> Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.).
it's more like, "refining prose so that nobody sane will bother reading it". like wow it's so useful to claudefy your thoughts, wow look at how amazing your blog post looks now with how much more slop you produced from your prompt, amazing.
I really wonder like, do those authors not think from the perspective of the reader?
If some text is AI written as a response to a much shorter prompt, then the prompt and/or sources used to make the text should be published instead (or at the very least together with the text).
"please walk our observability stacks, our IaC code and config, our cloud account, and our application codebases to gather an RCA for for any errored out requests we've been producing this week. include a tabulated breakdown."
~actual prompt i sent in to claude last week. doing what you propose would be basically impossible / nonsensical, and further undo the entire exercise, sending all the money spent on the tokens down the toilet.
put differently, if you use agents in any actually useful manner, the principle you describe erases whatever value they did end up providing. though since the whole underlying premise is that ai never provides any value, maybe that's the intended result. hard to tell these days what takes are genuine and which ones are demagogue.
I had to do this with my boss. He send an email saying he asked AI about an assignment he gave us, then sent us the reply from the LLM. It was verbose and lacked any and all awareness of the constraints we have within the company. The assignment was poorly defined from the outset, and I asked for the prompt he used, because I thought that would be far more useful to understand what he was looking for rather than what AI decided to spit back.
It turned out his prompt was equally uninspired... 1 or 2 sentences. That was the thought he put into it, which then had us spending hours trying to figure out the AI reply. He could have saved the whole team a full day by just sending the prompt... or nothing at all.
Having this problem a lot at work currently. Every single jira ticket is a novel worth of useless text you have to skip over to find the human written parts. Occasionally important details get lost in the noise because they are sandwiched between slop.
I wish I could do a "right-click -> view page source"-like "right click -> view prompt" or like the dark mode toggle (prompt <-> ai slop (expanded)), depending on my mood (although almost everything is in constant dark mode, so I believe I'd look mostly at the prompts)
The infinite monkey theorem[1] can be applied to show that AI is not incapable of producing quality output. However, expecting your audience to sort through the output from a very large quantity of monkeys is not respectful. I think the best approach would be:
"Here is the prompt and model I used, here is the portion of the output that stuck out to me as relevant and useful, and here, in my own words, is why I think that is so."
i.e. Highlight the good part of the output for me and, preferably, explain why you think it's good. Otherwise it's the same thing as posting slop, only with extra steps. You thought it was worth posting and I thought that made it worth looking at, but now I'm sorting through a bunch of monkey garbage looking for what made you think that. Being a different person, I may not find that hidden gem and I may become quite frustrated with you.
Funnily enough, for me AI writing is usually the summarizer rather than expander. I would usually give Claude 2-3x the amount of data in notes, context, braindump etc; when doing person-to-person communication, using AI to _expand_ the context rather than shrink it is doing everyone a disservice.
Maybe I'm the odd-one-out here, but I don't like the comparison being drawn to TLDR, because I have seldom seen it used as condemning the author for a kind of immorality.
tl;dr as the sole reply to someone IS a condemnation of what they wrote. tl;dr at the front of your message with a short summary, is an admission that the long version may not be for everyone and there's a core point for quick consumption.
I'd say that sounds about the same for ai;dr. I could see myself posting a prompt like that in front of the generated report.
I agree, likening it to "TL;DR" is much too charitable. At least when someone wrote a wall of text it was apparent they cared enough about the subject to think about and pay attention to it.
>If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it...
>...then I’m not going to bother reading it.
Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but we've had copywriters and editors for generations now. Not reading something because AI did the post-writing work feels kinda weak. Skip stuff started from AI, fine, but this is just because it's AI, not because the author didn't do the task. And I do get the point is that if an AI did /most/ of the work, ok to that, too, but not post-write processing alone.
The problem with copywriters is that they wrote "copy" - which turns out to be writing that I don't want to read. And the problem with AI is that much of what it trained on is copy, so it trained to write stuff that I don't want to read.
So in the end, I don't care if a human wrote it or an AI, I don't want to read it either way.
What's wrong with copyrighters? They write like corporations, not like humans (see the Cluetrain Manifesto for more on this). They sound like nobody - literally inhuman. I don't want to read that. I want to hear a human voice. If I can't hear that in your writing, I don't need to read it.
I think the main reason many people (including me), very often, lack the motivation to read content that is likely generated by AI is the suspicion that it comes from a place of intellectual laziness. Another reason, based on personal experience, is that AI content may suffer from too much verbosity, too much jargon and over-confidence, which makes the reading experience feel fake and border-line irritating. In many cases the content may have very little to no nuance, which is ultimately a waste of time.
As an anecdote, someone posted a blogpost on Linkedin on using agents to implement a driver to access PCIe devices over TCP/IP. I was intrigued because that's not an easy task for several reasons, like handling PCIe interrupts and DMA. For exmaple, how does the remote machine map the device's PCIe BARs? And when it issues I/O to the devices registers, how are these reads and writes transferred to the remote device. In the end, this is just some virtual memory. In a local machine, this is either directly mapped to the PCIe physical addresses or some IOMMU virtual address space which is then translated by the hardware upon CPU/device/VM access.
After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc.
Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.
The purpose of writing is to communicate. The person communicating is an important part of the message.
Consider the sentence "I'm waiting for you at home." It really matters if it's said by your loving wife or an evil clown. You can extrapolate from this.
The problem is that some people think all AI-assisted writing is prompting "write me a post about X", so they see LLM prose and assume there has been no thought or effort put into it.
1. I can't effectively engage in follow-up conversation with the "author." I can't do it with the human (principal) because they didn't write it and can't explain it--and, in fact, they may not even personally agree with all if it!
2. It shifts the cognitive burden from writer to reader. What makes writing hard, and valuable, is the effort put into translating your thoughts into writing that is easy to read, and the authenticity that is expressed in it. The "soul," if you will. As ambient prose, AI-generated writing is frequently not only difficult to read, but also has this "sameness" quality that makes every "author" have the same personality.
Because what the clanker produces is almost always bad output compared to what a capable human would produce. Furthermore, even an incapable human is better than a clanker, because at least humans have intrinsic value that they bring to the table. Finally, it's just plain disrespectful to refuse to take some time to answer a question and hand it off to the clanker.
A similar metaphor (I think I came up with but can't remember) is the slop sandwich. You can deliver slop to me but only when wrapped in a thick layer of human intervention (which usually also means removing 50% of the slop)
There is a light at the end of the tunnel for all the minds burned out by AI slop.
I already saw someone getting fired for only producing AI text as part of their entire output, after being unable to explain what they “wrote” in multiple situations.
And recently my company enacted a mandate that text made for humans should not be AI generated.
Sooner or later every company will start realizing that this is just people too lazy to actually work and coasting on a paycheck, at the expense of every other worker.
This makes me happy to hear that someone got fired for that, but I just cannot picture that happening at my organization. Perhaps standards are too low. What sort of thing did they get fired for? Was there some warning etc?
Product Manager using Jira AI to hallucinate tickets, epics, metrics and roadmap. Even the numbers were completely made up.
There were too many incidents of “this doesn’t look right” in the same week, so when their boss did a thorough check a couple days after, it was all fake, everything. Eventually they admitted and got canned.
I am pro AI, and also deeply share this sentiment.
I think sometimes people have a big long thread with Claude where they feel enthusiastic about the back and forth being very productive -- and then they genuinely want to share the summary of the conversation with their colleagues so that they can feel it too. It's not just typing a short prompt and copy/pasting the response.
But, Claude, especially Opus is so unnecessarily flowery, and smug -- and it's so identifiably characteristic.
It somehow rubs salt in the wound: "I didn't take the time to write this out in my own words, so now you get to listen to this petulant asshole mansplain it to you".
If it would get to the point, and with some humility, it would be a much different proposition.
The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person.
If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?
I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that?
> If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?
I would crumple up the flyer, throw it on the ground, and then ask for another one and then repeat that process until he gets the point.
People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.
Not many and if you lurk more than comment (like I do) then you don't have enough credibility on this site to down vote or flag things.
Which is in my humble opinion counter productive since a bot would comment far more often to influence the comments than a human which like me often doesn't comment because my comment doesn't hold enough value to further the insightful discussion so I look more like a new account even with many years of membership.
(Sharing next sentence for the newbies, since you know-) All our jobs to flag on site & even email the worst offenders to hn@ycombinator.com . That said I rarely flag or even downvote anything. People either really behave, or perhaps the rulebreakers break rules that don’t grind my gears. Politely admonishing good faith rulebreakers is another tactic in the arsenal.
AI-generated comment posters with comment histories of exclusively slop get email alerts from me. Don’t know whether they’re planning to sell or spam but they clearly need help finding the door :)
I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.
On reddit specifically, point of that would be karma farming. Plus vast majority doesn't care for either quality of the argument or for entire thing being dreamed up by a neural net.
Case in point: a repost of this AI-generated video:
There are comments from people enjoying it with >15000 upvotes, and waaay, way down the comment tree, couple of people pointing out this is a blatant AI, with, like 5 upvotes.
I've seen it used as a newer evolution of trolling on Reddit. A user hops in to a somewhat nuanced discussion and gives a very curt and rude contradiction, and then just uses an LLM to generate walls of argumentative text after you respond with "What are you talking about and why are you being such a dick?"
Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.
I saw a post on HN once that was someone’s LLM written blog. This was called out, and eventually the author admitted it but said he’d reviewed it and stood by every idea.
Other people think it sounds better, or it’s “editing” like grammar check (a sibling post thinks this). It’s people who are functionally illiterate plus lazy and just think LLM writing sounds better and is what they would have said anyway.
It’s the same people who would have written school assignments by copy pasting paragraphs from the internet and maybe swapping in synonyms.
I don’t think we should be at all charitable about it, it’s an offence to whoever you’re communicating with and should be called output.
I completely agree in principle, but to play devil's advocate, if an "author's" prompting technique is better than mine such that they generate a more useful article than what my own AI session might produce on average, then maybe there's value in some generated articles.
The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.
It's possible, but I've experimented with different style guides and prompt methods and have never gotten it to output what I'd call "good" writing.
It is almost always low information density. Sometimes I can get it to remove most of the extraordinarily cliche phrases it injects into everything, along with the tortured, gauche prose (especially Claude). But what remains is an expansion algorithm: it takes a simple idea and expands it like polyurethane foam to fill however much space it can take, the volume filled mainly by grammatical syntax and only traced with any actual semantic meaning.
Fair enough, but to be fair, that just sounds like bad defaults to me. Most of the things you describe mostly go away with a nice customised system prompt.
> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person.
Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link".
But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content.
(And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.)
> If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.
To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.
I would have said the opposite: I'd assume the link to be to a blog post, or Wikipedia page, that articulates the idea in a clearer more succint way than the person might be able of.
This is, of course, before people started sending Instagram Reel or YouTube Short links. Or, maybe worse, links to 3-hour-long YouTube podcasts.
> I'd assume the link to be to a blog post, or Wikipedia page, that articulates the idea in a clearer more succint way than the person might be able of.
As with everything, it depends on who is sending it. For some people, yes. For the rest (majority), it's a case of
He: Makes some claim
Me: I question some aspect of it.
... Potential back and forth
He: Oh, just look at this video/article/book that explains and answers all your concerns.
Thing is, in the majority of the cases, it didn't address my concern. I'd write up something in detail, and get back either silence or yet another link. Took way too long for me to realize I shouldn't bother clicking the link to begin with.
Too many people put up a lazy comment when it is clear they haven't thought about $it, googled $it, or asked AI about $it. Where $it == {whatever they are unsure about or arguing about}.
The lazy commenter desires a human to waste their time writing a response. Often others judge that the commenter doesn't deserve the time or effort, so instead of a thoughtful response others often just reply with a relevant link - giving the commenter a chance to learn or reply.
Unfortunately offhand responses like LMGTFY become a common behaviour in forums, even when wildly inappropriate (as you note).
When it happens to you, it isn't personal, you are just a victim because everyone has been trained to a pattern of behaviour by thoughtless commenters.
It is also likely your comments get pattern matched as not worthwhile reasoning clearly to. You can do something to change your writing to avoid appearing waffly/bullshitty/unworthy (or whatever the reason responders are not replying to the meat of your point).
Eh, but it can become just as low-effort as AI slop. I've participated in a number of conversations here where it appears the person I was interacting with (this was pre-AI) was just googling off some keywords and pasting links with one or two sentences attached. Even in cases where they legitimately read the thing they posted, the static nature of the link leaves no room for actually responding to any nuance I might have added (i.e. the author missed something critical).
After a few years of this I also just stopped clicking thinks and refused to engage in conversations that seemed to be going that direction.
Not so. Posting links is not the same. If you were to copy+paste someone's blog post into the forum and post is as your own, without attribution, it would be seen as plagiarism. Everyone understands this; you're trying to pass another's work as your own.
On X there's actually a good modern equivalent to "posting links" which is @grok, and letting Grok add to the thread. There is occasional teasing but it's nothing like posting slop under your own name.
ChatGPT actually allows something like this; you can share a link to the conversation.
Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.
So I take it you'll be fine with responses that begin with:
"ChatGPT says ... "?
> Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.
I guess the bulk of folks use ChatGPT as the preferred chatbot, but people like me have a completely different interface that doesn't use ChatGPT. I can't send someone links to my conversation.
(And as an aside, over 80% of ChatGPT conversation links I click on don't work - not sure if they clean them after some time, or I need to be logged in, etc).
And even if it did work, I really don't want to read the whole conversation. Just send me the relevant part that ChatGPT said!
I think you're right, and we've been training ourselves for the shortest path of least resistance for quite a while while kidding ourselves that we're able to somehow preserve the result as worthwhile. Before I ever tried using LLMs for search I had already been training myself for years to offload my thinking to a quick web search and a skim of some plausible result served up.
Arguably things like Cliff's Notes and "for dummies" books were sating this impulse before that, I wouldn't be surprised if the line can be traced back further.
Since dropping LLMs altogether I've made the connection to the impulse for a superficial jump to the conclusion just by noticing how I use web search, or feverishly scan some text to get to the point.
Theoretically I studied critical thinking and have learned decades ago how to recognize when this is OK and when it's a superficial placation of some addiction to closing the book on a subject or micro-subject... but boy whatever good instincts I might have developed back then have significantly eroded over time. Trying to reclaim that again is pretty humbling.
You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.
That is not currently possible. At best, you could train on millions of personal examples of style, eg historical emails, reports, etc, and you'd still never get what the person would have written.
I'd be astonished if an LLM didn't even miss important nuance, data, and focus on the wrong point.
It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.
When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.
> At best, you could train on millions of personal examples of style, eg historical emails, reports, etc, and you'd still never get what the person would have written.
You wouldn't get it verbatim, but your mistrust in AI reflecting what you intended to say is unwarranted.
I use LLMs to clean up poorly OCR'd hand written notes. It's the exception where I need to "fix" its output. It figures out what the notes intended, and writes it up fairly well.
> It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.
For a lot (most?) of AI slop, I agree. But pre-LLMs, this was universally a bad idea. The first draft always sucked, and was easy to misunderstand. A good LLM, with a good system prompt, will usually produce something better than the input it is fed. Most people are poor at expressing their thoughts.
> When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.
Most people aren't Bob The Great, but Bob The Incoherent.
I will use LLMs to find spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as voice inconsistencies. I then carefully review the diff.
Yes there are deterministic tools for this, but grammar is actually kind of complicated and the tools either miss mistakes, or suggest obviously worse edits. Looking at you, Microsoft Word.
All the writing is my own and I read all of it. Naturally there’s no LLM-isms because I wrote 99.9% of the original text. But, it was AI assisted. So, I don’t think it’s cut and dry.
Many do as you, and I completely endorse this usage. Unfortunately, too many of us here make the giant leap of "If it went through the LLM, the original person was too lazy."
Of course, the start of the thread really had nothing to do with the concept you're espousing here. At all. It was more about "Some guy writes instructions into an LLM, and gets a blog entry", which is entirely on a different scale. And yes, that's the scope and scale we've been discussing.
Personally, in this new, different context you've stated, I don't think many have an issue with that. If you write 6 pages of text, and then ask an LLM to look for errors, that's not remotely the same, and it is more like a spell checker, or a second set of eyes.
Me calling someone uncool would be rather hypocritical in afraid! I've done some interesting things, cool even, but that doesn't necessarily make conversation with me interesting/cool! I'll go with letting them know I find it dickish and perhaps even a tad offensive.
> that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person
There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't".
For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI.
I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).
> I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them
That it is plausible to have come from any of the major ones just means that they all should be avoided. Which is of course not a very practical insight.
> unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later
That would be the point where our friendship is over (or rather I acknowledge the fact that it was already over) and I delete & block the contact.
This is why even if I ask GPT or Claude or whatever to rewrite an email, I still rewrite it by hand with my own words, what I look for is, did the AI remove sentences where I repated myself or that were too wordy? Perfect, I'll ommit those details.
Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale.
None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself.
Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question.
Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination.
People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway.
No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.
TL;DR: I want more effort posts/better SNR, so I guess I have to tolerate the human non-effort posts complaining about AI non-effort posts with the hope that it helps retard the rate of non-effort posts vs effort posts.
While I'm hoping the AI bubble pops sooner than later, as I still hold out hope that knowledge work will continue to require knowledgeable humans at the helm, I wanted to add on that I think you make a good point.
A lot of users online can't read[1], and between a lack of pure reading comprehension, poor media literacy habits draining one's brains and ability to focus, and finally the increase in AI-enabled content, I'm not surprised at how redditor-cultured netizens love to throw up their hands and say "AI;DR!", as if that makes them somehow morally superior.
These users won't read dense texts or try to elucidate meaning out of human-written works, they ask for AI summaries or manual "TL;DR" entries as it is, now the AI is use is being used as an excuse to enable mental laziness and lack of attempts to read information.
So while I get lost in wikipedia walks because I'm looking for written entertainment for 'learning', they are getting mind-melted by algorithms, therefore, an uncharitable part of me wants to let the meat-proxying continue.
And then the other part of me that gets annoyed by having to sift through AI-slop-infested text to see what if any meat there may be in there decides that perhaps that's not as helpful of an attitude as I should take after all, because if everybody decides to meat-proxy the world away, I'll be unhappier than letting lazy functionally-illiterate-users complain aloud, even as the latter is boring reading as well.
It's a good point, I just don't agree with the conclusion. I think if you examine the incentives/mechanics behind the phenomena, you would realize that a world in which there are more "meat proxies" for more tasks would be a more enlightened one. The precedents to me are obvious - go back and examine the most famous times of human flourishing. It was always connected to power and patronage - ie, commerce. Most people could not read for most of human history. Universities used to be institutions for a small number of elite who could afford not to labor because it was someone else's job. Compared to primeval man this is essentially using another human as a "meat-proxy". That's what the modern economy is. The CEO doesn't waste his time filling out the spreadsheet or w/e. It's the same concept. Why is a human meat-proxy necessarily better than a wholly mechanical one? Our social institutions have simply fallen behind our scale.
I view LLMs optimistically as the catchup phase. After all, they aren't really "reinventing" anything, rather they are a tool to synthesize the vast human corpus and catch up to the scale. Yes, at the moment they are used for all sorts of things, most of which are trivial. But when the bubble pops it will not mean knowledge work has a renaissance, rather it will be the nail in the coffin. The bubble pop will mean it will be cheap, compute/LLMs become a utility. So let the AI fill out the spreadsheet. Allow UBI to flourish, implement a severe wealth tax. End pointless wars. Slim government, which is a lot of bloat and obfuscation around what should be automated, open and transparent disbursements. End private taxes on the economy (credit cards duopoly, etc) and essentially, everyone gets to act like an enlightenment era university student. On this view, the hope would be that the present times are the wars of religion, the storm before the calm. If we are able to make it through in a hyper-networked, nuclear age.
LLMs are not going away, no matter how many Americans may want to go back to the proverbial land. Reactive movements have always existed, and always failed. I think you would simply be better served by advocating for the best case scenario, rather than aligning yourself with the AI skeptics who as you acknowledge, are also rather widely boring and intellectually lazy - that which you seek to remedy. The question of assuring UBI is not obvious. Imo there is far more rigor and interesting questions in the camp trying to create the optimistic future, than in those who resort to unexamined, parroted skepticism.
It's not controversial that if left alone, most people will tend towards minimizing laborious work, and that the use of technology to do that ought to be expected. Consider, however:
1. A lot of this work was optional to begin with. Few people actually need to post on LinkedIn, write blogs, etc. It's arguably a mountain of content waste (which is why the term "slop" is so fitting).
2. It's not a substitute for actual work. If it becomes clear that you're using LLM to do work you are paid to do, eventually the person who pays you will notice, and replace you with the LLM. If your employer values you because of the work you do, it's in your best interest to do the job yourself.
