It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

https://blog.pabloecortez.com/its-insulting-to-read-your-ai-generated-blog-post/

by speckx • 9 months ago

1300 540 9 months ago

blog.pabloecortez.com

noir_lord5• 9 months ago

I just hit the back button as soon as my "this feels like AI" sense tingles.

Now you could argue but you don't know it was AI it could just be really mediocre writing - it could indeed but I hit the back button there as well so it's a wash either way.

rco87862• 9 months ago

There's definitely an uncanny valley with a lot of AI. But also, it's entirely likely that lots of what we're reading is AI generated and we can't tell at all. This post could easily be AI (it's not, but it could be)

Waterluvian2• 9 months ago

Ah the portcullis to the philosophical topic of, “if you couldn’t tell, does that demonstrate that authenticity doesn’t matter?”

embedding-shape• 9 months ago

I do the same almost, but use "this isn't interesting/fun to read" and don't really care if it was written by AI or not, if it's interesting/fun it's interesting/fun, and if it isn't, it isn't. Many times it's obvious it's AI, but sometimes as you said it could just be bad, and in the end it doesn't really matter, I don't want to continue reading it regardless.

shadowgovt• 9 months ago

I do the same, but for blog posts complaining about AI.

At this point, I don't know there's much more to be said on the topic. Lines of contention are drawn, and all that's left is to see what people decide to do.

4fterd4rk• 9 months ago

It's insulting but I also find it extremely concerning that my younger colleagues can't seem to tell the difference. An article will very clearly be AI slop and I'll express frustration, only to discover that they have no idea what I"m talking about.

Insanity• 9 months ago

Or worse - they can tell the difference but don’t think it matters.

rco87862• 9 months ago

I see a lot of that also.

jermaustin1• 9 months ago

For me it is everyone that has lost the ability to respond to a work email without first having it rewritten by some LLM somewhere. Or my sister who will have ChatGPT give a response to a text message if she doesn't feel like reading the 4-5 sentences from someone.

I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof soon, and I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done about it.

noir_lord5• 9 months ago

I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof soon

As a diagnosed medical condition I don't know, as people having seemingly shorter and short attention spans we are seeing it already, TikTok and YT shorts and the like don't help, we've weaponised inattention.

larodi2• 9 months ago

ADHD is going to very soon be a major pandemic. Not one we talk about too much, as there are plenty of players ready to feed unlimited supplies of Concerta, Ritalin and Adderal among others.

mrguyorama2• 9 months ago

ADHD is a difference in how the brain functions and is constructed.

It is physiological.

I don't think any evidence exists that you can cause anyone to become neurodivergent except by traumatic brain injury

TikTok does not "make" people ADHD. They might struggle to let themselves be bored and may be addicted to quick fixes of dopamine, but that is not what ADHD is. ADHD is not an addiction to dopamine hits. ADHD is not an inability to be bored.

TikTok for example will not give you the kinds of tics and lack of proprioception that is common in neurodivergent people. Being addicted to Tiktok will never give you that absurd experience where your brain "hitches" while doing a task and you rapidly oscillate between progressing towards one task vs another. Being habituated to check your phone at every down moment does not cause you to be unable to ignore sensory input because your actual sensory processing machinery in your brain is not functioning normally. Getting addicted to tiktok does not give you a child's handwriting despite decades of practice. If you do not already have significant stimming and jitter symptoms, Tiktok will not make you develop them.

You cannot learn to be ADHD.

noir_lord5• 9 months ago

I'd be curious to do a general study to see what percentage of humans can spot AI written content vs human written content on the same subject.

Specifically is there any correlation between people who have always read a lot as I do and people who don't.

My observation (anecdota) is that the people I know who read heavily are much better at and much more against AI slop vs people who don't read at all.

Even when I've played with the current latest LLM's and asked them questions, I simply don't like the way they answer, it feels off somehow.

strix_varius• 9 months ago

I agree, and I'm not sure why it feels off but I have a theory.

AI is good at local coherence, but loses the plot over longer thoughts (paragraphs, pages). I don't think I could identify AI sentences but I'm totally confident I could identify an AI book.

This includes both opening a large text in a way of thinking that isn't reflected several paragraphs later, and also maintaining a repetitive "beat" in the rhythm of writing that is fine locally but becomes obnoxious and repetitive over longer periods. Maybe that's just regression to the mean of "voice?"

mediaman• 9 months ago

I both read a fair amount (and long books, 800-1,000 page classic Russian novels, that kind of thing) and use LLMs.

I quite like using LLMs to learn new things. But I agree: I can't stand reading blog posts written by LLMs. Perhaps it is about expectations. A blog post I am expecting to gain a view into an individual's thinking; for an AI, I am looking into an abyss of whirring matrix-shaped gears.

There's nothing wrong with the abyss of matrices, but if I'm at a party and start talking with someone, and get the whirring sound of gears instead of the expected human banter, I'm a little disturbed. And it feels the same for blog content: these are personal communications; machines have their place and their use, but if I get a machine when I'm expecting something personal, it counters expectations.

ehutch79• 9 months ago

In the US, (internet fact, grain of salt, etc) there is a trend where students, and now adults, are growing increasingly functionally illiterate.

otikik• 9 months ago

This is Rick and Morty S1E4 and we are all becoming Jerry. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Night_Shaym-Aliens!

edoceo• 9 months ago

I do like it for taking the hour long audio/video and creating a summary that, even if poorly written, can indicate to me wether I'd like to listen to the hour of media.

icapybara• 9 months ago

If they can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?

abixb• 9 months ago

I'm sure lots of "readers" of such articles fed it to another AI model to summarize it, thereby completely bypassing the usual human experience of writing and then careful (and critical) reading and parsing of the article text. I weep for the future.

Also, reminds me of this cartoon from March 2023. [0]

[0] https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

trthomps• 9 months ago

I'm curious if the people who are using AI to summarize articles are the same people who would have actually read more than the headline to begin with. It feels to me like the sort of person who would have read the article and applied critical thinking to it is not going to use an AI summary to bypass that since they won't be satisfied with it.

array_key_first2• 9 months ago

Are people doing this or is this just what, like, Apple or someone is telling us people are doing?

Because I've never seen anyone actually use a summarizing AI willingly. And especially not for blogs and other discretionary activities.

That's like getting the remote from the hit blockbuster "Click" starring Adam Sandler (2006) and then using it to skip sex. Just doesn't make any sense.

alxmdev• 9 months ago

Many of those who can't be bothered to write what they publish probably can't be bothered to read it themselves, either. Not by humans and certainly not for humans.

AlienRobot• 9 months ago

Now that I think about it, it's rather ironic that's a quote because you didn't write it.

bryanlarsen• 9 months ago

Because the author has something to say and needs help saying it?

pre-AI scientists would publish papers and then journalists would write summaries which were usually misleading and often wrong.

An AI operating on its own would likely be no better than the journalist, but an AI supervised by the original scientist quite likely might do a better job.

kirurik2• 9 months ago

I agree, I think there is such a thing as AI overuse, but I would rather someone uses AI to form their points more succinctly than for them to write something that I can't understand.

thw_9a83c3• 9 months ago

If they can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?

Isn't that the same with AI-generated source code? If lazy programmers didn't bother writing it, why should I bother reading it? I'll ask the AI to understand it and to make the necessary changes. Now, let's repeat this process over and over. I wonder what would be the state of such code over time. We are clearly walking this path.

conception• 9 months ago

Why would source code be considered the same as a blog post?

Ekaros• 9 months ago

Why would I bother to run it? Why wouldn't I just have AI to read it and then provide output on my input?

CuriouslyC6• 9 months ago

Tired meme. If you can't be bothered to think up an original idea, why bother to post?

YurgenJurgensen6• 9 months ago

2+2 doesn’t suddenly become 5 just because you’re bored of 4.

dist-epoch• 9 months ago

They used to say judge the message, not the messenger.

But you are saying that is wrong, you should judge the messenger, not the message.

elif• 9 months ago

I feel like this has to be AI generated satire as art

thire• 9 months ago

Yes, I was almost hoping for a "this was AI-generated" disclaimer at the end!

xena• 9 months ago

People at work have fed me obviously AI generated documentation and blogposts. I've gotten to the point where I can make fairly accurate guesses as to which model generated it. I've started to just reject them because the alternative is getting told to rewrite them to "not look AI".

the_af6• 9 months ago

What amazes me is that some people think I want to read AI slop in their blog that I could have generated by asking ChatGPT directly.

Anyone can access ChatGPT, why do we need an intermediary?

Someone a while back shared, here on HN, almost an entire blog generated by (barely touched up) AI text. It even had Claude-isms like "excellent question!", em-dashes, the works. Why would anyone want to read that?

dewey4• 9 months ago

There's blogs that are not meant to be read, but are just content marketing to be found by search engines.

CuriouslyC6• 9 months ago

In that case, I'd say maybe you didn't have the wisdom to ask the question in the first place? And maybe you wouldn't know the follow up questions to ask after that? And if the person who produced it took a few minutes to fact check, that has value as well.

the_af6• 9 months ago

It's seldom the case that AI slop requires widsom to ask, or is fact-checked in any depth other than cursory. Cursory checking of AI-slop has effectively zero value.

Or do you remember when Facebook groups or image communities were flooded with funny/meme AI-generated images, "The Godfather, only with Star Wars", etc? Thank you, but I can generate those zero-effort memes myself, I also have access to GenAI.

We truly don't need intermediaries.

latexr15• 9 months ago

This assumes the person using LLMs to put out a blog post gives a single shit about their readers, pride, or “being human”. They don’t. They care about the view so you load the ad which makes them a fraction of a cent, or the share so they get popular so they can eventually extract money or reputation from it.

I agree with you that AI slop blog posts are a bad thing, but there are about zero people who use LLMs to spit out blog posts which will change their mind after reading your arguments. You’re not speaking their language, they don’t care about anything you do. They are selfish. The point is themselves, not the reader.

Everyone wants to help each other.

No, they very much do not. There are a lot of scammers and shitty entitled people out there, and LLMs make it easier than ever to become one of them or increase the reach of those who already are.

JohnFen7• 9 months ago

They are selfish. The point is themselves, not the reader.

True!

But when I encounter a web site/article/video that has obviously been touched by genAI, I add that source to a blacklist and will never see anything from it again. If more people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to decline.

latexr15• 9 months ago

I add that source to a blacklist

Please do tell more. Do you make it like a rule in your adblocker or something else?

If more people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to decline.

I’m not convinced. The effort on their part is so low that even the lost audience (which will be far from everyone) is still probably worth it.

babblingfish• 9 months ago

If someone puts an LLM generated post on their personal blog, then their goal isn't to improve their writing or learn on a new topic. Rather, they're hoping to "build a following" because some conman on twitter told them it was easy. What's especially hilarious is how difficult it is to make money with a blog. There's little incentive to chase monetization in this medium, and yet people do it anyways.

YurgenJurgensen6• 9 months ago

Don’t most ad platforms and search engines track bounce rate? If too many users see that generic opening paragraph, bullet list and scattering of emoji, and immediately hit back or close, they lose revenue.

latexr15• 9 months ago

Assuming most people can detect LLM writing quickly. I don’t think that’s true. In this very submission we see people referencing cases where colleagues couldn’t detect something is written by LLM even after reading everything.

dewey4• 9 months ago

No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations

I think that's the best use case and it's not AI related as spell-checkers and translation integrations exist forever, now they are just better.

