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Comment by drabbiticus | Hacker News Reader

Just chiming in here - any time I've written something online that considers things from multiple angles or presents more detailed analysis, the liklihood that someone will ask if I just used ChatGPT go way up. I worry that people have gotten really used to short, easily digestible replies, and conflate that with "human". Because of course it would be crazy for a human to expend "that much effort" on something /s.

EDIT: having said that, many of the other articles on the blog do look like what would come from AI assistance. Stuff like pervasive emojis, overuse of bulleted lists, excessive use of very small sections with headers, art that certainly appears similar in style to AI generated assets that I've seen, etc. If anything, if AI was used in this article, it's way less intrusive than in the other articles on the blog.

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Author here - yes, this was written using guided AI. I consider this different than giving a vague prompt and telling it to write an article. My process was to provide all the information, for example I used AI to: 1. transcribe the phone call into text using whisper model 2. review all the email correspondence 3. research industry news about the breach 4. brainstorm different topics and blog structures to target based on the information, pick one 5. Review the style of my other blog articles 6. write the article and redact any personal info 7. review the article and suggest iterate on changes multiple times. To me this is more akin to having a writer on staff who can save you a lot of time. I can do all the above in less than 30mins, where it could take a full day to do it manually. I had a blog 20 years ago but since then I never had time to write content again (too time consuming and no ROI) - so the alternative would be nothing.

There are some still some signs you can tell content is AI written based on verbosity, use of bold, specific HTML styling, etc. I see no issues with the approach. I noticed some people have an allergic reaction to any hint of AI, and when the content produced is "fluff" with no real content I get annoyed too - however that isn't the case for all content.

The issue is that the article is excessively verbose; the time you saved in writing end editing comes at the cost of wasting readers' time. There is nothing wrong with using AI to improve writing, but using it to insert fluff that came at no cost to you and no benefit to me feels like a violation of social contract.

Please, at least put a disclaimer on top so I can ask an AI to summarize the article and complete the cycle of entropy.

I have attempted to condense it based on your feedback, and added some more info about email headers.

Sure, the problem here isn't a lack of veracity in regard to your source material. Many readers are also concerned with the stilicisms and prose of the articles they read. I don't care particularly that the complete article wasn't written by a human. The generic LLM style is however utterly unbearable to me. It is overly sensational and verbose, while lacking normal sized paragraphs of natural text. It's reminiscent of a poor comic except extrapolated to half the stuff which gets posted to HN.

> [...] I can do all the above in less than 30mins, where it could take a full day to do it manually [...]

Generating thousands of words because it's easy is exactly the problem with AI generated content. The people generating AI content think about quantity not quality. If you have to type out the words yourself, if you have to invest the time and energy into writing the post, then you're showing respect for your readers by making the same investment you're asking them to make... and you are creating a natural constraint on the verbosity because you are spending your valuable time.

Just because you can generate 20 hours of output in 30 minutes, doesn't mean you should. I don't really care about whether or not you use AI on principle, if you can generate great content with AI, go for it, but your post is classic AI slop, it's a verbose nightmare, it's words for the sake of words, it's from the quantity over quality school of slop.

> I had a blog 20 years ago but since then I never had time to write content again (too time consuming and no ROI) - so the alternative would be nothing.

Posting nothing is better than posting slop, but you're presenting a false dichotomy. You could have spent the 30 minutes writing the post yourself and posted 30 minutes of output. Or, if you absolutely must use ChatGPT to generate blog posts, ask it to produce something that is a few hundred words at most. Remember the famous quote...

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

If ChatGPT can do hundreds of hours of work for you then it should be able to produce the shortest possible blog post, it should be able to produce 100 words that say what you could in 3,000. Not the other way around!

If you can't be bothered to spend even an hour writing something up, especially allegations of this magnitude, then chances are you know it's actually not an article with any content worth reading.

I get you, It grinds my gears. I've been told that I "Talk" like an LLM because I go into detail and give thorough explanations on topics. I'm not easily insulted but that was a first for me. I used to get 'human wikipedia' before, and before that 'walking dicitonary' which I always thought was reductive but it didn't quite irk me as much as being told my entire way of communicating is reminiscent of a bot. So perhaps I take random accusations of LLM use to heart, even if it does seem overwhelmingly likely to be true.

You're getting downvoted for being right. Attempt being nuanced and people will call you a robot.

Well if that's how we identify humans I for one prefer our new LLM overlords.

A lot of people who say stuff like "boo AI!" are not only setting the bar for humanity very low, they're also discouraging intellectualism and intelligent discourse online. Honestly, if a LLM wrote a good think piece, I prefer that over "human slop".

I just wish people would critique a text on its own merits instead of inventing strawman arguments about how it was written.

Oh and, for the provocative effect — I'll end my comment with an em dash.

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