1. This doesn't make any sense. On this reading, most any work is "optional" in that you had the option to do something else. But few people have the option to not work at all. If creating slop generates a decent enough ROI, and you have to work, then why is it waste? It may be waste to you, but for them it is an income. Just like there are entire industries or products I might personally think are a waste and yet make tons of money. In the modern economy most work is optional then. So what point are you making?
2. Yes, people get replaced at work all the time. And actually most employees who figure out who to maximize their own ROI (and thus their companies) get rewarded, not punished. If your slop code is "good enough" and you are moving the metrics the C suite cares about, your colleague taking far longer to create far less is obviously going to be punished.
If some sea change happens that replaces a whole class of workers, that is beyond the scope of the individual worker to think about. The modern economy can be viewed as one long process of automation, where most workers have been subsidizing their own eventual replacement, given the privileged position of capital over labor. This is historically obvious. It does not mean it benefits the individual to go back into some state of nature, or not reap what benefits they may gain from the prevailing system while it is still the one at hand.
What I meant by "optional" work is that it's not being performed for a buyer; it's volunteer labor. Nobody's paying for individuals' awful LinkedIn posts. I suppose it could be framed as self-promotion aimed at a potential future payoff, but if it repels buyers, then it's pointless.
Perhaps it's worth looking at this issue from the demand side instead. Who is the customer or buyer of the AI-generated work; and if there is one, how much do they value it? I contend that there are few actual buyers who are actually asking for the AI-generated output, and thus the value is low. These buyers are usually asking for some other outcome that flows downstream from the work, and AI slop is either being misperceived as the actual ask, or is a step in the middle somewhere.
Next, I wasn't talking about slop code. I was talking about slop narrative work--the work preceding the coding phase that gets teams and goals aligned, and reports results to management. In a world in which code is increasingly machine-written, the focus turns to the planning and decision stages, and that's where communication skills are most important. If you're outsourcing that work to an LLM, you're providing little added value, and that makes you replaceable. Not by a machine, but someone better than you at writing.
As for your last paragraph, I'm having trouble understanding whether you're in favor of AI-written content (not code, let's put that aside). That's the question I'm more interested in discussing than how economies evolve. I know how economic progress works ;-)
As to the first part, if you mean the demand side as in who wants to read slop LinkedIn posts, LLMs haven't changed the fundamental nature of that. It's always been awful. Therefore the point is who cares if an AI has written it. As I said, it's all pablum anyway. But I don't agree with how you are describing the problem. Most marketing or self promotion is "optional" then? Why is not having a direct buyer asking for the work equal to "volunteer" work? Anyone who has been around marketing knows conversion rates are incredibly low. That's just the nature of it. It still often makes sense from a ROI perspective. There are many if not most cases were > 99% of people might readily say "who asked for this?" and it will still make economic sense to convert the fraction of a percent.
I similarly don't think your second point makes much sense. I think people going on about writing or domain experience as a skill are missing the obvious writing on the wall. If you are not an exceptional writer you will be replaced. Most people will be replaced then. Or at the very least, their diminished market power is inevitable. The end state of these models is in my view clearly aligned to less human in the loop and more automated self prompting. Most people's prompts are not that unique. If someone has a superior prompt that eventually gets integrated into the model. Eventually the model learns to ask itself the superior question, even if the spark is a profoundly lazy human invocation. The progress along code generation is then joined hand in hand by progress to full automation. Why is generating a prompt harder to solve than generating code? Why will both not advance in the next decade?
Suggesting code will be increasingly machine written while saying humans will still need to be around to write instructions just strikes me as denialism of the scale of the change. If you think that in 10 years most of the back and forth is not going to be LLMs talking entirely among themselves I think you are in for a rude awakening.
As I said earlier, if a human cares a human will author. As for the rest of it, it makes almost no difference. Bad, lazy writing has always existed. Why would I take solace that a human has produced slop over a machine? The question is not "do I like it" but "do I care". The answer is no. Most things in the economy I don't care for or like. But certain things are inevitable as humans conglomerate. A well organized mind learns to get over it. Quite frankly if LLMs push LinkedIn over the edge and lead to the destruction of that platform I would be pleased. It was always a center of corporate slop and backpatting, something that in theory was optional but was more like a mandatory career chore, a step in the middle to actual work. It just is kind of amusing that your example of why AI writing is bad is because it is ruining LinkedIn, as if that place wasn't always trash. It just makes my point. In domains were humans care about human authorship, it's just not an issue in the same way. I've never heard someone care about LinkedIns viability as an ecosystem from someone who didn't work there. If LLMs are making the site unusable they are doing God's work.
> That is precisely the observation we're not seeing.
What is the basis for this claim? To me, my formulation reads as logically self evident, to the point of near tautology. Your claim is what? People who genuinely care about things are delegating those things to LLMs? Then in what sense do they actually "care" about them?
You said: "if a human cares, a human will author." That statement was somewhat ambiguous, and I interpreted that in such a way that the first human (the consumer) is different from the second (producer). Perhaps that's not what you meant.
I'm not sure where the lack of clarity on my part came in. I think at this juncture it is best to thank you for the back and forth and wish you a good day. I will just also suggest debates at work should be settled at work.
Thanks! I appreciated it.
Edit: I see what you mean. In my formulation the "human" in question was one and the same. Perhaps this clarification makes my point more intelligible. Thanks again!
- I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection.
- I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response.
- In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify.
- The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.
> AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt
this a thousand times this
LLMs are information transformers. if you're trying to take some rough idea and blow it out into something that "feels" substantive, you're just combining your high-signal idea / prompt with a bunch of meaningless bloat and noise from the model weights.
>The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not.
I think we're already there. We started having database issues after a rushed deploy (the PR diff had +100k lines). Everyone was pasting random Fable output as gospel and grasping at straws running random "create index concurrently" statements directly in production while I was slowly reading library documentation, testing hypotheses, gathering logs.
One colleague was completely in denial that his vibe coded "optimizations" that went into the update could have anything to do with the problem. I eventually found that the "optimizations", naively trying to optimize for page "first contentful paint" were prefetching pages whenever users hovered over anything and creating a barrage of requests.
And people seem really proud of what they "generate" too, not at all worried that they might be offloading the consequences to others. It's a stupid, tiring time to be working in software.
The benefit and promise of social media, at least early on, was that it was supposed to be authentic - that when someone posted, it was really coming from them. Engagement was truly personal, at least for a little while. It still is for most.
Ghost authors of books have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.
well it’s widely understood that any large scale social media account is managed by a team and not the individual being represented and we seem broadly ok with that. what those teams produce is often vapid manipulative corporate bs which i don’t find any less offensive for it being typed by humans earning a salary as compared to tensors assembling copy via gpu. the current anti AI sentiment strikes me as a bit of a high-minded pose when the actual underlying behaviors have been in place for a while.
Everyone is fighting OP on this extremely reasonable take when some of us are dealing with coworkers that copy slack messages/JIRA ticket comments/PR feedback into Claude and respond with the pasted output as is back like that’s completely acceptable.
Like I don’t need to be placated by someone else’s AI agent when I call out something in a PR, especially when they have such an aversion to conciseness and resolution
Sort of related, I always felt the apparent level of writing was so much higher in say the Victorian age. If you look at text from then it feels quite sophisticated compared to what you’d typically see written even in a newspaper today.
I think this is because only an elite few were literate and even fewer were writing stuff. As literacy increased, the common denominator got lower.
The next step in this evolution appears to be LLM writing, people will look back on pre 2023 writing with the same feeling as we look at the later 19th century now.
No, it's hard to compare literacy rates because proficiency varies and nobody's been measuring things the same way throughout time and geography for all this time, but literacy rates are generally understood to be pretty darn great by the end of the Victorian era. Certainly, print culture was booming and letters were flying around like wild across most social classes.
The difference you notice is probably either (1) you're own subjective impression that Victorian style is more sophisticated, or (2) it actually is more sophisticated because people were reading (and writing) a lot more than they do now and so their exposure and practice with prose style was much richer. In the decades since, most people just don't read or write nearly as much because they prefer other ways to communicate, learn, or spend their time and it seems natural that there's some consequence to that.
Wow! that comment you linked speaks to me. I was watching a review video for a game yesterday that was so obviously written by AI it was actually painful to listen to. I stated reading the comments and there were several people praising this Youtuber on their great use of metaphor. Literally "subbed because you're such an amazing writer." It actually shook me to my core. If those were real people making those comments, there is no hope for us. I need to believe those were mostly bot comments just to maintain my sanity.
At least you didn’t over-react. Some people seem so afraid of consuming AI-generated content that they see it everywhere. A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI. In the comments for any blog post or article that hits the HN front page, there is always someone confidently calling it out for being unmistakeably written by Claude. It’s so tiring. Let’s say the YouTube video that rocked the very foundation of your being was scripted with AI assistance. It was apparently good enough for people to praise it specifically. Why is that a problem? If it wasn’t AI, which may well be the case, would your soul be calmed?
What I find tiring: the same. writing. style. everywhere.
Various youtubers I subscribe to are using apparently AI-written scripts now. They all wrote and spoke just fine before, each with their own particular style. Now they just sound like Claude. I know it's still their thoughts, and I'm still interested in what they have to say. Maybe they're using AI to save time, or maybe they've read too much AI text and now that's how they write. But it kinda takes the sparkle and personality out of everything.
>A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI.
In this era, I live by two principles
1. Do my best to avoid AI slop. If you agree, this is straightforward. I don't always succeed and I'm sure I've "fallen for it" in quite a few places, but I disengage if I sense it.
2. Let sleeping dogs lie. Because I'm not some almighty judge of AI, I'm not going around accusing others of doing so. There is zero benefit for me to call out random internet pieces on if something is AI. And ultimately, I'm in discussions to engage with humans, not to monitor bots nor even to argue about the existence of bots (I feel I've said all I can on the topic, I have moved on internally in terms of discussion).
>It was apparently good enough for people to praise it specifically. Why is that a problem?
Writing is subjective, but I can certainly see some dangerous anti-patterns develop if you take bad advice as a beginner, especially advice that ultimately came from hallucinations in an LLM.
I was watching a Youtube video about "developing taste" and how culture has been impacted in the modern age. TYou risk becoming "tasteless" consuming AI slop, because AI by its nature is trying to average out all the inputs and cut of all the edges of any given culture. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you just wanted to get a brief overview of a culture, but is poison if it comes time to try and become part of that culture.
as a huge summation of an interesting video: There's 3 aspects of a culture: embodied,objectified, and institutionalized. it's never been easier to pretend to be a "poser" in this era of AI and be rewarded for it, because AI makes objectified easier than ever. But it doesn't mean it truly embodies you into the culture. And that's dangerous for multiple reasons (in my eyes).