Especially for non-native speakers that work in a globalized market. Why wouldn't they use the tool in their toolbox?

j4yav3• 9 months ago

Because it doesn’t just fix your grammar, it makes you sound suspiciously like spam.

cubefox2• 9 months ago

Yeah. It's "pick your poison". If your English sounds broken, people will think poorly of your text. And if it sounds like LLM speak, they won't like it either. Not much you can do. (In a limited time frame.)

dewey4• 9 months ago

It's a tool and it depends on how you use it. If you tell it to fix your grammar with minimal intervention to the actual structure it will do just that.

portaouflop2• 9 months ago

I disagree. You can use it to point out grammar mistakes and then fix them yourself without changing the meaning or tone of the subject.

whatsakandr• 9 months ago

I have a prompt to make it not rewrite, but just point out "hey you could rephrase this better." I still keep my tone, but the clanker can identify thoughts that are incomplete. Stuff that spell chekcer's can't do.

orbital-decay2• 9 months ago

No? If you ask it to proofread your stuff, any competent model just fixes your grammar without adding anything on its own. At least that's my experience. Simply don't ask for anything that involves major rewrites, and of course verify the result.

thw_9a83c3• 9 months ago

Because it doesn’t just fix your grammar, it makes you sound suspiciously like spam.

This ship sailed a long time ago. We have been exposed to AI-generated text content for a very long time without even realizing it. If you read a little more specialized web news, assume that at least 60% of the content is AI-translated from the original language. Not to mention, it could have been AI-generated in the source language as well. If you read the web in several languages, this becomes shockingly obvious.

ianbicking• 9 months ago

It does however work just fine if you ask it for grammar help or whatever, then apply those edits. And for pretty much the rest of the content too: if you have the AI generate feedback, ideas, edits, etc., and then apply them yourself to the text, the result avoids these pitfalls and the author is doing the work that the reader expects and deserves.

boscillator• 9 months ago

Yah, it is very strange to equivocate using AI as a spell checker and a whole AI written article. Being charitable, they meant asking the AI re-write your whole post, rather than just using it to suggest comma placement, but as written the article seems to suggest a blog post with grammar errors is more Human™ than one without.

mjr00• 9 months ago

Especially for non-native speakers that work in a globalized market. Why wouldn't they use the tool in their toolbox?

My wife is ESL. She's asked me to review documents such as her resume, emails, etc. It's immediately obvious to me that it's been run through ChatGPT, and I'm sure it's immediately obvious to whomever she's sending the email. While it's a great tool to suggest alternatives and fix grammar mistakes that Word etc don't catch, using it wholesale to generate text is so obvious, you may as well write "yo unc gimme a job rn fr no cap" and your odds of impressing a recruiter would be about the same. (the latter might actually be better since it helps you stand out.)

Humans are really good at pattern matching, even unconsciously. When ChatGPT first came out people here were freaking out about how human it sounded. Yet by now most people have a strong intuition for what sounds ChatGPT-generated, and if you paste a GPT-generated comment here you'll (rightfully) get downvoted and flagged to oblivion.

So why wouldn't you use it? Because it masks the authenticity in your writing, at a time when authenticity is at a premium.

dewey4• 9 months ago

Having a tool at your disposal doesn't mean you don't have to learn how to use it. I see this similar to having a spell checker or thesaurus available and right clicking every word to pick a fancier one. It will also make you sound inauthentic and fake.

These type of complains about LLMs feel like the same ones people probably said about using a typewriter for writing a letter vs. a handwritten one saying it loses intimacy and personality.

demetris• 9 months ago

Thanks for no cap! I looked it up and learned something new today. :-D

DonHopkins• 9 months ago

lexical bingo machine

I would have written "lexical fruit machine", for its left to right sequential ejaculation of tokens, and its amusingly antiquated homophobic criminological implication.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fruit_machine

VladVladikoff• 9 months ago

Recently I had to give one of my vendors a dressing down about LLM use in emails. He was sending me these ridiculous emails where the LLM was going off the rails suggesting all sorts of features etc that were exploding the scope of the project. I told him he needs to just send the bullet notes next time instead of pasting those into ChatGPT and pasting the output into an email.

larodi2• 9 months ago

I was shouting to my friend and partner the other day, that he is absolutely to ever stop sending me LLM-generated mails, even if the best he can come with is full of punctuation and grammar errors.

jihadjihad• 9 months ago

It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji...

You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

latexr15• 9 months ago

You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

I don’t think they are (telling you that). The person who sends you an AI slop PR would be just as happy (probably even happier) if you turned off your brain and just merged it without any critical thinking.

nbardy• 9 months ago

You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And

gdulli• 9 months ago

You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And

Waiting for the rest of the comment to load in order to figure out if it's sincere or parody.

footy• 9 months ago

did AI write this comment?

rkozik1989• 9 months ago

So how do you catch the errors that AI made in the pull request? Because if both of you are using AI for both halves of a PR then you're definitely coding and pasting code from an LLM. Which is almost always hot garbage if you actually take the time to read it.

i80and• 9 months ago

Please be doing a bit

skrebbel• 9 months ago

Hahahahah well done :dart-emoji:

dyauspitr• 9 months ago

Satire? Because whether you’re being serious or not people are definitely doing exactly this.

dickersnoodle• 9 months ago

One Furby codes and a second one reviews...

latexr15• 9 months ago

This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time?

This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose.

And no, using different models doesn’t fix the issue. That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that somehow the result is smart.

devsda• 9 months ago

I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review.

I first read that as "coworkers (who are) fully AI generated" and I didn't bat an eye.

All the AI hype has made me immune to AI related surprises. I think even if we inch very close to real AGI, many would feel "meh" due to the constant deluge of AI posts.

metalliqaz• 9 months ago

When I picture a team using their AI to both write and review PRs, I think of the "obama medal award" meme

KalMann• 9 months ago

If An AI can do a review then why would you put it up for others to review? Just use the AI to do the review yourself before creating a PR.

athrowaway3z3• 9 months ago

If your team is stuck at this stage, you need to wake up and re-evaluate.

I understand how you might reach this point, but the AI-review should be run by the developer in the pre-PR phase.

jacquesm5• 9 months ago

And

Do you review your comments too with AI?

matheusmoreira• 9 months ago

AIs generating code which will then be reviewed by AIs. Résumés generated by AIs being evaluated by AI recruiters. This timeline is turning into such a hilarious clown world. The future is bleak.

babypuncher• 9 months ago

"Let the AI check its own homework, what could go wrong?"

photonthug2• 9 months ago

fully AI generated and fully AI review

This reminds me of an awesome bit by Žižek where he describes an ultra-modern approach to dating. She brings the vibrator, he brings the synthetic sleeve, and after all the buzzing begins and the simulacra are getting on well, the humans sigh in relief. Now that this is out of the way they can just have a tea and a chat.

It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish

r0me1• 9 months ago

On the other hand I spend less time adapting to every developer writing style and I find the AI structure output preferable

sesm• 9 months ago

To be fair, the same problem existed before AI tools, with people spitting out a ton of changes without explaining what problem are they trying to solve and what's the idea behind the solution. AI tools just made it worse.

zdragnar• 9 months ago

AI tools just made it worse.

That's why it isn't necessary to add the "to be fair" comment i see crop up every time someone complains about the low quality of AI.

Dealing with low effort people is bad enough without encouraging more people to be the same. We don't need tools to make life worse.

kcatskcolbdi• 9 months ago

This comment seems to not appreciate how changing the scope of impact is itself a gigantic problem (and the one that needs to be immediately solved for).

It's as if someone created a device that made cancer airborne and contagious and you come in to say "to be fair, cancer existed before this device, the device just made it way worse". Yes? And? Do you have a solution to solving the cancer? Then pointing it out really isn't doing anything. Focus on getting people to stop using the contagious aerosol first.

o11c• 9 months ago

There is one way in which AI has made it easier: instead of maintainers trying to figure out how to talk someone into being a productive contributor, now "just reach for the banhammer" is a reasonable response.

sumeno• 9 months ago

If my neighbors let their dog poop in my yard and leave it I have a problem.

If a company builds an industrial poop delivery system that lets anyone with dog poop deliver it directly into my yard with the push of a button I have a much different and much bigger problem

mikepurvis2• 9 months ago

I would never put up a copilot PR for colleague review without fully reviewing it myself first. But once that’s done, why not?

irl_zebra• 9 months ago

I don't think this is what they were saying.

goostavos• 9 months ago

It destroys the value of code review and wastes the reviewers time.

Code review is one of the places where experience is transferred. It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments and have them met with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it."

If all you do is 'review' the output of your prompting before cutting a CR, I'd prefer you just send the prompt.

mmcromp• 9 months ago

You're not "reviewing" ai's slop code. If you're using it for generation, use it as a starting point and fix it up to the proper code quality

lawlessone• 9 months ago

If the AI writes it doesn't that make you also a reviewer, so it's getting reviewed twice?

godelski5• 9 months ago

  > But once that’s done, why not?

Do you have the same understanding of the code?

Be honest here. I don't think you do. Just like none of us have the same understanding of the code somebody else wrote. It's just a fact that you understand the code you wrote better than code you didn't.

I'm not saying you don't understand the code, that's different. But there's a deeper understanding to code you wrote, right? You might write something one way because you had an idea to try something in the future based on an idea to had while finding some bug. Or you might write it some way because some obscure part of the codebase. Or maybe because you have intuition about the customer.

But when AI writes the code, who has responsibility over it? Where can I go to ask why some choice was made? That's important context I need to write code with you as a team. That's important context a (good) engineering manager needs to ensure you're on the right direction. If you respond "well that's what the AI did" then how that any different from the intern saying "that's how I did it at the last place." It's a non-answer, and infuriating. You could also try to bullshit an answer, guessing why the AI did that (helpful since you promoted it), but you're still guessing and now being disingenuous. It's a bit more helpful, but still not very helpful. It's incredibly rude to your coworkers to just bullshit. Personally I'd rather someone say "I don't know" and truthfully I respect them more for that. (I actually really do respect people that can admit they don't know something. Especially in our field where egos are quite high. It's can be a mark of trust that's *very* valuable)

Sure, the AI can read the whole codebase, but you have hundreds or thousands of hours in that codebase. Don't sell yourself short.

Honestly I don't mind the AI acting as a reviewer to be a check before you submit a PR, but it just doesn't have the context to write good code. AI tries to write code like a junior, fixing the obvious problem that's right in front of you. But it doesn't fix the subtle problems that come with foresight. No, I want you to stumble through that code because while you write code you're also debugging and designing. Your brain works in parallel, right? I bet it does even if you don't know it. I want you stumbling through because that struggling is helping you learn more about the code and the context that isn't explicitly written. I want you to develop ideas and gain insights.

But AI writing code? That's like measuring how good a developer is by the number of lines of code they write. I'll take quality over quantity any day of the week. Quality makes the business run better and waste fewer dollars debugging the spaghetti and duct tape called "tech debt".

Aeolun2• 9 months ago

I mean, if I could accept it myself? Maybe not. But I have no choice but to go through the gatekeeper.

reg_dunlop• 9 months ago

Now an AI-generated PR summary I fully support. That's a use of the tool I find to be very helpful. Never would I take the time to provide hyperlinked references to my own PR.

danudey4• 9 months ago

I don't need an AI generated PR summary because the AI is unlikely to understand why the changes are being made, and specifically why you took the approach(es) that you did.

I can see the code, I know what changed. Give me the logic behind this change. Tell me what issues you ran into during the implementation and how you solved them. Tell me what other approaches you considered and ruled out.

Just saying "This change un-links frobulation from reticulating splines by doing the following" isn't useful. It's like adding code comments that tell you what the next line does; if I want to know that I'll just read the next line.

WorldMaker• 9 months ago

But that's not what a PR summary is best used for. I don't need links to exact files, the Diff/Files tab is a click away and it usually has a nice search feature. The Commits tab is a little bit less helpful, but also already exists. I don't need an AI telling me stuff already at my fingertips.

