Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by givemeethekeys | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

givemeethekeys

The nephew has no programming knowledge.

He wants to build a website that will turn him into a bazillionaire.

He asks AI how to solve problem X.

AI provides direction, but he doesn't quite know how to ask the right questions.

Still, the AI manages to give him a 70% solution.

He will go to his grave before he learns enough programming to do the remaining 30% himself, or, understand the first 70%.

Delegating to AI isn't the same as delegating to a human. If you mistrust the human, you can find another one. If you mistrust the AI, there aren't many others to turn to, and each comes with an uncomfortable learning curve.

View on HN

In the early aughts, I was so adept at navigating my town because I delivered pizza. I could draw a map from memory. My directional skills were A+.

Once GPS became ubiquitous, I started relying on it, and over about a decade, my navigational skills degraded to the point of embarrassment. I've lived in the same major city now for 5 years and I still need a GPS to go everywhere.

This is happening to many people now, where LLMs are replacing our thinking. My dad thinks he is writing his own memoirs. Yeah pop, weird how you and everyone else just started using the "X isn't Y, it's Z" trope liberally in your writing out of nowhere.

It's definitely scary. And it's definitely sinister. I maintain that this is intentional, and the system is working the way they want it to.

I’m going to defend your dad here.

AI slop at work is an absolute waste of time and effort.

But your dad is trying to write his story, probably because he wants to leave something behind so he’s not forgotten. It might be cliche-riddled but AI is helping him write his experiences in a form he’s happy with and it’s still his story even if he got help.

He’s also probably only writing it for an audience of one - you. So don’t shit on it, read it. Or you might regret it.

I sympathize with people who find writing difficult. But, putting myself in GP's shoes, I can't imagine trying to read my father's LLM-generated memoir. How could I possibly understand it as _his_ work? I would be sure that he gave the LLM some amount of information that would render it technically unique, but there's no way I could hear his voice in words that he didn't choose.

If you're writing something for an audience of one, literally nothing matters more than the connection between you and the reader. As someone with a father who's getting on in years, even imagining this scenario is pretty depressing.

I get what you are saying, and a situation like this needs to be treated with extreme tact and care. But no, it's not his story, it's a low res approximation of his story as viewed through the lens of the stastical average reddit comment or self published book.

If the father is really into the tech side of it (as opposed to pure laziness), I'd ask him for the prompts alongside the generated text and just ignore the output. The prompts are the writing that is meant for the original commentor, and it is well worth it to take the tact of not judging those by their writing quality independently.

Who said I didn't read it? Who said I didn't see it for the earnest effort it is? He doesn't know any better, it's not his fault.

However, I can assure you if his audience is one person, he is that person. He is not writing for me.

More precisely, each ‘AI’ is just a statistical grouping of a large subset of other (generally randomly) selected humans.

You don’t even get the same ‘human’ with the same AI, as you can see with various prompting.

It’s like doing a lossy compression of an image, and then wondering why the color of a specific pixel isn’t quite right!

Who is "the nephew"?

Metaphorical - the story of the professional who had to make way for the boss’s nephew who took a php course last week…

My nephew! :)

Understand the first 70%.

With the 70% you then pitch "I have this" and some Corp/VC will buyout the remaining 30%.

They then in return hire engineers who are willing to lap the 70% slop, and fix the rest with more AI slop.

Your brother dies happily achieving their dream of being a bazillionaire doing nothing more than typing a few sentences in a search bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com