Thank you for the considered response. Do you know the name of the channel the video was on? Searching youtube for ‘developing taste’ returns too many videos and I don’t know where to start.
> A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI.
Well that is not really what happened at all. Most people seem to believe Hank Green was honest when he said the line "thanks for the pushback" was in fact made up at the spot and not by an LLM, and the scandal would have died there.
Except in follow-up to that, Hank Green made several very open and personal posts about his LLM usage getting completely out of hand to the extent that his wife and brother called for an intervention about it, that it's been like an addiction to him, and that he had been letting it guide him way too much and how this was a breach of trust to his audience.
There were also one or two other incidents for people who are paying attention that this did another rather large dent in trusting him as a "smart person who says smart things", any more.
Really, does it matter? Lots of YouTube comments are zero-effort attempts to juice a video/channel's engagement metrics (aka "commenting for the algorithm"), and whether they're accomplices/sockpuppets, or just unimaginative parasocial parasites, is basically unknowable from the outside.
You realize that when people aren't told an image or text is AI generated, on average they prefer it to human created content, and it's only when they know it's AI that they rate it lower than the human content? You shouldn't be shocked by this, the last 20 years of Hollywood and pop music clearly indicates the the mass market doesn't care about craft or art, it likes to ride the vibes of what's trending.
Yeah, and you might enjoy a meal, and when someone tells you it contained 5 percent human eyeballs to give the sauce that awesome texture, and you know they're not lying, you will puke it out right on the spot.
Then you say "it's because I don't like human eyeballs in my food", and someone and replies "but the mass market clearly doesn't care. You shouldn't be shocked by this."
LLMs output the average of their training data. On average, people are tasteless and clueless. So it's to be expected that average and especially below-average people find LLM output appealing. Or the tasteless work of an average person.
> So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are.
Now? My friend, we’ve been flooded with stupid people’s attempts to show us how smart they are ever since internet forums came to be. Heck, just look at 90% of the comments on any given HN post. It’s mind-numbingly stupidity by the handful disguised as PhD talk—big words, fancy terms, heavy phrasing, all to say a bunch of nothing or just pretend they have a part in said conversation.
...yes? It is up to the human as to how to interpret it. They can choose to not actually read it, but focus on whether or not it was written by AI, or instead they could focus on what the text is saying, AI or human generated. If the sky is red, does it matter if the AI generated those three words vs a human? The sky is red! So it's a good point to make, but it's on them too decide how they want to use it.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe the AI style as the next person.
But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output.
That's an added value
Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read
It's still a lower effort contribution and because the surface is plausible and the content is usually verbose, it's a bigger waste of time for the other party than a low effort 100% human contribution.
Steered it?! If I'm gonna read it, I want someone to have written it, not bloody "steered" it!
"Why are you upset with this restaurant meal? Okay it wasn't actually cooked here per se, but the chef certainly reheated it and carefully monitored the microwave oven while doing so!"
This crap just needs to end. "Steering" words at another human being is incredibly disrespectful.
big restaurants have many cooks that are trained and monitored by the chef, but the chef is certainly not necessarily prepairing your meal.
The chef is however responsible for the outcome so you're absolutely right to complain if the meal sucks and most of this AI written crap definitely sucks to read.
That said, it's not about the "principle" of having your meal cooked by the chef / the text written word by word by the human.
It's about the outcome. People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose) and it's absolutely despicable that so many people are so eager to lower our standards in quality just because everybody else seems to be doing it.
If I go to a restaurant and find out I got a reheated meal I'm going to be upset no matter how much quality control the chef does of the reheating. That's just not something I would ever go to a restaurant for.
> That said, it's not about the "principle" of having your meal cooked by the chef / the text written word by word by the human. It's about the outcome.
No. It very much isn't about outcome. It's about interpersonal relationships.
> People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose)
The quality isn't the problem. The quality is that something that needs to be "tamed" is writing words that the "tamer" expects me to read.
> the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation
This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past.
But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously.
It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.
> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six
It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.
It's typically referred to as CE to indicate the speaker's personal lack of belief in the divinity of Jesus, that might be implied by using the term anno domini. Nobody is under any illusion about whose birth began this era.
The fact that the number is still based on the birth of Christ shows people are not pretending it isn't based on that. The term CE was adopted to lessen the implied endorsement of said religion via the terms Christ and "the year of OUR lord".
What's astonishing to me is how quickly people at my workplace have adopted this habit. Six months ago my manager was vociferously complaining about his boss asking him to review a lengthy document that was clearly AI generated, saying that his boss wasn't even capable of understanding the document the LLM had created. Now the majority of technical communication I get from my manager is just a transcript exported directly from ChatGPT.
Recently on a call with a junior coworker where they asked me to look at some changes they had made, they were completely unable to answer any questions that I asked on their own. The way the conversation went was: I ask a question, they type my question into a ChatGPT prompt, we read the output together and discuss whether it makes sense.
To be fair, the outputs from ChatGPT tend to be quite good. But it's just shocking how quickly people have basically completely handed over control to LLMs.
I've been wondering lately if this is about the end of the road for me for a career in tech (I've had a good long one, so.. maybe?).
I'm so tired of AI Slopped architecture documents, code, messages in slack, emails etc. I'm close to flat out rejecting any architecture doc I get that's written by an LLM, because I'm not sure the engineers even understand what they're proposing. The code is often a nightmare under the hood, even if it works. I've got smart coworkers who now just copy paste everything via an LLM giving themselves something approaching a lobotomy in the process.
I've decided to leave my current company. It's mostly the result of burnout from working many years at an unsatisfying job, but the advent of AI has certainly exacerbated things. I no longer need the income (although it's certainly nice), and recently have begun to dread the start of every work day. It's time for a change.
I may just get out of the tech industry altogether. But I'm also tempted to try my hand at an indie dev project that I have in mind. With AI, it seems like it would be easier than ever to get a new project off the ground. And I don't really mind AI-assisted development personally. It's mainly all the organizational and interpersonal disruption that is giving me a headache at the moment.
This is very sad. I found it was interrupting coding when the editor would suggest new blocks of code without me actually thinking and I found I was just generally abandoning any thought processes.
So I've disabled that and now I'm explicit if I want to solve a problem because then it means my brain's actually engaged.
It seems to be like a shortcut to early onset dementia because the brain's never being actively involved in problem solving.
maybe it's not so absolute. if someone else has the talent or takes the effort to come up with a clever prompt that got an interesting response from an LLM, I'd want to read it too. Treating LLMs as a tool, this is not so different from someone else using Blender to create an interesting animation.
To play devil's advocate here, it is possible for someone to simultaneously use AI to write and also not be a meat proxy. I'm not saying that is the norm, but I have written docs where the vast majority of the words come from AI, but I also spent multiple days on the substance and content.
Maybe if you only use the LLM to proof read or something? I don't know if LLMs are actually any good for this purpose, but it's something I came to think of when trying to answer your question.
I do think that it is very difficult to not be a meat proxy when you utilize an LLM for writing tasks. These tools are computer programs that generate text, so what else would you do with it than have it write for you? This is being a meat proxy.
Trying to avoid being a meat proxy can quickly eat the supposed productivity gains of using an LLM in the first place.
Like say I need to write an article about some subject and it would take me the entire day to complete this task without an LLM. I can get some sort of article out of an LLM by simply asking, I don't need to think about the subject myself at all. The LLM productivity promise is also fulfilled, because I did an entire days work in a minute or so.
Now if I also need to read and understand the work, and be able to defend it or explain it to others as if I produced it myself, then this will take a lot of time. If on top of this I need to edit the text to sound like me rather than an LLM, then I probably still need the whole day for this task and I have lost all the productivity increase that I sought from using the LLM.
It's the thinking that takes time when you write, not typing. But you can't do the thinking and avoid doing it at the same time.
The same idea applies to coding too. Doing code review and requiring the author and reviewer to read and understand the code basically eliminates all the productivity gains that using the LLM was supposed to provide. Throw out the reviewing, reading, and understanding and we can have each developer producing a thousand kloc per day, over 1000x productivity. If we don't throw those out, we are comparatively in the exact same spot as not using LLMs at all.
Yes, it's like people have forgotten that junior contributors you can't trust yet often have net negative productivity due to the time you need to invest to review and guide them.
I find that the LLM is great for helping with the starting problem. I will go for a walk and basically brain dump my thoughts and ideas about a topic/doc into a voice note, where I can ramble, wander from point to point, etc. Then I transcribe it, get a model to take that and turn it into something cohesive, and then I spend multiple hours reading it, reworking it, and editing it. I am not very good at writing docs and this method produces something with far more detail and quality than I would ever get on my own. But AI;DR right?
Fascinating seeing you get irate with people who are giving you feedback that your own thoughts are far superior to the regurgitated "cleaned up" version which is absolute garbage indeed.
You have some solid ideas there but they are very poorly organized. I think you would benefit from a class in writing. I had a month-long technical writing workshop back a couple of decades ago that my company sponsored and it helped me tremendously with starting with wall of consciousness, progressing to writing plan, outline and then editing. It had a very positive impact on my career in professional services where clear communication via documents is an essential part of value prop.
People say this, but AI artists keep getting listens on music platforms, doing at least as well as human artists if the listener is making a blind choice.
Expressing a preference between two choices is not how I would measure what listeners want. What they should have been testing is whether the listener ends up playing the track over and over and singing along to every word of the track. I think you would end up with a very different conclusion if you measured passion and not preference. This study merely reflects what the companies want to measure.
There's been a few. The last one was 2007 when the iPhone changed the internet from a place you went because you wanted to be there and had a reason to engage, into an app meant to entertain you for 5min at a time between text messages and flushing.
I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.
That implies you think the output of an LLM is only a rewording of the prompt, and that it doesn't add anything from it's corpus of training data. That's obviously untrue.
I'm in the "post both and let your readers figure out which, if any, they prefer" camp but even if you didn't (and unless you were using one of those super special models that can't be released according to the companies) I would hope that any literate adult that thought it valuable would be capable of consulting something with comparable knowledge and experience.
Of course, given that posting one is not mutually exclusive with posting the other, I would still think that posting both is the easiest way to satisfy both people who prefer to read the prompt and those who prefer the read the output.
Even when LLMs add something it's a better idea to let the readers use LLMs to augment content. They have the best knowledge of their own background and what they're looking for.
Sharing information that is already in the corpus is simply not that valuable in a world where everyone has access to their own LLMs.
I don't like it. I don't take any offence. It just triggers the same AI;DR for me.