A good PR summary should be the why of the PR. Not redundantly repeat what changed, give me description of why it changed, what alternatives were tested, what you think the struggles were, what you think the consequences may be, what you expect the next steps to be, etc.

I've never seen an AI generated summary that comes close to answering any of those questions. An AI generated summary is a bit like that junior developer that adds plenty of comments but all the comments are:

    // add x and y
    var result = x + y;

Yes, I can see it adds x and y, that's already said by the code itself, why are we adding x and y? What's the "result" used for?

I'm going to read the code anyway to review a PR, a summary of what the code already says it does is redundant information to me.

ab_io• 9 months ago

100%. My team started using graphite.dev, which provides AI generated PR descriptions that are so bloated with useless content that I've learned to just ignore them. The issue is they are doing a kind of reverse inference from the code changes to a human-readable description, which doesn't actually capture the intent behind the changes.

collingreen2• 9 months ago

I tell my team that the diff already perfectly describes what changed. The commits and PR are to convey WHY and in what context and what we learned (or should look out for). Putting the "what" in the thing meant for the "why" is using the tools incorrectly.

xarope2• 9 months ago

you mean we will get even more of these sort of useless comments?

  // loop over list and act on items
  for each _, item := range items {
    item.act()
  }

0x6c6f6c• 9 months ago

I absolutely have used AI to scaffold reproduction scenarios, but I'm still validating everything is actually reproducing the bug I ran into before submitting.

It's 90% AI, but that 90% was almost entirely boilerplate and would have taken me a good chunk of time to do for little gain other than the fact I did it.

shortrounddev2• 9 months ago

Whenever a PM at work "writes" me a 4 paragraph ticket with AI, I make AI read it for me

derwiki• 9 months ago

I think it’s especially low effort when you can point it at example commit messages you’ve written without emojis and emdashes to “learn” your writing style

lm28469• 9 months ago

The best part is that they write the PR summaries in bullet points and then feed them to an LLM to dilute the content over 10x the length of text... waste of time and compute power that generates literally nothing of value

danudey4• 9 months ago

I would love to know how much time and computing power is spent by people who write bullet points and have ChatGPT expand them out to full paragraphs only for every recipient to use ChatGPT to summarize them back down to bullet points.

ManuelKiessling3• 9 months ago

Why have the LLMs „learned“ to write PRs (and other stuff) this way? This style was definitely not mainstream on Github (or Reddit) pre-LLMs, was it?

It’s strange how AI style is so easy to spot. If LLMs just follow the style that they encountered most frequently during training, wouldn’t that mean that their style would be especially hard to spot?

oceanplexian2• 9 months ago

LLMs write things in a certain style because that's how the base models are fine tuned before being given to the public.

It's not because they can't write PRs indistinguishable from humans, or can't write code without Emojis. It's because they don't want to freak out the general public so they have essentially poisoned the models to stave off regulation a little bit longer.

WesolyKubeczek3• 9 months ago

You may thank millenial hipsters who used think emojis are cute and proliferation of little javascript libraries authored by them on your friendly neighborhood githubs.

Later the cutest of the emojis paved their way into templates used by bots and tools, and it exploded like colorful vomit confetti all over the internets.

When I see this emojiful text, my first association is not with an LLM, but with a lumberjack-bearded hipster wearing thick-framed fake glasses and tight garish clothes, rolling on a segway or an equivalent machine while sipping a soy latte.

stephendause• 9 months ago

This is total speculation, but my guess is that human reviewers of AI-written text (whether code or natural language) are more likely to think that the text with emoji check marks, or dart-targets, or whatever, are correct. (My understanding is that many of these models are fine-tuned using humans who manually review their outputs.) In other words, LLMs were inadvertently trained to seem correct, and a little message that says "Boom! Task complete! How else may I help?" subconsciously leads you to think it's correct.

NewsaHackO• 9 months ago

I wonder if it's due to emojis being able to express a large amount of infomation per token. For instance, the bulls-eye emoji is 16 bits. Also, Emoji's don't have the language barrier.

fho• 9 months ago

Don't Github have emoji reactions? I would assume that those tie "PR" and "needs emojis" closely together.

rolisz• 9 months ago

There's some research that shows that LLMs finetuned to write malicious code (with security vulnerabilities) also becomes more malicious (including claiming that Hitler is a role model).

So it's entirely possible that training in one area (eg: Reddit discourse) might influence other areas (such as PRs)

https://arxiv.org/html/2502.17424v1

somethingsome2• 9 months ago

My impression is that this style started with apple products. I remember distinctly opening a terminal and many command lines (mostly Javascript frameworks) applications were showing emoji in the terminal way before LLMs.

But maybe it originated somewhere else.. In Javascript libraries..?

FinnKuhn• 9 months ago

It reminds me of this, but without the logic and structure: https://gitmoji.dev/

bmacho2• 9 months ago

For this "LLM style were already the most popular, that's how LLM works, then how come LLM style is so weird and annoying" I have 2 theories.

First, LLM style did not even exist, it's a match of several different styles, choice of words and phrases.

Second, LLM has turned a slight plurality into a 100% exclusivity.

Say, there are 20 different choices to say the same thing. They are more or less evenly distributed, one of them is a slightly more common. LLM chooses the most common one. This means that

   situation before : 20 options,  5% frequency each
   situation now    :  1 option, 100% frequency

LLM text is both reducing the variety and increases the absolute frequency drastically.

I think these 2 theories explain how can LLM both sound bad, and "be the most common stye, how humans have always talked" (it isn't).

Also, if the second theory is true, that is, LLM style is not very frequent among humans, that means that if you see someone on the internet that talks like an LLM, he probably is one.

analog31• 9 months ago

I wonder if there's an analogy to the style of Nigerian e-mail scams, that always contain spelling errors, and conclude with "God Bless." If the writing looks too literate, people might actually read and critique it.

God Bless.

apwheele• 9 months ago

I do remember 1 example of an emoji in tech docs before all of this -- learning github actions (which based on my blog happened in 2021 for me, before ChatGPT release), at one point they had an apple emoji at the final stage saying "done". (I am sure there are others, I just do not remember them.)

But agree excessive emoji's, tables of things, and just being overly verbose are tells for me anymore.

troupo• 9 months ago

Why have the LLMs „learned“ to write PRs (and other stuff) this way?

They didn't learn how to write PRs. They "learned" how to write text.

Just like generic images coming out of OpenAI have the same style and yellow tint, so does text. It averages down to a basic tiktok/threads/whatever comment.

Plus whatever bias training sets and methodology introduced

echelon_musk• 9 months ago

I'm glad that AI slop is detectable. So, for now the repulsive emoji crap is a useful heuristic to me that someone is wasting my time. In a few years once it is harder to detect I expect I'm going to have a harder and more frustrating time. For this reason I hope people don't start altering their prompts to make them harder to detect as LLM generated to people with a modicum of intelligence left.

standardly• 9 months ago

RLHF and system prompt, I assume. But isn't being able to identify LLM output a good thing?

wiseowise• 9 months ago

Why do you need to use 100% of your brain on a pull request?

risyachka• 9 months ago

Probably to understand what is going on there in the context of the full system instead of just reading letters and making sure there are no grammar mistakes.

credit_guy• 9 months ago

You can absolutely ask the LLM to write a concise and professional commit message, without emojis. It will conform to the request. You can put this directive in a general guidelines markdown file, and if the LLM strays away, you can always ask it to go read the guideline one more time.

cyrusradfar• 9 months ago

It seems I'm going to be contrarian here because I really prefer AI-supported (obviously reviewed for accuracy) PR comments over what I had seen before where I'd, often, need to reach out to someone to ask follow up questions on requirements, a link to a ticket, or any number of omissions.

I have worked at smaller firms, mostly, early stage (< 50 engineers), and folks are super busy. Having AI support in writing better thoughtful commentary, provide deeper context is a boon.

In the end, I'll have to say "it depends" -- you can't just throw slop at people but there's definitely a middle ground where everyone wins.

schmookeeg• 9 months ago

Imagine hand-crafting a PR and fighting through the AI-generated review comments with no cultural support for pushing back. It's like Brandolini's Law but in github.

nobodywillobsrv2• 9 months ago

How to do simple change on complex projects at the same ROI with LLM?

MisterTea• 9 months ago

"Bruh, you're supposed to use the AI to read and vet the requests so you can spend more time arguing on the internet about the merits of using AI"

ComplexSystems• 9 months ago

You're absolutely right! Here is the correct, minimal reprex to demonstrate the issue:

# Minimal Reprex (Correct)

(unintelligible nonsense here)

And here is the correct, minimal fix, guaranteed to work:

# Correct Fix (Correct)

(same unintelligible nonsense, wrapped in a try/catch block)

Make this change and your code should work perfectly!

coldtea4• 9 months ago

You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code

No, they're expecting you to half-ass it too, and just use AI to review the PR.

shadyKeystrokes• 9 months ago

AI makes it a game-theory-wise bad move to not defect and still work effective. Ask your chat gpt on how to docial hack your superior to create a impression of being successful.

Simulacra• 9 months ago

I've noticed this with a significant number of news articles. Sometimes it will say that it was "enhanced" with AI, but even when it doesn't, I get that distinct robotic feel.

chasing• 9 months ago

My thing is: If you have something to say, just say it! Don't worry that it's not long enough or short enough or doesn't fit into some mold you think it needs to fit into. Just say it. As you write, you'll probably start to see your ideas more clearly and you'll start to edit and add color or clarify.

But just say it! Bypass the middleman who's just going to make it blurrier or more long-winded.

CuriouslyC6• 9 months ago

Sorry, but I 100% guarantee that there are a lot of people that have time for a quick outline of an article, but not a polished article. Your choice then is between a nugget of human wisdom that's been massaged into a presentable format with AI or nothing.

You're never going to get that raw shit you say you want, because it has negative value for creator's brands, it looks way lazier than spot checked AI output, and people see the lack of baseline polish and nope out right away unless it's a creator they're already sold on (then you can pump out literal garbage, as long as you keep it a low % of your total content you can get away with shit new creators only dream of).

__alexander• 9 months ago

I feel the same way about AI generated README.md on Github.

doug_durham• 9 months ago

I don't like reading content that has not been generated with care. The use of LLMs is largely orthogonal to that. If a non-native English speaker uses an LLM to craft a response so I can consume it, that's great. As long as there is care, I don't mind the source.

olooney3• 9 months ago

I don't see the objection to using LLMs to check for grammatical mistakes and spelling errors. That strikes me as a reactionary and dogmatic position, not a rational one.

Anyone who has done any serious writing knows that a good editor will always find a dozen or more errors in any essay of reasonable length, and very few people are willing to pay for professional proofreading services on blog posts. On the other side of the coin, readers will wince and stumble over such errors; they will not wonder at the artisanal authenticity of your post, but merely be annoyed. Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic best reserved for decor, not prose.

keiferski• 9 months ago

Yes, I agree. There's nothing wrong with using an LLM or a spell-checker to improve your writing. But I do think it's important to have the LLM point out the errors, not rewrite the text directly. This lets you discover errors but avoid the AI-speak.

ryanmcbride2• 9 months ago

You thought we wouldn't notice that you used AI on this comment but you were wrong.

olooney3• 9 months ago

Here is a piece I wrote recently on that very subject. Why don't you read that to see if I'm a human writer?

https://www.oranlooney.com/post/em-dash/

CuriouslyC6• 9 months ago

The fact that you were downvoted into dark grey for this post on this forum makes me very sad. I hope it's just that this article is attracting a certain kind of segment of the community.

olooney3• 9 months ago

I'm pretty sure my mistake was assuming people had read the article and knew the author veered wildly halfway through towards also advocating against using LLMs for proofreading and that you should "just let your mistakes stand." Obviously no one reads the article, just the headline, so they assumed I was disagreeing with that (which I was not.) Other comments that expressed the same sentiment as mine but also quoted that part did manage to get upvoted.

