't deserve my authentic voice or my personal toil, not for this task.If it makes James Bach think I'm a liar, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
more at 11
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
So using author's logic, I should not trust them when they say they never use AI for writing, because all we have is their word.
> “I’m a skilled liar. I frequently tell lies. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t lie to you!”
Interesting how saying you used any amount of AI instantly labels you as "a skilled liar" to the author.
I want to read code by Abrash, Peyton Jones and Karpathy, not Claude's output based on a prompt from a third rater.
If you send me AI generated writing, I will have my AI agent read it and respond to it.
Meanwhile I will use my limited human time to engage with humans and human created content.
Their arguments are mostly addressed by proper, clear attribution. "My sister helped with my homework essay" deserves distrust withour further clarification.
Comparing LLM usage to lying is a fun perspective, but most of the lying happens in attribution. Their moral against lying also seems silly.
If one uses the first person in one’s writing, it follows that the words are their own.
Anything else is disingenuous.
For the record, I never use AI in writing. First, it's no fun, and that's really reason enough. It'd be like sending a bot to watch a movie for me. Second, I'm better than it is, and it would just be an exercise in frustration micromanaging its every word. I might as well just type what I want it to say.
And third, most importantly, who would read anything I wrote if they could just generate it themselves? The goal is to be better.
This should be embarrassingly obvious to everyone, but allegedly there are hoards of vibecoders and other slop producers to whom it never occurs (if it's not astroturfers pretending to be that). If prompt slinging is your only expertise, you already are redundant.
But the question is how often are you better at all the tasks where you don’t have maximal time, attention, and energy - and it would make no sense to invest it.
"One number. Four completely different stories. The number is engineered to include all of them, because including all of them is what produces the 49 percent."
I decided to fact-check a statement ("CNN’s May 2026 survey found the share of Americans spontaneously naming gas prices as their top economic problem rose from 5 percent to 23 percent in a single year, with food costs cited almost as often") and it was incorrect (food costs were in fact cited more often than gas prices). Since the first thing I checked was wrong, I decided it wasn't worth my time reading the rest of the article. It was, as they say these days, slop.
It felt like a little bit of my time had been stolen. If a disclosure had been at the top, it would have been more of a caveat emptor situation.
If the author of this write up actually used AI for writing he would have way more than just word. Because you can definitely tell AI output that somebody put no effort into from output that somebody put in a ton of effort into.
It can be as much of a difference as between artistic photograph and a photo from a photo-trap installed in the forest or from a speed camera.
Let the reader decide the value of what they read at face value.
I honestly feel this ai disclosure thing is just pure mindless elitism and worse - entitlement - from readers. "Crappy" writing has always existed, deal with it. Stop reading as soon as you want
It’s not like people feel the need to explain that they used a spellchecker or thesaurus or googled the correct use of an idiom, etc.
There seems to be a general need for some people to dunk on valuable AI use by refusing to acknowledge that there are a many ways to use a tool. (Similar story on using AI for coding.)
Echoing a comment from above, why would I care whether a sentence was formulated by AI or John or a ghostwriter or John who asked Jane for feedback before rewriting? I care about the content. If I don’t like the way it’s written or if I’m irked by how it is written (ooh, an emdash — how embarrassing!) then I don’t need to read it.
Personally, I’m much more annoyed when I click on an article that sounds interesting, and the author tries to show off their penmanship by starting with five pages of “a history of X” or a tangential but redundant personal story before getting to the point. IMHO most non-fiction writing on the web could be accomplished in bullets. But again, that’s just my very personal preference…
So, I agree with the moral stance of the article, and I personally take all the Ls from all the CV rejection, and the lower grades because I write the paper myself. Just realize that you are choosing life on hard mode for negative societal and "dominance hierarchy" benefit.