If I think the task requires a human to think about it. And the person is the human paid to think about it. Whether I get a wall of AI text, prompt, or an entire AI conversation... there is no human insight in it.
If that person took the time to think about the problem, had a chat with the AI, and understood the output, surely they can take the final step and tell me the short result/summary themselves, right?
Yes, the original prompt is 10000% better than the AI output, because it shows me exactly how much the author (you?) cares about this topic and how much effort they're willing to put into communication, which is barely any at all.
Sure enough, the prompt is infinitely more expressive and interesting.
AI writing is like the voice anonymizer they'd use in TV interviews when they wanted to hide the identity of the person speaking. The output is more adherant to convention but likewise more impersonal and exhausting, and when it's used by too many people it's so indistint that it becomes noise.
It might look good to you in isolation, because you're excited to see that it says what you meant to say without the features you feel self-conscious about, but to others it just reads like yet another sample of the same old AI slop. The message gets entirely lost behind that.
FWIW, I tried to read the AI version first, and found myself bouncing back to the prompt multiple times. The AI version just reads as flat, impersonal, and as if it has had all the corners sanded off (both in style and content). The prompt conveys much more about what _you_ want to say, and is easier to read without zoning out and losing interest.
If you must use AI in this way, I'd tell it to take a _much_ lighter touch. It cleans things up without washing away the personality of your writing. ChatGPT example:
> adjust the following for spelling and grammar, making MINIMAL alterations to the original wording and content. do NOT rewrite, just clean up what is already there: [post]
I find amusing that both Claude and ChatGPT realized the "hackers" in "a lot of people on hackers that like to complain about stuff" was about "Hacker News" :-P
The stream-of-consciousness in the prompt is much better than the LLMs response. Yes, it's messy and unpolished, maybe even a little hard to parse, but it's so much richer for it. The way it is written lets me follow your thought process, shows that you were getting the words out quickly without much or any editing, and how you were exploring the idea and making it more concrete by giving it written form.
The LLM response has none of that character, it doesn't give me that little sliver of insight into the writer. It strips the idea from the author, making it generic and anonymous. The only thing I can gleam from text edited with an LLM like this (besides the literal meaning of the text), is that the author didn't care enough to express themselves.
Sure, it's more polished, but doing the writing manually is half the point. You have an abstract idea, you refine into something that can be communicated, and in doing so, explore that idea and improve your understanding of it. I've re-written this paragraph a dozen times trying to do exactly that.
"More interesting" =/= "good". Yes, at the end of the day it's a very derisive rant against people the writer feels is too hard on AI and a defense on how they personally wield it. With a slightly ill intent to create a messy, unstructured writing in the prompt to support his point of "see, people like pretty words!".
Even the attempt of using Claude to be a fancy formatter failed when you look closely at the language employed in the final prompt. It's trying to convey the same ideas with better foratting, but still softens up the derision the author clearly has here. Which is the interesting part in my eyes.
There was no ill intent. The content itself described the reason for the process. Even simple comments I write here end up with multiple edits over the hour-long edit window.
If you read my entire comment history you will find I rarely make more than a single observation per comment. Anything more complex becomes too difficult to read and revise.
Cognitive impairment is extremely difficult to understand until you have experienced it. I am particularly lucid this afternoon. That doesn't mean the difficulty is not real.
The stream-of-consciousness is only hard to read because it lacks paragraph breaks, sometimes sentence breaks, and there's so many misspelled words. If you just tweak it to fix that stuff, it becomes fairly readable, like most internet comments or whatnot. (Which do you think this comment is, a polished essay, or lightly-formatted stream of consciousness?)
Meanwhile, the LLM-generated essay is hard to read because it's essentially the high-school essay that's padding its paper to meet a minimum page count. I'm surprised that you find it easier to read than most human text, because I've invariably found that my first reaction to LLM-generated text is "where's the point?"--everything is just buried in so much fluff.
So yeah, I find the prompt much better than the LLM output.
This is actually a great representation of what is good and what is insidious about LLM assisted writing.
The practice of writing can serve the purpose of conveying an idea or information to the readers, but it can also be an invaluable tool for the writer to process, digest, and internalize a message.
The act of wordsmithing, and shaping the idea from its raw rambling form into a coherent narrative, is intellectual metabolism.
A good writer will both distill the ideas, present them in such a way that will be pleasurable to their readers, and also bring the reader along the way so they can learn as well, and feel like an active participant.
The LLM tend to produce prose that defeats the purpose for the writer, takes the joy out for the reader, and ultimately does nothing for anyone but take up space.
It's not more words that make good stories, and it's not more code that makes good programs. It's what use is this to anyone, and only humans understand what other humans want and only humans can care.
Seems like people in this thread agree that it's better to express oneself in a less skilled fashion but actually write something that represents your idea, than to present some polished turd and pass it off as your own writing.
Same as a birthday card on some stock paper written in crayon will always be more valuable than a store bought card with generic sentiment.
I asked claude 4.5 :
"""
Please, with an absolute minimum of content modification, edit this text with proper paragraph-formatting, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Do not alter vocabulary, language, or tone.
"""
And then fed it your input.
And the output was a very easily readable, enjoyable plain-ascii-text, with no Ai-ick, except for an em-dash or two.
Tried pasting it here, but that removed paragraph formatting
> Iff you dismiss AI writings just because it sounds like it’s written by aI you will end up missing out on some truly valuable content.
Yes that might be the case. But with Ai now being in so heavy use, there is so much content generated that most of us dont have time to just read output of someone elses basic prompts, if we can't determine how much original thought went into it.
So, with your Ai generated post, I don't know how much of was is actually based on your thoughts/opinons, and how much of it is just a conglomerate wordsallad from a consensus machine based on random internet thoughts/opinions. Thus I ignore a majority of everything that looks Ai, just to protect my cognitive circuits.
Unfortunatly this means that I sometimes even miss out on genuine human content that is just close enough to Ai-style to trigger my "Ai filter" . I've even dismissed content narated by voice actors, such as Benjamin Pemberton, just because his style is so close to Ai voice (although his style obviously predates the Ai voice style)
And it seems this is such a common occurence that, some videos now put a "Human narator, not Ai" text on screen at the begining of the videos.
As someone whose inner (brain) chain of thought is messy, reading your prompt was a very pleasant experience. It might be dirty, it might not be polished, but reading this was like taking a dump of your thought, planting it on my brain, and letting me build upon it to understand your point.
I could not finish the output made by Claude. I tried, but having to translate back from "mouthy words" to "plain English" is tiresome.
I am not trying to say that I don't like well written words, a good book with carefully chosen words is a good way to spend an afternoon. But for LLMs, it feels very forced and not natural because it doesn't insert those words where it would make sense for a good author.
I prefer your writing to Claude's. A single linear stream of consciousness is easier to parse than empty headings that grab my attention with nothing to say.
I used to do that, but the person could be bad at prompting too (which is often why the LLM couldn't give a good answer in the first place).
So the polite version I use now is: "Hey, thanks for the <doc/code>, just to get a bit more context, what was the original problem you were trying to solve?".
That gets them to distill their own problem a bit further.
i personally prompt to produce a baseline then re-prompt to tweak then re-re-prompt to re-order, then re-re-re-prompt to expand certain parts, then re-re-re-reprompt to properly cross reference internally , then re-re-re-re-reprompt to proof read and add missing references . so there is no single prompt that produced the document and if i were to start from scratch the path would likely be different.
Would you prefer a 10k word discussion with an agent about a hypothesis with back and forth over data sources and such, analysis, etc, or a 2000 word AI essay condensate with the rough edges smoothed over manually?
A lot of people replying seem to be misunderstanding, though. The only point of human-to-human communication is to transmit thoughts from one brain to another. If you simply send me stuff from AI then I don't need you. I want to hear your thoughts. If you don't have any, then I don't need or want to hear from you. Your thoughts are entirely contained within your prompts. Just send me those.
"Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.)."
Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?
553 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] thread> Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.).
I stopped reading there.
it's more like, "refining prose so that nobody sane will bother reading it". like wow it's so useful to claudefy your thoughts, wow look at how amazing your blog post looks now with how much more slop you produced from your prompt, amazing.
I really wonder like, do those authors not think from the perspective of the reader?
~actual prompt i sent in to claude last week. doing what you propose would be basically impossible / nonsensical, and further undo the entire exercise, sending all the money spent on the tokens down the toilet.
put differently, if you use agents in any actually useful manner, the principle you describe erases whatever value they did end up providing. though since the whole underlying premise is that ai never provides any value, maybe that's the intended result. hard to tell these days what takes are genuine and which ones are demagogue.
It turned out his prompt was equally uninspired... 1 or 2 sentences. That was the thought he put into it, which then had us spending hours trying to figure out the AI reply. He could have saved the whole team a full day by just sending the prompt... or nothing at all.
"Here is the prompt and model I used, here is the portion of the output that stuck out to me as relevant and useful, and here, in my own words, is why I think that is so."
i.e. Highlight the good part of the output for me and, preferably, explain why you think it's good. Otherwise it's the same thing as posting slop, only with extra steps. You thought it was worth posting and I thought that made it worth looking at, but now I'm sorting through a bunch of monkey garbage looking for what made you think that. Being a different person, I may not find that hidden gem and I may become quite frustrated with you.
________________
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
It's a tool like any other. It assists the intelligent, but makes the lazy - lazi-er.
I'd say that sounds about the same for ai;dr. I could see myself posting a prompt like that in front of the generated report.
>If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it...
>...then I’m not going to bother reading it.
Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but we've had copywriters and editors for generations now. Not reading something because AI did the post-writing work feels kinda weak. Skip stuff started from AI, fine, but this is just because it's AI, not because the author didn't do the task. And I do get the point is that if an AI did /most/ of the work, ok to that, too, but not post-write processing alone.
did you formerly hire copywriters for this task?
So in the end, I don't care if a human wrote it or an AI, I don't want to read it either way.
What's wrong with copyrighters? They write like corporations, not like humans (see the Cluetrain Manifesto for more on this). They sound like nobody - literally inhuman. I don't want to read that. I want to hear a human voice. If I can't hear that in your writing, I don't need to read it.
As an anecdote, someone posted a blogpost on Linkedin on using agents to implement a driver to access PCIe devices over TCP/IP. I was intrigued because that's not an easy task for several reasons, like handling PCIe interrupts and DMA. For exmaple, how does the remote machine map the device's PCIe BARs? And when it issues I/O to the devices registers, how are these reads and writes transferred to the remote device. In the end, this is just some virtual memory. In a local machine, this is either directly mapped to the PCIe physical addresses or some IOMMU virtual address space which is then translated by the hardware upon CPU/device/VM access.