This is an emotionally charged subject for many, so they're operating in Hurrah/Boo mode[1]. After all, how can we defend the value of careful human thought if we don't rush blindly to the defense of every low-effort blog post with a headline that signals agreement with our side?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism

philipwhiuk8• 9 months ago

No it's because he introduced an obscure term that came out of nowhere which is both a poor communication style and indicative of AI.

aeve890• 9 months ago

No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

Fellas, is it antihuman to use tools to perfect your work?

I can't draw a perfect circle by hand, that's why I use a compass. Do I need to make it bad on purpose and feel embarrassed by the 1000th time just to feel more human? Do I want to make mistakes by doing mental calculations instead of using a calculator, like a normal person? Of course not.

Where this "I'm proud of my sloppy shit, this is what's make me human" thing comes from?

We rised above other species because we learnt to use tools, and now we define to be "human"... by not using tools? The fuck?

Also, ironically, this entire post smells like AI slop.

dev_l1x_be• 9 months ago

Is this the case when I put in the effort, spent several hours on tuning the LLM to help me the best possible way and I just use it answer the question "what is the best way to phrase this in American English?"?

I think low effort LLM use is hilariously bad. The content it produces too. Tuning it, giving is style, safeguards, limits, direction, examples, etc. can improve it significantly.

charlieyu1• 9 months ago

I don’t know. As a neurodivergent person I have been insulted for my entire life for lacking “communication skills” so I’m glad there is something for levelling the playing field.

rcarmo2• 9 months ago

Hear hear. I pushed through that gap by sheer willpower (and it was quite liberating), but I completely get you.

YurgenJurgensen6• 9 months ago

It only levels the field between you and a million spambots, which arguably makes you look even worse than before.

siva7• 9 months ago

ouch... but it's true.

GuinansEyebrows3• 9 months ago

I’d rather be insulted for something I am and can at least try to improve, than praised for something I’m not or can’t do, despite my physiological shortcomings.

tpmoney2• 9 months ago

On the other hand, your perspective is shaped by not being dismissed by the vast majority of the people you encounter for that shortcoming. I would imagine you might feel very differently if every person you met treated you as an imbecile because you were't articulate enough, especially if your best efforts at improving don't move the needle much.

I can't speak for the OP's experiences, but my early schooling years were marked by receiving a number of marked down or failing grades because my handwriting was awful, it still is, but at the time no matter what I did, I couldn't get my handwriting to stay neat. Writing neatly was too slow for my thoughts, and I'd get lost or go off topic. But writing at a pace to keep up with my thoughts turned my writing into barely understandable runes at best, and incomprehensible scribbles at worst. Even where handwriting wasn't supposed to count, I lost credit because of how bad it was.

At a certain point I was given permission to type all of my work. Even for tested material I was given proctored access to a type writer (and later computer). And my grades improved noticeably. My subjective experiences and enjoyment of my written school work also improved noticeably. Maybe I could have spend more years working on improving my handwriting and getting it to a place where I was just barely adequate enough to stop losing credit for it. Maybe I have lost something "essential" about being human because my handwriting is still so bad I often can't read my own scribblings. But I am infinitely grateful to have lived in a time and place where personal access to typing systems allowed me to be more fairly evaluated on what I had to say, rather than how I could physically write it.

arresin4• 9 months ago

Your bad, human, prose is a hundred times better than any chatgpt slop. Mistakes and all (also grammar and spelling was already largely a solved problem).

retrocog• 9 months ago

The tool is only as good as the user

alyxya5• 9 months ago

I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me.

No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable.

furyofantares2• 9 months ago

People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they don't.

All I care about is content, too, but people using LLMs to blog and make readmes is routinely getting garbage content past the filters and into my eyeballs. It's especially egregious when the author put good content into the LLM and pasted the garage output at us.

Are there people out there using an LLM as a starting point but taking ownership of the words they post, taking care that what they're posting still says what they're trying to say, etc? Maybe? But we're increasingly drowning in slop.

kirurik2• 9 months ago

To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. Maybe you only notice it because it is obvious. Just like someone would only notice machine translation if it is obvious.

paulpauper3• 9 months ago

Quality , human-made content is seldom rewarded anymore. Difficulty has gone up. The bar for quality is too high, so an alternative strategy is to use LLMs for a more lottery approach to content: produce as much LLM-assisted content as possible in the hope something goes viral. Given that it's effectivity free to produce LLM writing, eventually something will work if enough content is produced.

I cannot blame people for using software as a crutch when human-based writing has become too hard and seldom rewarded anymore unless you are super-talented, which statistically the vast majority of people are not.

alyxya5• 9 months ago

That’s true, I just wanted to offer a counter perspective to the anti-AI sentiment in the blog post. I agree that the slop issue is probably more common and egregious, but it’s unhelpful to discount all AI assisted writing because of slop. The only way I see to counteract slop is to care about the reputation of the author.

dcow2• 9 months ago

The problem is the “they’re making it to the top of HN routinely” part.

c4wrd• 9 months ago

I think the author’s point is that by exposing oneself to feedback, you are on the receiving end of the growth in the case of error. If you hand off all of your tasks to ChatGPT to solve, your brain will not grow and you will not learn.

latexr15• 9 months ago

It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.

“Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written.

The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts

If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt.

ChrisMarshallNY• 9 months ago

there was never a period when blogs were hand written.

I’ve seen exactly that. In one case, it was JPEG scans of handwriting, but most of the time, it’s a cursive font (which may obviate “handwritten”).

I can’t remember which famous author it was, that always submitted their manuscripts as cursive writing on yellow legal pads.

Must have been thrilling to edit.

Aeolun2• 9 months ago

Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read?

Like, I’m totally on board with rejecting slop, but not all content that AI was involved in is slop, and it’s kind of frustrating so many people see things so black and white.

jancsika• 9 months ago

If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt.

It's like listening to Bach's Prelude in C from WTCI where he just came up with a humdrum chord progression and uses the exact same melodic pattern for each chord, for the entire piece. Thanks, but I can write a trivial for loop in C if I ever want that. What a loser!

Edit: Lest HN thinks I'm cherry picking-- look at how many times Bach repeats the exact same harmony/melody, just shifting up or down by a step. A significant chunk of his output is copypasta. So if you like burritos filled with lettuce and LLM-generated blogs, by all means downvote me to oblivion while you jam out to "Robo-Bach"

cerved• 9 months ago

If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written.

This is just pedantic nonsense

athrowaway3z3• 9 months ago

If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts

The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the sentences or _language_ they're written in. Not completely independent, but to claim thoughts are completely dependent on text (thus also the language) is nonsense.

Might as well just give people your prompt.

What would be the value of seeing a dozen diffs? By the same logic, should we also include every draft?

dingocat• 9 months ago

“Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written.

Did you use AI to write this...? Because it does not follow from the post you're replying to.

k__• 9 months ago

This.

It's about to find the sweet spot.

Vibe coding is crap, but I love the smarter autocomplete I get from AI.

Generating whole blog posts from thin air is crap, but I love smart grammar, spelling, and diction fixes I get from AI.

throw35546• 9 months ago

The best yarn is spun from mouth to ear over an open flame. What is this handwriting?

falcor844• 9 months ago

It's what is used to feed the flames.

MangoToupe3• 9 months ago

I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things

Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.

alyxya5• 9 months ago

I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources, and sometimes I can rely on that source to fact check.

cm20122• 9 months ago

Chatbots are more reliable than 95% of people you can ask, on a wide variety of researched topics.

B56b• 9 months ago

Even if someone COULD write a great post with AI, I think the author is right in assuming that it's less likely than a handwritten one. People seem to use AI to avoid thinking hard about a topic. Otherwise, the actual writing part wouldn't be so difficult.

This is similar to the common objection for AI-coding that the hard part is done before the actual writing. Code generation was never a significant bottleneck in most cases.

signorovitch• 9 months ago

I tend to agree, though not in all cases. If I’m reading because I want to learn something, I don’t care how the material was generated. As long as it’s correct and intuitive, and LLMs have gotten pretty good at that, it’s valuable to me. It’s always fun when a human takes the time to make something educational and creative, or has a pleasant style, or a sense of humor; but I’m not reading the blog post for that.

What does bother me is when clearly AI-generated blog posts (perhaps unintentionally) attempt to mask their artificial nature through superfluous jokes or unnaturally lighthearted tone. It often obscures content and makes the reading experience inefficient, without the grace of a human writer that could make it worth it.

However, if I’m reading a non-technical blog, I am reading because I want something human. I want to enjoy a work a real person sank their time and labor into. The less touched by machines, the better.

It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.

And I would totally ready handwritten blog posts!

paulpauper3• 9 months ago

AI- assisted or generated content tends to have an annoying wordiness or bloat to it, but only astute readers will pick up on it.

But it can make for tiresome reading. Like, a 2000 word post can be compressed to 700 or something had a human editor pruned it.

apsurd• 9 months ago

Human as in unique kind of experiential learning. We are the sum of our mistakes. So offloading your mistakes, becomes less human, less leaning into the human experience.

Maybe humans aren't so unique after all, but that's its own topic.

enraged_camel2• 9 months ago

Content can be useful. The AI tone/prose is almost always annoying. You learn to identify it after a while, especially if you use AI yourself.

thatjoeoverthr3• 9 months ago

Even letting the LLM “clean it up” puts its voice on your text. In general, you don’t want its voice. The associations are LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. It’s the modern equivalent of “talking like a used car salesman”. Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.

ryanmerket• 9 months ago

It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.

tptacek2• 9 months ago

I don't like ChatGPT's voice any more than you do, but it is definitely not HR-voice. LLM writing tends to be in active voice with clear topic sentences, which is already 10x better writing than corporate-speak.

robwwilliams2• 9 months ago

Only if you ask it to or let it lead you. Just say no.

paulpauper3• 9 months ago

I have human-written blog posts, and I can rest assured no one reads those either.

yashasolutions• 9 months ago

Yeah, same here. I’ve got to the stage where what I write is mostly just for myself as a reminder, or to share one-to-one with people I work with. It’s usually easier to put it in a blog post than spend an hour explaining it in a meeting anyway. Given the state of the internet these days, that’s probably all you can really expect from blogging.

jacquesm5• 9 months ago

I have those too and I don't actually care who reads them. When I write it is mostly to organize my thoughts or to vent my frustration about something. Afterwards I feel better ;)

korse• 9 months ago

:Edit, not anymore kek

Somehow this is currently the top comment. Why?

Most non-quantitative content has value due to a foundation of distinct lived experience. Averages of the lived experience of billions just don't hit the same, and are less likely to be meaningful to me (a distinct human). Thus, I want to hear your personal thoughts, sans direct algorithmic intermediary.

medstrom• 9 months ago

HN favors very fresh comments, to give them all some time in the limelight.

AlexandrB• 9 months ago

If you want this, why would you want the LLM output and not just the prompts? The prompts are faster to read and as models evolve you can get "better" blog posts out of them.

It's like being okay with reading the entirety of generated ASM after someone compiles C++.

caconym_3• 9 months ago

It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable.

