Shoot me in the face if my own writing is ever that bad.
ETA: just to be clear... I am not a great writer. Or a bad one. But this is a particular kind of bad. The kind we should all try to avoid.
I see this all the time from AI boosters. Flashy presentation, and it seems like it worked! But if you actually stare at the result for a moment, it’s mediocre at best.
Part of the issue is that people who are experts at creating ML models aren’t experts at all the downstream tasks those models are asked to do. So if you ask it to “write a poem about pizza” as long as it generally fits the description it goes into the demo.
We saw this with Gemini’s hallucination bug in one of their demos, telling you to remove film from a camera (this would ruin the photos on the film). They obviously didn’t know anything about the subject beforehand.
Yep. CAD, music, poetry, comedy. Same pattern in each.
But it's more than not being experts: it's about a subliminal belief that there either isn't much to be expert in or a denial of the value of that expertise, like if what they do can be replicated by a neural network trained on the description, is it even expertise?
Unavoidably, all of this stuff is about allowing people to do, with software, tasks they would otherwise need experts for.
Unskilled and unaware of it. Or rather, unskilled and unaware of what a skilled output actually involves. So, unaware of the damage they do to their reputations by passing off the output of a GPT.
This is what I mean about the writing, ultimately. If you don't know why ChatGPT writing is sort of essentially banal and detracts from honesty and authenticity, you're the sort of person who shouldn't be using it.
(And if you do know why, you don't need to use it)
Other people in our lab (from China, Korea, etc.) also find this kind of thing useful for working / communicating quickly
Write honestly. Write the way you write. Use your own flow, make your own grammatical wobbles, whatever they are. Express yourself authentically.
Don't let an AI do this to you.
Person A: Me try make this code work but it always crash! maybe the server hate or i miss thing. any help?
Person A with AI: I've been trying to get this code to work, but it keeps crashing. I'm not sure if I missed something or if there's an issue with the server. Any tips would be appreciated!
Recently, I stumbled upon a bug that initially seemed minor but quickly revealed itself to be a formidable adversary. It disrupted the seamless user experience I had meticulously crafted, and despite my best efforts, this issue has remained elusive. Each attempt to isolate and resolve it has only led me deeper into a labyrinth of complexity, leaving me frustrated yet undeterred.
Understanding that even the most seasoned developers can hit a wall, I’m reaching out for help. I’ve documented the symptoms, error messages, and my various attempts at resolution, and I’m eager to collaborate with anyone who might have insights or fresh perspectives. It’s in the spirit of community and shared knowledge that I hope to unravel this mystery and turn this challenge into an opportunity for growth.
Me: This is the most garbage code I've ever seen. It's bad and you should feel. It's not even wrong. I can't even fathom the conceptual misunderstandings that led to this. I'm going to have to rewrite the entire thing at this rate, honestly you should just try again from scratch.
With AI: I've had some time to review the code you submitted and I appreciate the effort and work that went into it. I think we might have to refine some parts so that it aligns more closely with our coding standards. There are certain areas that are in need of restructuring to make sure the logic is more consistent and the flow wouldn't lead to potential issues down the road.
I sympathize with the sibling comment about AI responses being overly-verbose but it's not that hard to get your model of choice to have a somewhat consistent voice. And I don't even see it as a crutch, this is just automated secretary / personal assistant for people not important enough to be worth a human. I think a lot of us on HN have had the experience of the stark contrast between comms from the CEO vs CEO as paraphrased by their assistant.
For lots of East Asian researchers it's really embarrassing for them to send an email riddled with typos, so they spend a LOT of time making their emails nice.
I like that tools like this can lift their burden
OK -- I can see this. But I think Grammarly would be better than this.
But its suggestion system, where it spots wordy patterns and suggests clearer alternatives, was available long before LLMs were the new hotness, and is considerably more nuanced (and educational).
Grammarly would take apart the nonsense in that screenshot and suggest something much less "dark and stormy night".
But there's not much more important, stylistically, to writing an business email or document than clarity. It's absolutely the most important thing. Especially in customer communications.
In the UK there is/used to be a yearly awards scheme for businesses that reject complexity in communucations for clarity:
https://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html
But anyway, you don't have to act on all the suggestions, do you? It's completely different from the idea of getting an AI to write generic, college-application-letter-from-a-CS-geek prose from your notes.
They don't care. Their goal is to accelerate the production of garbage.
I really like copilot/ai when the focus was about hyper-auto-complete. I wish the integration was LSP+autocomplete+compilation check+docs correlation. That will boost my productivity x10 times and save me some brain cycles. Instead we are getting garbage UX/Backends that are trying to fully replace devs. Give me a break.
For them, the ability to generate so much trash is the good part. They might not even be fully aware that it's trash, but their general goal is to output more trash because trash is profitable.
It's like all those "productivity systems". Not a single one will produce a noticeable increase in productivity magically that you can't get from just a $1 notebook, they just make you feel like you are being more productive. Same with RP bots or AI text editors. It makes you feel so much faster, and for a lot of people that's enough so they want in on a slice of the AI moneypit!
Occasionally I sink 1-2 hours into a tweaking something I thought was 90% correct but was in reality garbage. I had that happen a lot more with earlier models, but its becoming increasingly rare. Perhaps I'm recognizing the limitations of the tool, or the systems indeed are getting better.
This is all anecdotal, but I'm shipping and building faster than I was previously and its definitely not all trash.
If you accept that we live in a world where blind lead the blind, it's less surprising.
Them releasing this stuff actually suggest they don't have much progress in their next model. It's a sell signal but today's investors have made their money in zirp, so they have no idea about the real world market. In a sense this is the market funneling money from stupid to grifter.