After reading the long verbose promising article, in the end, the guy (with the help of the agent) only managed to implement access to the PCIe config space so that lspci on the remote machine works and shows the remote PCIe device, but that's all. It never addressed the issues above nor even mentioned them. The code was AI generated. The article was AI-written. The article never made a reference to DMA, interrupts, MSIX-X, IOMMU, IOTLB, virtual memory, etc, but it made big claims on next-gen datacenter disaggregated architecture, boosting GPU utilization, reducing large scale inference costs, etc.
Anyway, you get my point: big long beautiful words, but zero nuance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991394
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933
- Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing? And how would you know if the /content/ is worthwhile, unless you read it...
- The ability to "detect AI" is imperfect at best. 90% AI written? 5%? How would you know, unless you read it....
- If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"?
- If you are wrong, and you announce it to the world, how would it feel to someone who spent a lot of time and energy writing?
The purpose of writing is to communicate. The person communicating is an important part of the message.
Consider the sentence "I'm waiting for you at home." It really matters if it's said by your loving wife or an evil clown. You can extrapolate from this.
It's a reference to TL;DR. If you can understand that, you can understand AI;DR.
Two reasons:
1. I can't effectively engage in follow-up conversation with the "author." I can't do it with the human (principal) because they didn't write it and can't explain it--and, in fact, they may not even personally agree with all if it!
2. It shifts the cognitive burden from writer to reader. What makes writing hard, and valuable, is the effort put into translating your thoughts into writing that is easy to read, and the authenticity that is expressed in it. The "soul," if you will. As ambient prose, AI-generated writing is frequently not only difficult to read, but also has this "sameness" quality that makes every "author" have the same personality.
Because what the clanker produces is almost always bad output compared to what a capable human would produce. Furthermore, even an incapable human is better than a clanker, because at least humans have intrinsic value that they bring to the table. Finally, it's just plain disrespectful to refuse to take some time to answer a question and hand it off to the clanker.
I already saw someone getting fired for only producing AI text as part of their entire output, after being unable to explain what they “wrote” in multiple situations.
And recently my company enacted a mandate that text made for humans should not be AI generated.
Sooner or later every company will start realizing that this is just people too lazy to actually work and coasting on a paycheck, at the expense of every other worker.
There were too many incidents of “this doesn’t look right” in the same week, so when their boss did a thorough check a couple days after, it was all fake, everything. Eventually they admitted and got canned.
I think sometimes people have a big long thread with Claude where they feel enthusiastic about the back and forth being very productive -- and then they genuinely want to share the summary of the conversation with their colleagues so that they can feel it too. It's not just typing a short prompt and copy/pasting the response.
But, Claude, especially Opus is so unnecessarily flowery, and smug -- and it's so identifiably characteristic.
It somehow rubs salt in the wound: "I didn't take the time to write this out in my own words, so now you get to listen to this petulant asshole mansplain it to you".
If it would get to the point, and with some humility, it would be a much different proposition.
If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?
I would crumple up the flyer, throw it on the ground, and then ask for another one and then repeat that process until he gets the point.
If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.
Right, exactly, that's what you'd do whether he spend 10 hours on it or 10 minutes.
I'd like them to go further and delete links to AI-generated content, but I haven't been able to persuade management to do that yet.
(Sharing next sentence for the newbies, since you know-) All our jobs to flag on site & even email the worst offenders to hn@ycombinator.com . That said I rarely flag or even downvote anything. People either really behave, or perhaps the rulebreakers break rules that don’t grind my gears. Politely admonishing good faith rulebreakers is another tactic in the arsenal.
AI-generated comment posters with comment histories of exclusively slop get email alerts from me. Don’t know whether they’re planning to sell or spam but they clearly need help finding the door :)
Case in point: a repost of this AI-generated video:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ORTp0KAR3po
...was on the front page just an hour ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/1vqlg7r/cant_ev...
There are comments from people enjoying it with >15000 upvotes, and waaay, way down the comment tree, couple of people pointing out this is a blatant AI, with, like 5 upvotes.
Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.
I saw a post on HN once that was someone’s LLM written blog. This was called out, and eventually the author admitted it but said he’d reviewed it and stood by every idea.
Other people think it sounds better, or it’s “editing” like grammar check (a sibling post thinks this). It’s people who are functionally illiterate plus lazy and just think LLM writing sounds better and is what they would have said anyway.
It’s the same people who would have written school assignments by copy pasting paragraphs from the internet and maybe swapping in synonyms.
I don’t think we should be at all charitable about it, it’s an offence to whoever you’re communicating with and should be called output.
The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.
It is almost always low information density. Sometimes I can get it to remove most of the extraordinarily cliche phrases it injects into everything, along with the tortured, gauche prose (especially Claude). But what remains is an expansion algorithm: it takes a simple idea and expands it like polyurethane foam to fill however much space it can take, the volume filled mainly by grammatical syntax and only traced with any actual semantic meaning.
https://claude.ai/share/ac747c6d-2a62-40b7-b33e-06a94cf34344
Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link".
But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content.
(And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.)
> If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.
To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.
No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not.
Meet "the masses".
Sorry, but no. Sending me a link as an alternative to having a conversation is totally not OK.
And it is not the same as "I had AI generate this".
Please reread my comments. That's not the scenario I was discussing.
This is, of course, before people started sending Instagram Reel or YouTube Short links. Or, maybe worse, links to 3-hour-long YouTube podcasts.
As with everything, it depends on who is sending it. For some people, yes. For the rest (majority), it's a case of
He: Makes some claim
Me: I question some aspect of it.
... Potential back and forth
He: Oh, just look at this video/article/book that explains and answers all your concerns.
Thing is, in the majority of the cases, it didn't address my concern. I'd write up something in detail, and get back either silence or yet another link. Took way too long for me to realize I shouldn't bother clicking the link to begin with.
Too many people put up a lazy comment when it is clear they haven't thought about $it, googled $it, or asked AI about $it. Where $it == {whatever they are unsure about or arguing about}.
The lazy commenter desires a human to waste their time writing a response. Often others judge that the commenter doesn't deserve the time or effort, so instead of a thoughtful response others often just reply with a relevant link - giving the commenter a chance to learn or reply.
Unfortunately offhand responses like LMGTFY become a common behaviour in forums, even when wildly inappropriate (as you note).
When it happens to you, it isn't personal, you are just a victim because everyone has been trained to a pattern of behaviour by thoughtless commenters.
It is also likely your comments get pattern matched as not worthwhile reasoning clearly to. You can do something to change your writing to avoid appearing waffly/bullshitty/unworthy (or whatever the reason responders are not replying to the meat of your point).
See also: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vamp...
Sorry in advance if I've misunderstood your point or if I'm being Captain Obvious.
After a few years of this I also just stopped clicking thinks and refused to engage in conversations that seemed to be going that direction.
Not so. Posting links is not the same. If you were to copy+paste someone's blog post into the forum and post is as your own, without attribution, it would be seen as plagiarism. Everyone understands this; you're trying to pass another's work as your own.
On X there's actually a good modern equivalent to "posting links" which is @grok, and letting Grok add to the thread. There is occasional teasing but it's nothing like posting slop under your own name.
ChatGPT actually allows something like this; you can share a link to the conversation.
Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.
"ChatGPT says ... "?
> Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.
I guess the bulk of folks use ChatGPT as the preferred chatbot, but people like me have a completely different interface that doesn't use ChatGPT. I can't send someone links to my conversation.
(And as an aside, over 80% of ChatGPT conversation links I click on don't work - not sure if they clean them after some time, or I need to be logged in, etc).
And even if it did work, I really don't want to read the whole conversation. Just send me the relevant part that ChatGPT said!
Arguably things like Cliff's Notes and "for dummies" books were sating this impulse before that, I wouldn't be surprised if the line can be traced back further.
Since dropping LLMs altogether I've made the connection to the impulse for a superficial jump to the conclusion just by noticing how I use web search, or feverishly scan some text to get to the point.
Theoretically I studied critical thinking and have learned decades ago how to recognize when this is OK and when it's a superficial placation of some addiction to closing the book on a subject or micro-subject... but boy whatever good instincts I might have developed back then have significantly eroded over time. Trying to reclaim that again is pretty humbling.
That is not currently possible. At best, you could train on millions of personal examples of style, eg historical emails, reports, etc, and you'd still never get what the person would have written.
I'd be astonished if an LLM didn't even miss important nuance, data, and focus on the wrong point.
It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.
When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.
You wouldn't get it verbatim, but your mistrust in AI reflecting what you intended to say is unwarranted.
I use LLMs to clean up poorly OCR'd hand written notes. It's the exception where I need to "fix" its output. It figures out what the notes intended, and writes it up fairly well.
> It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.
For a lot (most?) of AI slop, I agree. But pre-LLMs, this was universally a bad idea. The first draft always sucked, and was easy to misunderstand. A good LLM, with a good system prompt, will usually produce something better than the input it is fed. Most people are poor at expressing their thoughts.
> When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.
Most people aren't Bob The Great, but Bob The Incoherent.
Yes there are deterministic tools for this, but grammar is actually kind of complicated and the tools either miss mistakes, or suggest obviously worse edits. Looking at you, Microsoft Word.
All the writing is my own and I read all of it. Naturally there’s no LLM-isms because I wrote 99.9% of the original text. But, it was AI assisted. So, I don’t think it’s cut and dry.
Personally, in this new, different context you've stated, I don't think many have an issue with that. If you write 6 pages of text, and then ask an LLM to look for errors, that's not remotely the same, and it is more like a spell checker, or a second set of eyes.
There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't".
For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI.
I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).
That it is plausible to have come from any of the major ones just means that they all should be avoided. Which is of course not a very practical insight.
> unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later
That would be the point where our friendship is over (or rather I acknowledge the fact that it was already over) and I delete & block the contact.
None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself.
Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question.
Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination.
People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway.
No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.
While I'm hoping the AI bubble pops sooner than later, as I still hold out hope that knowledge work will continue to require knowledgeable humans at the helm, I wanted to add on that I think you make a good point.
A lot of users online can't read[1], and between a lack of pure reading comprehension, poor media literacy habits draining one's brains and ability to focus, and finally the increase in AI-enabled content, I'm not surprised at how redditor-cultured netizens love to throw up their hands and say "AI;DR!", as if that makes them somehow morally superior.
These users won't read dense texts or try to elucidate meaning out of human-written works, they ask for AI summaries or manual "TL;DR" entries as it is, now the AI is use is being used as an excuse to enable mental laziness and lack of attempts to read information.