Whether I hand write a blog post or type it into a computer, I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far more important distinction than whatever differences we might imagine arise from hand writing vs. typing.

your thoughts

No, they aren't! Not if you had AI write the post for you. That's the problem!

zanellato19• 9 months ago

The idea that an AI can keep the authors voice just means it is so unoriginal that it doesn't make a difference.

gr4vityWall3• 9 months ago

I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far, far more important distinction than whatever differences we might imagine

That apparently is not the case for a lot of people.

alyxya5• 9 months ago

I think of technology as offering a sliding scale for how much assistance it can provide. Your words could be literally the keys you press, or you could use some tool that fixes punctuation and spelling, or something that fixes the grammar in your sentence, or rewrites sentences to be more concise and flow more smoothly, etc. If I used AI to rewrite a paragraph to better express my idea, I still consider it fundamentally my thoughts. I agree that it can get to the point where using AI doesn’t constitute my thoughts, but it’s very much a gray area.

aakkaakk2• 9 months ago

As long as you’re not using an autopen, because that is definitely not you!

https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

jibal4• 9 months ago

Trump uses it more than anyone.

rustystump2• 9 months ago

I agree with you to a point. Ai will often suggest edits which destroy the authentic voice of a person. If you as a writer do not see these suggestions for what they are, you will take them and destroy the best part of your work.

I write pretty long blog posts that some enjoy and dump them into various llms for review. I am pretty opinionated on taste so I usually only update grammar but it can be dangerous for some.

To be more concrete, often ai tells me to be more “professional” and less “irreverent” which i think is bullshit. The suggestions it gives are pure slop. But if english isnt first language or you dont have confidence, you may just accept the slop.

k_r_z• 9 months ago

Couldn’t agree more with this. AI is a tool like everything else. I mean if You are not a native it could be handy just to suggest You the polishing the style and all the language quirks to some degree. Why when You use autocorrect You are the boss but when You use AI You turn to half brain with ChatGPT?

strbean3• 9 months ago

I just despise the trend of commenting "I asked ChatGPT about this and this is what it said:".

It's like getting an unsolicited text with a "Let Me Google That For You" link. Yes, we can all ask ChatGPT about the thing. We don't need you to do it for us.

sings• 9 months ago

What is remarkable is the frequency with which I’ve heard so-called subject matter experts do this on podcasts. It seems to me a very effective way to communicate your lack of any such expertise.

beej712• 9 months ago

Do you care if a scifi book was written by an AI or human, out of curiosity?

tpmoney2• 9 months ago

I'm not the OP but I've been thinking about this for a little bit since I read your question. Part of me says no, what could be more Sci-Fi than a complete and comprehensive story written by a computer. Who wouldn't want Data to have been able to and succeeded at writing a story that connects with his human compatriots? On the other hand, I also understand the concern and feeling of "something lost" when I consider a story written by a human vs a machine.

But if I'm truly honest with myself, I think in the long run I wouldn't care. I grew up on Science Fiction, and the stories I've always found most interesting were ones that explored human nature instead of just being techno fetishism. But the reality is I don't feel a human connection to Asimov, or Cherryh, or any of the innumerable short form authors who wrote for the SF&F magazines I devoured every chance I got. I remember the stories, but very rarely the names. So they might as well have been written by an AI since the human was never really part of the equation (for me as a reader).

And even when I do remember the names, maybe the human isn't one I want a lot of "human connection" with anyway. Ender's Game, the short story and later the novel were stories I greatly enjoyed. But I feel like my enjoyment is hampered by knowing that the author of a phenomenal book that has some interesting things to day on the pains caused by de-humanizing the other has themselves become someone who dehumanizes others often. The human connection might be ironic now, but that doesn't make the story better for me. Here too, the story might as well have been written by an AI for all that the current person that the author is represents who they were (either in reality or just in my head) when I read those stories for the first time.

Some authors I have been exposed to later in life, I have had a degree of human connection with. I felt sadness and pain when Steve Miller died and left his spouse and long time writing partner Sharon Lee to carry on the Liaden series. But that connection isn't what drew me to the stories in the first place and that connection is largely the same superficial parasocial one that the easy access into the private lives of famous people gives us. Sure I'm saddened, but honesty requires me to note I'm more sad that it reminds me eventually this decades spanning series will draw to a close, and likely with many loose ends. And so even here, if an AI were capable of producing such a phenomenal series of books, in a twisted way as a reader it would be better because they would never end. The world created by the author would live on forever, just like a "real" world should.

Emotionally I feel like I should care that a book was or wasn't written by an AI. But if I'm truly honest with myself, the author being a human hasn't so far added much to the experience, except in some ways to make it worse, or to cut short something that I wish could have continued forever.

All of that as a longwinded way of answering, "no, I don't think I would care".

bee_rider• 9 months ago

It is sort of fun to bounce little ideas off ChatGPT, but I can’t imagine wanting to read somebody else’s ChatGPT responses.

IMO a lot of the dumb and bad behavior around LLMs could be solved by a “just share the prompts” strategy. If somebody wants to generate an email from bullet points and send it to me: just send the bullet points, and I can pass them into an LLM if I want.

Blog post based on interesting prompts? Share the prompt. It’s just text completion anyway, so if a reader knows more about the topic than the prompt-author, they can even tweak the prompt (throw in some lingo to get the LLM to a better spot in the latent space or whatever).

The only good reason not to do that is to save some energy in generation, but inference is pretty cheap compared to training, right? And the planet is probably doomed anyway at this point so we as well enjoy the ride.

alyxya5• 9 months ago

AI assisted blog posts could have an interleaved mix of AI and human written words where a person could edit the LLM’s output. If the whole blog post were simply a few prompts on ChatGPT with no human directly touching the output, then sure it makes sense to share the prompt.

munificent• 9 months ago

The only thing that matters to me is the content.

The content itself does have value, yes.

But some people also read to connect with other humans and find that connection meaningful and important too.

I believe the best writing has both useful content and meaningful connection.

subsection1h• 9 months ago

I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not.

0% of your HN comments include URLs for sources that support the positions and arguments you've expressed at HN.[1] Do you generally not care about the sources of ideas? For example, when you study public policy issues, do you not differentiate between research papers published in the most prestigious journals and 500-word news articles written at the 8th-grade level by nonspecialist nobodies?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+htt...

palmotea2• 9 months ago

I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content.

An LLM generated blog post is by definition derivative and bland.

I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me.

Then say so, up front.

But that's not what people do. They're lazy or lack ideas but want "content" (usually for some kind of self-promotional reason). So you get to read that.

jibal4• 9 months ago

People say "by definition" when they have no idea what the phrase actually means, and their use of it is intellectually dishonest.

akst2• 9 months ago

I would personally find it insulting if i ask someone something and they gave me ChatGPT output, i would rather then say idk and I look for answers else where. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT I would have done so myself.

Generative AI tends to be very sure of itself. It doesn’t say, it doesn’t know when it doesn’t know. Sometimes when it doesn’t it won’t engage in the premise of the question and instead give an answer to an easier question

xarope2• 9 months ago

so this is the danger. If you are an expert in the content, you'll realize the AI slop.

If you are not an expert, you'll think the AI is amazing, without realizing the slop.

I'll rather do without the AI slop, thanks.

somethingsome2• 9 months ago

I don't mind either, I have way too few time to write blogposts, but I have some things that I want to share. So I focus on the content extensively, and use the llm to help with the style and the phrasing and grammar..

But I often correct the result and change some wording.

Maybe at the beginning, when I was less experienced with llms, I used more llm style, but now I find it a good compromise to convey what I think without hindering the message behind my awful writing :)

robwwilliams2• 9 months ago

Agreed. This short target piece is an amusing Luddite rant. No true content other than to bemoan our first stumbling steps toward using AI to write and think.

I am a reasonably good (but sloppy) writer and use Claude to help improve my text, my ideas, and the flow of sentences and paragraphs. A huge help once I have a good first draft. I treat Claude like a junior editor who is useful but requires a tight leash and sharp advice.

This thoughtless piece is like complaining about getting help from professional human editors: a profession nearly killed off over the last three decades.

Who can afford $50/hr human editorial services? Not me. Claude is a great “second best” and way faster and cheaper.

kagerou74• 9 months ago

I agree. I remember back in the days when facebook came out around mid 2000s or so my mentor started an online open-source academic journal. that was frowned upon by his colleagues. if it wasn't printed, it wasn't considered authentic. And then he went ahead and asked me (a helper, a volunteer) to create a facebook and Twitter accounts to spread the word. and that was frowned upon, too. it was considered like a really crass move among his respectable colleagues. Now social media has become a given.

Why do I need to spend hours on formatting when AI can help clean them up in seconds? Or typos? grammar inconsistencies? Clarifying sentences? I'd rather much read writings cleaned up by an AI than some incoherent fluff that really says nothing and wasting space.

And frankly, in my experience, writing with AI is no more easier than writing on your own. It's just that my priority shifts from being distracted on those externalities (like fixing typos and formatting) to the subject matter of writing itself. So I go deep dive researching topics and contents at hand with AIs and try to figure out the best way to communicate the ideas to the audience with an AI. It takes time and it's a work of its own. It takes hours depending on what I am doing.

And you probably wished I have cleaned this comment up with an AI, too! (I tried in my best human way given time I'm allowed).

giltho• 9 months ago

Hey chatGPT, summarise this post for me

ericol2• 9 months ago

read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.

Ha! That's a very clever spot on insult. Most LLMs would probably be seriously offended by this would thy be rational beings.

No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake.

OK, you are pushing it buddy. My mandarin is not that good; as a matter of fact, I can handle no mandarin at all. Or french to that matter. But I'm certain a decent LLM can do that without me having to resort to reach out to another person, that might not be available or have enough time to deal with my shenanigans.

I agree that there are way too much AI slop being created and made public, but yet there are way too many cases where the use is fair and used for improving whatever the person is doing.

Yes, AI is being abused. No, I don't agree we should all go taliban against even fair use cases.

ericol2• 9 months ago

As a side note, i hate posts where they go on and on and use 3 pages to go to the point.

You know what I'm doing? I'm using AI to chase to the point and extract the relevant (For me) info.

portaouflop2• 9 months ago

It’s a clever post but people that use so to write personal blogposts ain’t gonna read this and change their mind. Only people who already hate using llms are gonna cheer you on.

But this kind of content is great for engagement farming on HN.

Just write “something something clankers bad”

While I agree with the author it’s a very moot and uninspired point

maxdo• 9 months ago

Typical black and white article to capitalize on I hate AI hype.

Super top articles with millions of readers are done with AI. It’s not an ai problem it’s the content. If it’s watery and no style tuned it’s bad. Same as human author

rcarmo2• 9 months ago

I don't get all this complaining, TBH. I have been blogging for over 25 years (20+ on the same site), been using em dashes ever since I switched to a Mac (and because the Markdown parser I use converts double dashes to it, which I quite like when I'm banging out text in vim), and have made it a point of running long-form posts through an LLM asking it to critique my text for readability because I have a tendency for very long sentences/passages.

AI is a tool to help you _finish_ stuff, like a wood sander. It's not something you should use as a hacksaw, or as a hammer. As long as you are writing with your own voice, it's just better autocorrect.

curioussquirrel• 9 months ago

100% agree. Using it to polish your sentences or fix small grammar/syntax issues is a great use case in my opinion. I specifically ask it not to completely rewrite or change my voice.

It can also double as a peer reviewer and point out potential counterarguments, so you can address them upfront.

philipwhiuk8• 9 months ago

I specifically ask it not to completely rewrite or change my voice.

And LLMs always do what you say, absolutely always, no issues there.

yxhuvud• 9 months ago

The problem is that a lot of people use it for a whole lot more than just polish. The LLM voice in a text get quite jarring very quickly.

fullshark2• 9 months ago

The complaint is because people (marketers and people marketing themselves) are not using it that way, and instead are using it to generate low value blogspam.

carimura• 9 months ago

I feel like sometimes I write like an LLM, complete with [bad] self-deprecating humor, overly-explained points because I like first principals, random soliloquies, etc. Makes me worry that I'll try and change my style.

That said, when I do try to get LLMs to write something, I can't stand it, and feel like the OP here.

chemotaxis2• 9 months ago

I don't like binary takes on this. I think the best question to ask is whether you own the output of your editing process. Why does this article exist? Does it represent your unique perspective? Is this you at your best, trying to share your insights with the world?

If yes, there's probably value in putting it out. I don't care if you used paper and ink, a text editor, a spell checker, or asked an LLM for help.

On the flip side, if anyone could've asked an LLM for the exact same text, and if you're outsourcing a critical thinking to the reader - then yeah, I think you deserve scorn. It's no different from content-farmed SEO spam.

Mind you, I'm what you'd call an old-school content creator. It would be an understatement to say I'm conflicted about gen AI. But I also feel that this is the most principled way to make demands of others: I have no problem getting angry at people for wasting my time or polluting the internet, but I don't think I can get angry at them for producing useful content the wrong way.

buu7002• 9 months ago

Exactly. If it's substantially the writer's own thoughts and/or words, who cares if they collaborated with an LLM, or autocomplete, or a spelling/grammar-checker, or a friend, or a coworker, or someone from Fiverr? This is just looking for arbitrary reasons to be upset.

If it's not substantially their own writing or ideas, then sure, they shouldn't pass it off as such and claim individual authorship. That's a different issue entirely. However, if someone just wanted to share, "I'm 50 prompts deep exploring this niche topic with GPT-5 and learned something interesting; quoted below is a response with sources that I've fact-checked against" or "I posted on /r/AskHistorians and received this fascinating response from /u/jerryseinfeld", I could respect that.

In any case, if someone is posting low-quality content, blame the author, not the tools they happened to use. OOP may as well say they only want to read blog posts written with vim and emacs users should stay off the internet.

I just don't see the point in gatekeeping. If someone has something valuable to share, they should feel free to use whatever resources they have available to maximize the value provided. If using AI makes the difference between a rambling draft riddled with grammatical and factual errors, and a more readable and information-dense post at half the length with fewer inaccuracies, use AI.

AppleBananaPie• 9 months ago

In my experience if the ai voice was immediately noticeable the writing provided nothing new and most of the time is actively wrong or trying to make itself seem important and sell me on something the owner has a stake in.

Not sure if this is true for other people but it's basically always a sign of something I end up wishing I hadn't wasted my time reading.

It isn't inherently bad by any means but it turns out it's a useful quality metric in my personal experience.

jzb2• 9 months ago

"but I don't think I can get angry at them for producing useful content the wrong way"

What about plagiarism? If a person hacks together a blog post that is arguably useful but they plagiarized half of it from another person, is that acceptable to you? Is it only acceptable if it's mechanized?

One of the arguments against GenAI is that the output is basically plagiarized from other sources -- that is, of course, oversimplified in the case of GenAI, but hoovering up other people's content and then producing other content based on what was "learned" from that (at scale) is what it does.

The ecological impact of GenAI tools and the practices of GenAI companies (as well as the motives behind those companies) remain the same whether one uses them a lot or a little. If a person has an objection to the ethics of GenAI then they're going to wind up with a "binary take" on it. A deal with the devil is a deal with the devil: "I just dabbled with Satan a little bit" isn't really a consolation for those who are dead-set against GenAI in its current forms.

My take on GenAI is a bit more nuanced than "deal with the devil", but not a lot more. But I also respect that there are folks even more against it than I am, and I'd agree from their perspective that any use is too much.

chemotaxis2• 9 months ago

My personal thoughts on gen AI are complicated. A lot of my public work was vacuumed up for gen AI, and I'm not benefitting from it in any real way. But for text, I think we already lost that argument. To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them on some ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of "it's OK for humans to train on books, but it's not OK for robots". Mind you, it pains me to write this. I just think that ship has sailed.

I think we have a better shot at making that argument for music, visual art, etc. Most of it is utilitarian and most people don't care where it comes from, but we have a cultural heritage of recognizing handmade items as more valuable than the mass-produced stuff.

dheatov• 9 months ago

I feel like plagiarism is an appropriate analogy. Student can always argue they still learn something out of it and yada yada, and there's probably some truth in it. However, we still principally reject it in a pretty binary manner. I believe the same reason applies to LLM artifacts too, or at least spiritually.

jayers• 9 months ago

I think it is important to make the distinction between "blog post" and other kinds of published writing. It literally does not matter if your blog post has perfectly correct grammar or misspellings (though you should do a one-pass revision for clarity of thought). Blog posts are best for articulating unfinished thoughts. To that end, you are cheating yourself, the writer, if you use AI to help you write a blog post. It is through the act of writing it that you begin to grok with the idea.

But you bet that I'm going to use AI to correct my grammar and spelling for the important proposal I'm about to send. No sense in losing credibility over something that can be corrected algorithmically.

futurecat• 9 months ago

slop excepted, writing is a very difficult activity that has always been outsourced to some extent, either to an individual, a team, or to some software (spell checker, etc). Of course people will use AI if they think it makes them a better writer. Taste is the only issue here.

iamwil2• 9 months ago

Lately, I've been writing more on my blog, and it's been helpful to change the way that I do it.

Now, I take a cue from school, and write the outline first. With an outline, I can use a prompt for the LLM to play the role of a development editor to help me critique the throughline. This is helpful because I tend to meander, if I'm thinking at the level of words and sentences, rather than at the level of an outline.

Once I've edited the outline for a compelling throughline, I can then type out the full essay in my own voice. I've found it much easier to separate the process into these two stages.

Before outline critiquing: https://interjectedfuture.com/destroyed-at-the-boundary/

After outline critiquing: https://interjectedfuture.com/the-best-way-to-learn-might-be...

I'm still tweaking the developement editor. I find that it can be too much of a stickler on the form of the throughline.

whshdjsk2• 9 months ago

And yet, Will, with all due respect, I can’t hear your voice in any of the 10 articles I skimmed. It’s the same rhetorical structure found in every other LLM blog.

I suppose if to make you feel like it’s better (even if it isn’t), and you enjoy it, go ahead. But know this: we can tell.

iamwil2• 9 months ago

The essays go back a couple years. How did I use LLMs to write in 2021 and 2022?

If you're talking about something more recent, there's only two essays I wrote with the outlining and throughline method I described above. And all of essays, I wrote every word you read on the page with my fingers tapping on the keyboard.

Hence, I'm not actually sure you can tell. I believe you think I'm just one-shotting these essays by rambling to an LLM. I can tell you for sure the results from doing that is pretty bad.

All of them have the same rhetorical structure...probably because it's what I write like without an LLM, and it's what I prompted the LLM, playing a role as a development editor to critique outlines to do! So if you're saying that I'm a bad writer (fair), that's one thing! But I'm definitely writing these myself. shrug

amrocha• 9 months ago

Tangential, but when I heard the Zoom CEO say that in the future you’ll just send your AI double to a meeting for you I couldn’t comprehend how a real human being could ever think that that would be an ok thing to suggest.

The absolute bare minimum respect you can have for someone who’s making time for you is to make time for them. Offloading that to AI is the equivalent of shitting on someone’s plate and telling them to eat it.

I struggle everyday with the thought that the richest most powerful people in the world will sell their souls to get a bit richer.

Charmizard• 9 months ago

Idk how I feel about this take, tbh. Do things the old way because I like them that way seems like poor reasoning.

If folks figure out a way to produce content that is human, contextual and useful... by all means.

jdnordy• 9 months ago

Anyone else suspicious this might be satire ironically written by an LLM?

iMax00• 9 months ago

I read anything as long as there is new and useful information

keepamovin• 9 months ago

So don't read it.

Frotag• 9 months ago

The way I view it is that the author is trying to explain their mental model, but there's only so much you can fit into prose. It's my responsibility to fill in the missing assumptions / understand why X implies Y. And all the little things like consistent word choice, tone, and even the mistakes helps with this. But mix in LLMs and now there's another layer / slightly different mental model I have to isolate, digest, and merge with the author's.

throwaway-0001• 9 months ago

For me it’s insulting not to use an AI to reply back. I’d say 90% of people would answer better with an AI assist in most business environments. Maybe even personal.

It’s really funny how many business deals would be better if people would put the requests in an AI to explain what exactly is requested. Most people are not able to answer and if they’d use an AI they could respond in a proper way without wasting everyone’s time. But at least not using an AI shows the competency (or better - incompetence) level.

It’s also sad that I need to tell people to put my message in an AI to don’t ask me useless questions. And AI can fill most of the gaps people don’t get it. You might say my requests are not proper, but then how an AI can figure out what I want to say? I also put my requests in an AI when I can and can create eli5 explanations of the requests “for dummies”

snorbleck• 9 months ago

this is great.

neilv• 9 months ago

I suspect that the majority of people who are shoveling BS in their blogs aren't doing it because they actually want to think and write and share and learn and be human; but rather, the sole purpose of the blog is for SEO, or to promote the personal brand of someone who doesn't want anything else.

Perhaps the author is speaking to the people who are only temporarily led astray by the pervasive BS online and by the recent wildly popular "cheating on your homework" culture?

magicalhippo• 9 months ago

Well Firefox just got an AI summarizing feature, so thankfully I don't have to...

bhouston• 9 months ago

I am not totally sure about this. I think that AI writing is just a progression of current trends. Many things have made writing easier and lower cost - printing press, typewriters, word processors, grammer/spell checkers, electronic distribution.

This is just a continuation. It does tend to mean there is less effort to produce the output and thus there is a value degradation, but this has been true all along this technology trend.

I don't think we should be a purist as to how writing is produced.

philipwhiuk8• 9 months ago

There's a bar somewhere to what serves meaningful benefit, surely?

causal• 9 months ago

LinkedIn marketing was bad before AI, now half the content is just generated emoji-ridden listicles

hiergiltdiestfu• 9 months ago

Thank you! Heartfelt thank you!

nickdothutton• 9 months ago

If you are going to use AI to make a post, then please instruct it to make that post as short and information-dense as possible. It's one thing to read an AI summary but quite another to have to wade through paragraphs of faux "personality" and "conversational writing" of the sort that slop AIs regularly trowel out.

frstrtd_engnr• 9 months ago

These days, my work routine looks something like this - a colleague sends me a long, AI-generated PRD full of changes. When I ask him for clarification, he stumbles through the explanation. Does he care at all? I have no idea.

Frustrated, I just throw that mess straight at claude-code and tell it to fix whatever nonsense it finds and do its best. It probably implements 80–90% of what the doc says — and invents the rest. Not that I’d know, since I never actually read the original AI-generated PRD myself.

In the end, no one’s happy. The whole creative and development process has lost that feeling of achievement, and nobody seems to care about code quality anymore.

wouldbecouldbe2• 9 months ago

I've always been bad at grammar, and wrote a lot of newsletters & blogs for my first startups which always got great feedback, but also lots of grammar complaints. Really happy GPT is so great at catching those nowadays, saves me a lot of Grammar supports requests ;)

whshdjsk2• 9 months ago

Or just get better?

I don’t know how someone can be nerdy enough to be on Hackernews, but simultaneously not nerdy enough to pickup and intuit the rules of English language from sheer osmosis.

wouldbecouldbe2• 9 months ago

Im not a native english speaker, but even in my own language I make many mistakes. I'm happy I can spend my time coding instead of going back to school :)

holdenc137• 9 months ago

I assume this is a double-bluff and the blog post WAS written by an AI o_O ?

braza• 9 months ago

No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

For essays, honestly, I do not feel so bad, because I can see that other than some spaces like HN the quality of the average online writer has dropped so much that I prefer to have some machine-assisted text that can deliver the content.

However, my problem is with AI-generated code.

In most of the cases to create trivial apps, I think AI-generated code will be OK to good; however, the issue that I'm seeing as a code reviewer is that folks that you know their code design style are so heavily reliant on AI-generated code that you are sure that they did not write and do not understand the code.