So while I get lost in wikipedia walks because I'm looking for written entertainment for 'learning', they are getting mind-melted by algorithms, therefore, an uncharitable part of me wants to let the meat-proxying continue.
And then the other part of me that gets annoyed by having to sift through AI-slop-infested text to see what if any meat there may be in there decides that perhaps that's not as helpful of an attitude as I should take after all, because if everybody decides to meat-proxy the world away, I'll be unhappier than letting lazy functionally-illiterate-users complain aloud, even as the latter is boring reading as well.
[1] in the https://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-compu... sense
I view LLMs optimistically as the catchup phase. After all, they aren't really "reinventing" anything, rather they are a tool to synthesize the vast human corpus and catch up to the scale. Yes, at the moment they are used for all sorts of things, most of which are trivial. But when the bubble pops it will not mean knowledge work has a renaissance, rather it will be the nail in the coffin. The bubble pop will mean it will be cheap, compute/LLMs become a utility. So let the AI fill out the spreadsheet. Allow UBI to flourish, implement a severe wealth tax. End pointless wars. Slim government, which is a lot of bloat and obfuscation around what should be automated, open and transparent disbursements. End private taxes on the economy (credit cards duopoly, etc) and essentially, everyone gets to act like an enlightenment era university student. On this view, the hope would be that the present times are the wars of religion, the storm before the calm. If we are able to make it through in a hyper-networked, nuclear age.
LLMs are not going away, no matter how many Americans may want to go back to the proverbial land. Reactive movements have always existed, and always failed. I think you would simply be better served by advocating for the best case scenario, rather than aligning yourself with the AI skeptics who as you acknowledge, are also rather widely boring and intellectually lazy - that which you seek to remedy. The question of assuring UBI is not obvious. Imo there is far more rigor and interesting questions in the camp trying to create the optimistic future, than in those who resort to unexamined, parroted skepticism.
1. A lot of this work was optional to begin with. Few people actually need to post on LinkedIn, write blogs, etc. It's arguably a mountain of content waste (which is why the term "slop" is so fitting).
2. It's not a substitute for actual work. If it becomes clear that you're using LLM to do work you are paid to do, eventually the person who pays you will notice, and replace you with the LLM. If your employer values you because of the work you do, it's in your best interest to do the job yourself.
2. Yes, people get replaced at work all the time. And actually most employees who figure out who to maximize their own ROI (and thus their companies) get rewarded, not punished. If your slop code is "good enough" and you are moving the metrics the C suite cares about, your colleague taking far longer to create far less is obviously going to be punished.
If some sea change happens that replaces a whole class of workers, that is beyond the scope of the individual worker to think about. The modern economy can be viewed as one long process of automation, where most workers have been subsidizing their own eventual replacement, given the privileged position of capital over labor. This is historically obvious. It does not mean it benefits the individual to go back into some state of nature, or not reap what benefits they may gain from the prevailing system while it is still the one at hand.
Perhaps it's worth looking at this issue from the demand side instead. Who is the customer or buyer of the AI-generated work; and if there is one, how much do they value it? I contend that there are few actual buyers who are actually asking for the AI-generated output, and thus the value is low. These buyers are usually asking for some other outcome that flows downstream from the work, and AI slop is either being misperceived as the actual ask, or is a step in the middle somewhere.
Next, I wasn't talking about slop code. I was talking about slop narrative work--the work preceding the coding phase that gets teams and goals aligned, and reports results to management. In a world in which code is increasingly machine-written, the focus turns to the planning and decision stages, and that's where communication skills are most important. If you're outsourcing that work to an LLM, you're providing little added value, and that makes you replaceable. Not by a machine, but someone better than you at writing.
As for your last paragraph, I'm having trouble understanding whether you're in favor of AI-written content (not code, let's put that aside). That's the question I'm more interested in discussing than how economies evolve. I know how economic progress works ;-)
I similarly don't think your second point makes much sense. I think people going on about writing or domain experience as a skill are missing the obvious writing on the wall. If you are not an exceptional writer you will be replaced. Most people will be replaced then. Or at the very least, their diminished market power is inevitable. The end state of these models is in my view clearly aligned to less human in the loop and more automated self prompting. Most people's prompts are not that unique. If someone has a superior prompt that eventually gets integrated into the model. Eventually the model learns to ask itself the superior question, even if the spark is a profoundly lazy human invocation. The progress along code generation is then joined hand in hand by progress to full automation. Why is generating a prompt harder to solve than generating code? Why will both not advance in the next decade? Suggesting code will be increasingly machine written while saying humans will still need to be around to write instructions just strikes me as denialism of the scale of the change. If you think that in 10 years most of the back and forth is not going to be LLMs talking entirely among themselves I think you are in for a rude awakening.
As I said earlier, if a human cares a human will author. As for the rest of it, it makes almost no difference. Bad, lazy writing has always existed. Why would I take solace that a human has produced slop over a machine? The question is not "do I like it" but "do I care". The answer is no. Most things in the economy I don't care for or like. But certain things are inevitable as humans conglomerate. A well organized mind learns to get over it. Quite frankly if LLMs push LinkedIn over the edge and lead to the destruction of that platform I would be pleased. It was always a center of corporate slop and backpatting, something that in theory was optional but was more like a mandatory career chore, a step in the middle to actual work. It just is kind of amusing that your example of why AI writing is bad is because it is ruining LinkedIn, as if that place wasn't always trash. It just makes my point. In domains were humans care about human authorship, it's just not an issue in the same way. I've never heard someone care about LinkedIns viability as an ecosystem from someone who didn't work there. If LLMs are making the site unusable they are doing God's work.
That is precisely the observation we're not seeing.
What is the basis for this claim? To me, my formulation reads as logically self evident, to the point of near tautology. Your claim is what? People who genuinely care about things are delegating those things to LLMs? Then in what sense do they actually "care" about them?
Thanks! I appreciated it.
Edit: I see what you mean. In my formulation the "human" in question was one and the same. Perhaps this clarification makes my point more intelligible. Thanks again!
You are likely not the target audience anymore and they don't care if you're going to read it.
- I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection.
- I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response.
- In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify.
- The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.
this a thousand times this
LLMs are information transformers. if you're trying to take some rough idea and blow it out into something that "feels" substantive, you're just combining your high-signal idea / prompt with a bunch of meaningless bloat and noise from the model weights.
I think we're already there. We started having database issues after a rushed deploy (the PR diff had +100k lines). Everyone was pasting random Fable output as gospel and grasping at straws running random "create index concurrently" statements directly in production while I was slowly reading library documentation, testing hypotheses, gathering logs.
One colleague was completely in denial that his vibe coded "optimizations" that went into the update could have anything to do with the problem. I eventually found that the "optimizations", naively trying to optimize for page "first contentful paint" were prefetching pages whenever users hovered over anything and creating a barrage of requests.
And people seem really proud of what they "generate" too, not at all worried that they might be offloading the consequences to others. It's a stupid, tiring time to be working in software.
Ghost authors of books have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.
If your favourite creator is engaged in generating this style of content, then I think it says more about your tastes than their morals.
Don't smash the like button, don't share and unsubscribe.
Like I don’t need to be placated by someone else’s AI agent when I call out something in a PR, especially when they have such an aversion to conciseness and resolution
LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say.
They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1]
So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763
I think this is because only an elite few were literate and even fewer were writing stuff. As literacy increased, the common denominator got lower.
The next step in this evolution appears to be LLM writing, people will look back on pre 2023 writing with the same feeling as we look at the later 19th century now.
The difference you notice is probably either (1) you're own subjective impression that Victorian style is more sophisticated, or (2) it actually is more sophisticated because people were reading (and writing) a lot more than they do now and so their exposure and practice with prose style was much richer. In the decades since, most people just don't read or write nearly as much because they prefer other ways to communicate, learn, or spend their time and it seems natural that there's some consequence to that.
Various youtubers I subscribe to are using apparently AI-written scripts now. They all wrote and spoke just fine before, each with their own particular style. Now they just sound like Claude. I know it's still their thoughts, and I'm still interested in what they have to say. Maybe they're using AI to save time, or maybe they've read too much AI text and now that's how they write. But it kinda takes the sparkle and personality out of everything.
In this era, I live by two principles
1. Do my best to avoid AI slop. If you agree, this is straightforward. I don't always succeed and I'm sure I've "fallen for it" in quite a few places, but I disengage if I sense it.
2. Let sleeping dogs lie. Because I'm not some almighty judge of AI, I'm not going around accusing others of doing so. There is zero benefit for me to call out random internet pieces on if something is AI. And ultimately, I'm in discussions to engage with humans, not to monitor bots nor even to argue about the existence of bots (I feel I've said all I can on the topic, I have moved on internally in terms of discussion).
>It was apparently good enough for people to praise it specifically. Why is that a problem?
Writing is subjective, but I can certainly see some dangerous anti-patterns develop if you take bad advice as a beginner, especially advice that ultimately came from hallucinations in an LLM.
I was watching a Youtube video about "developing taste" and how culture has been impacted in the modern age. TYou risk becoming "tasteless" consuming AI slop, because AI by its nature is trying to average out all the inputs and cut of all the edges of any given culture. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you just wanted to get a brief overview of a culture, but is poison if it comes time to try and become part of that culture.
as a huge summation of an interesting video: There's 3 aspects of a culture: embodied,objectified, and institutionalized. it's never been easier to pretend to be a "poser" in this era of AI and be rewarded for it, because AI makes objectified easier than ever. But it doesn't mean it truly embodies you into the culture. And that's dangerous for multiple reasons (in my eyes).
Well that is not really what happened at all. Most people seem to believe Hank Green was honest when he said the line "thanks for the pushback" was in fact made up at the spot and not by an LLM, and the scandal would have died there.
Except in follow-up to that, Hank Green made several very open and personal posts about his LLM usage getting completely out of hand to the extent that his wife and brother called for an intervention about it, that it's been like an addiction to him, and that he had been letting it guide him way too much and how this was a breach of trust to his audience.
There were also one or two other incidents for people who are paying attention that this did another rather large dent in trusting him as a "smart person who says smart things", any more.
they probably weren't.
Really, does it matter? Lots of YouTube comments are zero-effort attempts to juice a video/channel's engagement metrics (aka "commenting for the algorithm"), and whether they're accomplices/sockpuppets, or just unimaginative parasocial parasites, is basically unknowable from the outside.