One example: Working with some data scientists and researchers, most of them used to write things on Pandas, some trivial for loops, and some primitive imperative programming. Now, especially after Claude Code, most of the things are vectorized, with some sort of variable naming with way-compressed naming. Sometimes folks use Cython in some data pipeline tasks or even using functional programming to an extreme.

Good performance is great, and leveling up the quality of the codebase it's a net positive; however, I wonder in some scenario when things go south and/or Claude code is not available if those folks will be able to fix it.

rphv• 9 months ago

You don't need to understand code for it to be useful, any more than you need to know assembly to write Python.

bluSCALE4• 9 months ago

This is how I feel about some LinkedIn folks that are going all in w/ AI.

parliament32• 9 months ago

I'm looking forward to the (inevitable) AI detection browser plugin that will mark the slop for me, at least that way I don't need to spend the effort figuring out if it's AI content or not.

namirez• 9 months ago

No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

I do understand the reasoning behind being original, but why make mistakes when we have tools to avoid them? That sounds like a strange recommendation.

arresin4• 9 months ago

These days a spelling mistake actually increases the chance I’ll keep reading. I know you didn’t just shit this out with chatgpt then fart loudly and call it a day.

luisml77• 9 months ago

Who cares about your feelings, it's a blog post.

If the goal is to get the job done, then use AI.

Do you really want to waste precious time for so little return?

nhod• 9 months ago

"I'm choosing to be 'insulted' by the existence of an arbitrary thing in the universe and then upset by the insult I chose to ascribe to it."

z7• 9 months ago

Hypothetically, what if the AI-generated blog post were better than what the human author of the blog would have written?

philipwhiuk8• 9 months ago

Better how?

photochemsyn• 9 months ago

I like the author's idea that people should publish the prompts they use to generate LLM output, not the output itself.

vzaliva• 9 months ago

It is similarly unsulting to read an ungrammatical blog post full of misspelings. So I do not subscribe to the part of your argument "No, don't use it to fix your grammar". Using AI to fix your grammar, if done right, is the part of the learning process.

dinkleberg• 9 months ago

A critical piece of this is to ensure it is just fixing the grammar and not rewriting it in its own AI voice is key. This is why I think tools like grammarly or similar still have a useful edge over just directly using an LLM as the UX let's you pick and choose which suggestions to adopt. And they also provide context on why they are making a given suggestion. It still often kills your "personal voice", so you need to be judicious with its use.

arresin4• 9 months ago

Much less insulting than AI slop.

I can imagine it’s hard to see the nuance if you’re ESL but it’s there.

jexe• 9 months ago

Reading an AI blog post (or reddit post, etc) just signals that the author actually just doesn't care that much about the subject.. which makes me care less too.

mucio• 9 months ago

it's insulting to read text on a computer screen. I don't care if you write like a 5 years old or if your message will need days or weeks to reach me. Use a pen, a pencil and some paper.

saint_fiasco• 9 months ago

I sometimes share interesting AI conversations with my friends using the "share" button on the AI websites. Often the back-and-forth is more interesting than the final output anyway.

I think some people turn AI conversations into blog posts that they pass off as their own because of SEO considerations. If Twitter didn't discourage people sharing links, perhaps we would see a lot more tweet threads that start with https://chatgpt.com/share/... and https://claude.ai/share/... instead of people trying to pass off AI generated content as their own.

Kim_Bruning• 9 months ago

I think the problem is lazy AI generated content.

The problem is that the current generation of tools "looks like something" even with minimal effort. This makes people lazy. Actually put in the effort and see what you get, with or without AI assist.

saltysalt• 9 months ago

I'm pretty certain that the only thing reading my blog these days is AI.

mirzap• 9 months ago

This post could easily be generated by AI, no way to tell for sure. I'm more insulted if the title or blog thumbnail is misleading, or if the post is full of obvious nonsense, etc.

If a post contains valuable information that I learn from it, I don't really care if AI wrote it or not. AI is just a tool, like any other tool humans invented.

I'm pretty sure people had the same reaction 50 years ago, when the first PCs started appearing: "It's insulting to see your calculations made by personal electronic devices."

latchkey• 9 months ago

As a test, I used AI to rewrite their blog post, keeping the same tone and context but fewer words. It got the point across, and I enjoyed it more because I didn't have to read as much. I did edit it slightly to make it a bit less obviously AI'ish...

---

Honestly, it feels rude to hand me something churned out by a lexical bingo machine when you could’ve written it yourself. I'm a person with thoughts, humor, contradictions, and experience not a content bin.

Don't you like the pride of making something that's yours? You should.

Don't use AI to patch grammar or dodge effort. Make the mistake. Feel awkward. Learn. That's being human.

People are kinder than you think. By letting a bot speak for you, you cut off the chance for connection.

Here's the secret: most people want to help you. You just don't ask. You think smart people never need help. Wrong. The smartest ones know when to ask and when to give.

So, human to human, save the AI for the boring stuff. Lead with your own thoughts. The best ideas are the ones you've actually felt.

cyrialize• 9 months ago

I'm reading a blog because I'm interested in the voice a writer has.

If I'm finding that voice boring, I'll stop reading - whether or not AI was used.

The generic AI voice, and by that I mean very little prompting to add any "flavor", is boring.

Of course I've used AI to summarize things and give me information, like when I'm looking for a specific answer.

In the case of blogs though, I'm not always trying to find an "answer", I'm just interested in what you have to say and I'm reading for pleasure.

jquaint• 9 months ago

Do you not enjoy the pride that comes with attaching your name to something you made on your own? It's great!

This is like saying a photographer shouldn't find the sunset they photographed pretty or be proud of the work, because they didn't personally labor to paint the image of it.

A lot more goes into a blog post than the actual act of typing the context out.

Lazy work is always lazy work, but its possible to make work you are proud of with AI, in the same way you can create work you are proud of with a camera

throwawayffffas• 9 months ago

I already found it insulting to read seo spam blog posts. The ai involved is beside the point.

adverbly• 9 months ago

As someone who briefly wrote a bunch of AI generated blog posts, I kind of agree... The voicing is terrible, and the only thing it it does particularly well is replace the existing slop.

I'm starting to pivot and realize that quality is actually way more important than I thought, especially in a world where it is very easy to create things of low quality using AI.

Another place I've noticed it is in hiring. There are so many low quality applications its insane. One application with a full GitHub and profile and cover letter and or video which actually demonstrates that you understand where you are applying is worth more than 100 low quality ones.

It's gone from a charming gimmick to quickly becoming an ick.

jschveibinz• 9 months ago

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here yet, and I don't want to be pedantic, but for centuries famous artists, musicians, writers, etc. have used assistants to do their work for them. The list includes (but in no way is this complete): DaVinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Warhol, Koons, O'Keefe, Hepworth, Hockney, Stephen King, Clancy, Dumas, Patterson, Elvis, Elton John, etc. etc. Further, most scientific, engineering and artistic innovations are made "on the shoulders of giants." As the saying goes: there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing. I suggest that the use of an LLM for writing is just another tool of human creativity to be used freely and often to produce even more interesting and valuable content.

pertymcpert2• 9 months ago

No that’s complete rubbish, it’s a bad analogy.

pessimizer2• 9 months ago

Counterpoint: It's a fine thought, and an excellent analogy.

npteljes• 9 months ago

I agree with the author. If I detect that the article is written by an AI, I bounce off.

I similarly dislike other trickery as well, like ghostwriters, PR articles in journalism, lip-syncing at concerts, and so on. Fuck off, be genuine.

The thing why people are upset about AI is because AI can be used to easily generate a lot of text, but its usage is rarely disclosed. So then when someone discovers AI usage, there is no telling for the reader of how much of the article is signal, and how much is noise. Without AI, it would hinge on the expertise or experience of the author, but now with AI involved, the bets are off.

The other thing is that reading someone's text involves a little bit of forming a connection with them. But then discovering that AI (or someone else) have written the text, it feels like they betrayed that connection.

masly• 9 months ago

In a related problem:

I recently interviewed a person for a role as senior platform architect. The person was already working for a semi reputable company. In the first interview, the conversation was okay but my gut just told me something was strange about this person.

We have the candidate a case to solve with a few diagrams, and to prepare a couple slides to discuss the architecture.

The person came back with 12 diagrams, all AI generated, littered with obvious AI “spelling”/generation mistakes.

And when we questioned the person about why they think we would gain trust and confidence in them with this obvious AI generated content, they became even aggressive.

Needless to say it didn’t end well.

The core problem is really how much time is now being wasted in recruiting with people who “cheat” or outright cheat.

We have had to design questions to counter AI cheating, and strategies to avoid wasting time.

wenbin• 9 months ago

It's similarly insulting to listen to your AI-generated fake podcasts[0]. Ten minutes spent on them is ten minutes wasted.

[0] AI-generated fake podcasts (mostly via NotebookLM) https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...

jackdoe• 9 months ago

I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people visiting your content, and there is close to zero cost to make it. It is the same problem with music, in fact I search youtube music only with before:2022.

I recently wrote about the dead internet https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration.

I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity", or create rings of trust for humans, but now I think the ship has sailed.

Today a colleague was sharing their screen on google docs and a big "USE GEMINI AI TO WRITE THE DOCUMENT" button was front and center. I am fairly certain that by end of year most words you read will be tokens.

I am working towards moving my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist, and after that just using local indexes with some datahorading. (squid, wikipedia, SO, rfcs, libc, kernel.git etc)

Maybe in the future we just exchange local copies of our local "internet" via sdcards, like in Cuba's Sneakernet[1] El Paquete Semenal[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

gosub100• 9 months ago

thought we should do "proof of humanity"

I thought about this in another context and then I realized: what system is going to declare you're human or not? AI of course

tasuki3• 9 months ago

Uhh, that's a lot of links: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/

Where are the explanations what all of them mean? What is (nothing) vs `maxi` vs `mini` vs `nopic`? What is `100` vs `all` vs `top1m` vs `top` vs `wp1-0.8`?

hamdingers• 9 months ago

https://download.kiwix.org/zim/README

Mini is the introduction and infobox of all articles, nopic is the full articles with no pictures, maxi is full articles with (small) images. Other tags are categories (football, geography, etc.)

100 is the top 100 articles, top1m is top 1 million, 0.8 is (inexplicably) the top 45k articles.

My recommendation: sort by size and download the largest one you can accommodate in the language you prefer. wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08.zim is all wikipedia articles, with images, as of 2025-08 and it's a paltry 111G.

Kiwix publishes a library here, but it's equally unhelpful: https://library.kiwix.org/

somat• 9 months ago

It is the duality of generated content.

It feels great to use. But it also feels incredibly shitty to have it used on you.

My recommendation. Just give the prompt. If if your readers want to expand it they can do so. don't pollute others experience by passing the expanded form around. Nobody enjoys that.

marstall• 9 months ago

also: mind-numbing.

rootedbox• 9 months ago

I fixed it.

It appears inconsiderate—perhaps even dismissive—to present me, a human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions, and experiences, with content that reads as though it were assembled by a lexical randomizer. When you rely on automation instead of your own creativity, you deny both of us the richness of genuine human expression.

Isn’t there pride in creating something that is authentically yours? In writing, even imperfectly, and knowing the result carries your voice? That pride is irreplaceable.

Please, do not use artificial systems merely to correct your grammar, translate your ideas, or “improve” what you believe you cannot. Make errors. Feel discomfort. Learn from those experiences. That is, in essence, the human condition. Human beings are inherently empathetic. We want to help one another. But when you interpose a sterile, mechanized intermediary between yourself and your readers, you block that natural empathy.

Here’s something to remember: most people genuinely want you to succeed. Fear often stops you from seeking help, convincing you that competence means solitude. It doesn’t. Intelligent people know when to ask, when to listen, and when to contribute. They build meaningful, reciprocal relationships. So, from one human to another—from one consciousness of love, fear, humor, and curiosity to another—I ask: if you must use AI, keep it to the quantitative, to the mundane. Let your thoughts meet the world unfiltered. Let them be challenged, shaped, and strengthened by experience.

After all, the truest ideas are not the ones perfectly written. They’re the ones that have been felt.

tasuki3• 9 months ago

Heh, nice. I suppose that was AI-generated? Your beginning:

It appears inconsiderate—perhaps even dismissive—to present me, a human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions, and experiences, with content that reads as though it were assembled by a lexical randomizer.

I like that beginning than the original:

It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.

No one's making anyone read anything (I hope). And yes, it might be inconsiderate or perhaps even dismissive to present a human with something written by AI. The AI was able to phrase this much better than the human! Thank you for presenting me with that, I guess?

wltr• 9 months ago

It’s a cherry on top to see these silly AI-generated posts to be seriously discussed in here.

dcow2• 9 months ago

It’s not that people don’t value creativity and expression. It’s that for 90% of the communication AI is being used for, the slightly worse AI gen version that took 30 min to produce isn’t worse enough to justify spending 4 hours on the hand rolled version. That’s the reality we’re living through right now. People are eating up the productivity boosts like candy.

nazgu1• 9 months ago

I agree, but if I would have to type one most insulting things with AI is scraping data without consent to train models, so people no longer enjoy blog posting :(

deadbabe• 9 months ago

If you’re going to AI generate your blog, the least you could do is use a fine tuned LLM that matches your style. Most people just toss a prompt into GPT 5 and call it a day.

RIMR• 9 months ago

No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations

Okay, I can understand even drawing the line at grammar correction, in that not all "correct" grammar is desirable or personal enough to convey certain ideas.

But not for translation? AI translation, in my experience, has proven to be more reliable than other forms of machine translation, and personally learning a new language every time I need to read something non-native to me isn't reasonable.

KindDragon• 9 months ago

Everyone wants to help each other. And people are far kinder than you may think.

I want to believe that. When I was a student, I built a simple HTML page with a feedback form that emailed me submissions. I received exactly one message. It arrived encoded; I eagerly decoded it and found a profanity-filled rant about how terrible my site was. That taught me that kindness online isn’t the default - it’s a choice. I still aim for it, but I don’t assume it.

netule• 9 months ago

I’ve found that the kinds of people who leave comments or send emails tend to fall into two categories:

1. They’re assholes.

2. They care enough to speak up, but only when the thing stops working as expected.

I think the vast majority of users/readers are good people who just don’t feel like engaging. The minority are vocal assholes.

AnimalMuppet• 9 months ago

I mean, if you used an AI to generated it, you shouldn't mind if my AI reads it, rather than me.

akshatjiwan• 9 months ago

I don't know. Content matters more to me. Many of the articles that I read have so little information density that I find it hard to justify spending time on them.I often use AI to summarise text for me and then lookup particular topics in detail if I like.

Skimming was pretty common before AI too. People used to read and share notes instead of entire texts. AI has just made it easier.

Reading long texts is not a problem for me if its engaging. But often I find they just go on and on without getting to the point. Especially news articles.They are the worst.

voidhorse• 9 months ago

If you struggle with communication, using AI is fine. What matters is caring about the result. You cannot just throw it over the fence.

AI content in itself isn't insulting, but as TFA hits upon, pushing sloppy work you didn't bother to read or check at all yourself is incredibly insulting and just communicates to others that you don't think their time is valuable. This holds for non-AI generated work as well, but the bar is higher by default since you at least had to generate that content yourself and thus at least engage with it on a basic level. AI content is also needlessly verbose, employs trite and stupid analogies constantly, and in general has the nauseating, bland, soulless corporate professional communication style that anyone with even a mote of decent literary taste detests.

madcaptenor• 9 months ago

ai;dr

johanam• 9 months ago

AI generated text like a plume of pollution spreading through the web. Little we can do to keep it at bay. Perhaps transparency is the answer?

tasuki3• 9 months ago

It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.

Agreed fully. In fact it'd be quite rude to force you to even read something written by another human being!

I'm all for your right to decide what is and isn't worth reading, be it ai or human generated.

hereme888• 9 months ago

You are absolutely right!

Jokes aside, good article.

throwawa14223• 9 months ago

I should never spend more effort reading something than the author spent writing it. With AI-generated texts the author effort approaches zero.

gr4vityWall3• 9 months ago

Is it just me, or is OP posting a bunch of links on HN for karma farming? Some of seem to be AI-generated, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45724022

OptionOfT• 9 months ago

What am I even reading if it is AI generated?

The reason AI is so hyped up at the moment is that you give it little, it gives you back more.

But then whose blog-post am I reading? What really is the point?

corporat2• 9 months ago

The most thoughtful critique of this post isn’t that AI is inherently bad—but that its use shouldn’t be conflated with laziness or cowardice.

Fact: Professional writers have used grammar tools, style guides, and even assistants for decades. AI simply automates some of these functions faster. Would we say Hemingway was lazy for using a typewriter? No—we’d say he leveraged tools.

AI doesn’t create thoughts; it drafts ideas. The writer still curates, edits, and imbues meaning—just like a journalist editing a reporter’s notes or a designer refining Photoshop output. Tools don’t diminish creativity—they democratize access to it.

That said: if you’re outsourcing your thinking to AI (e.g., asking an LLM to write your thesis without engaging), then yes, you’ve lost something. But complaining about AI itself misunderstands the problem.

TL;DR: Typewriters spit out prose too—but no one blames writers for using them.

rideontime2• 9 months ago

For transparency, what role did AI serve in drafting this comment?

corporat2• 9 months ago

AI was used to analyze logical fallacies in the original blog post. I didn’t use it to draft content—just to spot the straw man, false dilemma, and appeal-to-emotion tactics in real time.

Ironically, this exact request would’ve fit the blog’s own arguments: "AI is lazy" / "AI undermines thought." But since I was using AI as a diagnostic tool (not a creative one), it doesn’t count.

Self-referential irony? Maybe. But at least I’m being transparent. :)

LeoPanthera• 9 months ago

Anyone can make AI generated content. It requires no effort at all.

Therefore, if I or anyone else wanted to see it, I would simply do it myself.

I don't know why so many people can't grasp that.

pasteldream3• 9 months ago

people are far kinder than you may think

Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People are harsh, and how much grace they give you has more to do with who you are than what you say.

That aside, the worst problem with LLM-generated text isn’t that it’s less human, it’s that (by default) it’s full of filler, including excessive repetition and contrived analogies.

_smfg• 9 months ago

Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People are harsh, and how much grace they give you has more to do with who you are than what you say.

You okay friend?

pasteldream3• 9 months ago

Yes.

foxfired• 9 months ago

Earlier this year, I used AI to help me improve some of my writing on my blog. It just has a better way of phrasing ideas than me. But when I came back to read those same blog posts a couple months later, you know after I've encountered a lot more blog posts that I didn't know were AI generated at the time, I saw the pattern. It sounds like the exact same author, +- some degree of obligatory humor, writing all over the web with the same voice.

I've found a better approach to using AI for writing. First, if I don't bother writing it, why should you bother reading it? LLMs can be great soundboards. Treat them as teachers, not assistants. Your teacher is not gonna write your essay for you, but he will teach you how to write, and spot the parts that need clarification. I will share my process in the coming days, hopefully it will get some traction.

tdiff• 9 months ago

Here is a secret: most people want to help you succeed.

Most people dont care.

Wowfunhappy• 9 months ago

I agree with everything except this part:

No, don't use it to fix your grammar

How is this substantially different from using spellcheck? I don't see any problem with asking an LLM to check for and fix grammatical errors.

vesterthacker• 9 months ago

When you criticize, it helps to understand the other’s perspective.

I suppose I am writing to you because I can no longer speak to anyone. As people turn to technology for their every word, the space between them widens, and I am no exception. Everyone speaks, yet no one listens. The noise fills the room, and still it feels empty.

Parents grow indifferent, and their children learn it before they can name it. A sickness spreads, quiet and unseen, softening every heart it touches. I once believed I was different. I told myself I still remembered love, that I still felt warmth somewhere inside. But perhaps I only remember the idea of it. Perhaps feeling itself has gone.

I used to judge the new writers for chasing meaning in words. I thought they wrote out of vanity. Now I see they are only trying to feel something, anything at all. I watch them, and sometimes I envy them, though I pretend not to. They are lost, yes, but they still search. I no longer do.

The world is cold, and I have grown used to it. I write to remember, but the words answer nothing. They fall silent, as if ashamed. Maybe you understand. Maybe it is the same with you.

Maybe writing coldly is simply compassion, a way of not letting others feel your pain.

arresin4• 9 months ago

LLM generated emails are probably the worst

gngoo• 9 months ago

I’m very happy that I can post ai generated blog posts from my writing. And I’m now averaging 500 unique daily visitors and quite some repeat visits and subscribers with it too. If it wasn’t for AI, then I’d go back to where it was before AI… 10 visitors per month? I don’t like writing, so I collaborate with AI to write entire blog posts. I don’t have AI “refine it”, I usually tell AI to take what I’m rambling about for 1000 words and rewrite it in my own style, cadence, rhythm and vibe. So I can generate 3-5 blog posts per week. Which surprisingly rank well, get posted on LinkedIn, Twitter and Reddit by others. So the amount of people that enjoy reading AI-generated blog posts likely is starting to outpace those who don’t at this rate.

dustypotato• 9 months ago

By all means , use AI. Just don't make it longer than it needs to be

K0balt• 9 months ago

It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t unbearable to read.

sinuhe69• 9 months ago

DeepL has the option “Correct only” and it can become quite handy for non-native speakers.

yalogin• 9 months ago

This is unavoidable. Individual blogs may not use AI but companies that live on user engagement will absolutely use them and churn out all types of content

fullshark2• 9 months ago

I avoid it by not reading open web blogs. Eventually open web message boards (like this one) will be fully contaminated as well and I'll move to discord or group chats I suppose.

invisibleink2• 9 months ago

YES and, also let's not use printing press, photography, word processors, spell checkers, internet and search engines because they lack human touch, make us lazy, prevent deep thinking blah blah...

philipwhiuk8• 9 months ago

Just because all those other inventions didn't wreck humanity doesn't mean this one won't.

invisibleink2• 9 months ago

The point is, every new technology attracts its share of romantic skeptics, and every time they fail then they retreat to the same tired line:

"Just because all those other inventions didn't wreck humanity doesn't mean this one won't"

But that’s not an argument, it’s an evasion.

Given past inventions didn’t destroy us despite similar concerns, then the burden is on you to show why this one is fundamentally different and uniquely catastrophic.

jeromie• 9 months ago

I had to go take a two-hour walk to calm down after my boss sent me a project proposal that was just ChatGPT gobbledygook.

akst2• 9 months ago

With the exception of using AI to proof read, I agree.

In terms of proof reading, I just mean proof reading, not rewriting anything. especially not using the output verbatim for suggested fixes. And the author should ensure they retain their writing style & be assertive with their discretion on what corrections they should make.

jibal4• 9 months ago

I see no evidence or logical argument here. You have feelings ... fine. Mine are different.

dankobgd• 9 months ago

Normal websites are not even findable now

jdlyga• 9 months ago

If you use AI to write a blog post, I'll use AI to summarize it.

blackhaj7• 9 months ago

I used to be really good at spotting it but my AI radar is getting less effective now. Often I don’t notice until late in an article which is very annoying.

There are some videos on Instagram that I didn’t notice were AI until my wife told me!

If I want AI content, I will go to an AI. The only good outcome is that I am spending way less time on social media because so much of it is now AI

kirito1337• 9 months ago

It's insulting to read any AI generated content.

It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

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