Then you say "it's because I don't like human eyeballs in my food", and someone and replies "but the mass market clearly doesn't care. You shouldn't be shocked by this."
uhm this is so heavily dependent on the kind, type and model of AI used that I'm calling you out on making this "statistic" up on the spot.
but I'm not entirely sure what your point is
if you don't tell people which food has been hyperprocessed and laced with corn syrup or whatever you can imagine, they will also prefer that one
also 9 times out of 10, people prefer the needle with heroin in it
Now? My friend, we’ve been flooded with stupid people’s attempts to show us how smart they are ever since internet forums came to be. Heck, just look at 90% of the comments on any given HN post. It’s mind-numbingly stupidity by the handful disguised as PhD talk—big words, fancy terms, heavy phrasing, all to say a bunch of nothing or just pretend they have a part in said conversation.
But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output.
That's an added value
Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read
"Why are you upset with this restaurant meal? Okay it wasn't actually cooked here per se, but the chef certainly reheated it and carefully monitored the microwave oven while doing so!"
This crap just needs to end. "Steering" words at another human being is incredibly disrespectful.
The chef is however responsible for the outcome so you're absolutely right to complain if the meal sucks and most of this AI written crap definitely sucks to read.
That said, it's not about the "principle" of having your meal cooked by the chef / the text written word by word by the human.
It's about the outcome. People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose) and it's absolutely despicable that so many people are so eager to lower our standards in quality just because everybody else seems to be doing it.
No. It very much isn't about outcome. It's about interpersonal relationships.
> People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose)
The quality isn't the problem. The quality is that something that needs to be "tamed" is writing words that the "tamer" expects me to read.
> the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation
This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past.
But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously.
It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.
It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.
I like how this could be offensive to both Christians (Jesus isn't god) and anti-Christians.
Recently on a call with a junior coworker where they asked me to look at some changes they had made, they were completely unable to answer any questions that I asked on their own. The way the conversation went was: I ask a question, they type my question into a ChatGPT prompt, we read the output together and discuss whether it makes sense.
To be fair, the outputs from ChatGPT tend to be quite good. But it's just shocking how quickly people have basically completely handed over control to LLMs.
I'm so tired of AI Slopped architecture documents, code, messages in slack, emails etc. I'm close to flat out rejecting any architecture doc I get that's written by an LLM, because I'm not sure the engineers even understand what they're proposing. The code is often a nightmare under the hood, even if it works. I've got smart coworkers who now just copy paste everything via an LLM giving themselves something approaching a lobotomy in the process.
I may just get out of the tech industry altogether. But I'm also tempted to try my hand at an indie dev project that I have in mind. With AI, it seems like it would be easier than ever to get a new project off the ground. And I don't really mind AI-assisted development personally. It's mainly all the organizational and interpersonal disruption that is giving me a headache at the moment.
So I've disabled that and now I'm explicit if I want to solve a problem because then it means my brain's actually engaged.
It seems to be like a shortcut to early onset dementia because the brain's never being actively involved in problem solving.
I do think that it is very difficult to not be a meat proxy when you utilize an LLM for writing tasks. These tools are computer programs that generate text, so what else would you do with it than have it write for you? This is being a meat proxy.
Trying to avoid being a meat proxy can quickly eat the supposed productivity gains of using an LLM in the first place.
Like say I need to write an article about some subject and it would take me the entire day to complete this task without an LLM. I can get some sort of article out of an LLM by simply asking, I don't need to think about the subject myself at all. The LLM productivity promise is also fulfilled, because I did an entire days work in a minute or so.
Now if I also need to read and understand the work, and be able to defend it or explain it to others as if I produced it myself, then this will take a lot of time. If on top of this I need to edit the text to sound like me rather than an LLM, then I probably still need the whole day for this task and I have lost all the productivity increase that I sought from using the LLM.
It's the thinking that takes time when you write, not typing. But you can't do the thinking and avoid doing it at the same time.
The same idea applies to coding too. Doing code review and requiring the author and reviewer to read and understand the code basically eliminates all the productivity gains that using the LLM was supposed to provide. Throw out the reviewing, reading, and understanding and we can have each developer producing a thousand kloc per day, over 1000x productivity. If we don't throw those out, we are comparatively in the exact same spot as not using LLMs at all.
Why would you think it would?
You have some solid ideas there but they are very poorly organized. I think you would benefit from a class in writing. I had a month-long technical writing workshop back a couple of decades ago that my company sponsored and it helped me tremendously with starting with wall of consciousness, progressing to writing plan, outline and then editing. It had a very positive impact on my career in professional services where clear communication via documents is an essential part of value prop.
I think you need to go double check exactly what I have replied!
Thank you for your advice on writing. I used to do exactly that prior to my cognitive decline.
https://www.promarket.org/2026/05/04/consumers-prefer-ai-mus...
Of course, given that posting one is not mutually exclusive with posting the other, I would still think that posting both is the easiest way to satisfy both people who prefer to read the prompt and those who prefer the read the output.
Sharing information that is already in the corpus is simply not that valuable in a world where everyone has access to their own LLMs.
If I think the task requires a human to think about it. And the person is the human paid to think about it. Whether I get a wall of AI text, prompt, or an entire AI conversation... there is no human insight in it.
If that person took the time to think about the problem, had a chat with the AI, and understood the output, surely they can take the final step and tell me the short result/summary themselves, right?
AI writing is like the voice anonymizer they'd use in TV interviews when they wanted to hide the identity of the person speaking. The output is more adherant to convention but likewise more impersonal and exhausting, and when it's used by too many people it's so indistint that it becomes noise.
It might look good to you in isolation, because you're excited to see that it says what you meant to say without the features you feel self-conscious about, but to others it just reads like yet another sample of the same old AI slop. The message gets entirely lost behind that.
If you must use AI in this way, I'd tell it to take a _much_ lighter touch. It cleans things up without washing away the personality of your writing. ChatGPT example:
> adjust the following for spelling and grammar, making MINIMAL alterations to the original wording and content. do NOT rewrite, just clean up what is already there: [post]
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a8382b9-3620-83eb-b17e-4397aee5ad...
Thank you :)
There’s also a difference between “please edit my writing” and “please generate a blog post from these bullet points.”
The LLM response has none of that character, it doesn't give me that little sliver of insight into the writer. It strips the idea from the author, making it generic and anonymous. The only thing I can gleam from text edited with an LLM like this (besides the literal meaning of the text), is that the author didn't care enough to express themselves.
Sure, it's more polished, but doing the writing manually is half the point. You have an abstract idea, you refine into something that can be communicated, and in doing so, explore that idea and improve your understanding of it. I've re-written this paragraph a dozen times trying to do exactly that.
...This part immediately made me link it to the hipster stereotype:
"oh, it's sooooo much better on vinyl because you can hear the cracks & pops"
Neither pieces in the chat log work for me: The prompt was a wall of ramblespeak. The output was a presentation that should've been an email.
Even the attempt of using Claude to be a fancy formatter failed when you look closely at the language employed in the final prompt. It's trying to convey the same ideas with better foratting, but still softens up the derision the author clearly has here. Which is the interesting part in my eyes.
There was no ill intent. The content itself described the reason for the process. Even simple comments I write here end up with multiple edits over the hour-long edit window.
If you read my entire comment history you will find I rarely make more than a single observation per comment. Anything more complex becomes too difficult to read and revise.
Cognitive impairment is extremely difficult to understand until you have experienced it. I am particularly lucid this afternoon. That doesn't mean the difficulty is not real.
Meanwhile, the LLM-generated essay is hard to read because it's essentially the high-school essay that's padding its paper to meet a minimum page count. I'm surprised that you find it easier to read than most human text, because I've invariably found that my first reaction to LLM-generated text is "where's the point?"--everything is just buried in so much fluff.
So yeah, I find the prompt much better than the LLM output.
The practice of writing can serve the purpose of conveying an idea or information to the readers, but it can also be an invaluable tool for the writer to process, digest, and internalize a message.
The act of wordsmithing, and shaping the idea from its raw rambling form into a coherent narrative, is intellectual metabolism.
A good writer will both distill the ideas, present them in such a way that will be pleasurable to their readers, and also bring the reader along the way so they can learn as well, and feel like an active participant.
The LLM tend to produce prose that defeats the purpose for the writer, takes the joy out for the reader, and ultimately does nothing for anyone but take up space.
It's not more words that make good stories, and it's not more code that makes good programs. It's what use is this to anyone, and only humans understand what other humans want and only humans can care.
Seems like people in this thread agree that it's better to express oneself in a less skilled fashion but actually write something that represents your idea, than to present some polished turd and pass it off as your own writing.
Same as a birthday card on some stock paper written in crayon will always be more valuable than a store bought card with generic sentiment.
And then fed it your input.
And the output was a very easily readable, enjoyable plain-ascii-text, with no Ai-ick, except for an em-dash or two.
Tried pasting it here, but that removed paragraph formatting
> Iff you dismiss AI writings just because it sounds like it’s written by aI you will end up missing out on some truly valuable content.
Yes that might be the case. But with Ai now being in so heavy use, there is so much content generated that most of us dont have time to just read output of someone elses basic prompts, if we can't determine how much original thought went into it.
So, with your Ai generated post, I don't know how much of was is actually based on your thoughts/opinons, and how much of it is just a conglomerate wordsallad from a consensus machine based on random internet thoughts/opinions. Thus I ignore a majority of everything that looks Ai, just to protect my cognitive circuits.
Unfortunatly this means that I sometimes even miss out on genuine human content that is just close enough to Ai-style to trigger my "Ai filter" . I've even dismissed content narated by voice actors, such as Benjamin Pemberton, just because his style is so close to Ai voice (although his style obviously predates the Ai voice style)
And it seems this is such a common occurence that, some videos now put a "Human narator, not Ai" text on screen at the begining of the videos.
I wish we werent here, but here we are.
I don't use one because my aim is to intentionally produce the obviously LLM-sounding output as I find it easier to read.
Do you read over what the AI spits out? Do you read over what you write?
It takes time to do either, and both are the things that I think are actually useful.
I could not finish the output made by Claude. I tried, but having to translate back from "mouthy words" to "plain English" is tiresome.
I am not trying to say that I don't like well written words, a good book with carefully chosen words is a good way to spend an afternoon. But for LLMs, it feels very forced and not natural because it doesn't insert those words where it would make sense for a good author.
So the polite version I use now is: "Hey, thanks for the <doc/code>, just to get a bit more context, what was the original problem you were trying to solve?".
That gets them to distill their own problem a bit further.
A lot of people replying seem to be misunderstanding, though. The only point of human-to-human communication is to transmit thoughts from one brain to another. If you simply send me stuff from AI then I don't need you. I want to hear your thoughts. If you don't have any, then I don't need or want to hear from you. Your thoughts are entirely contained within your prompts. Just send me those.
Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?