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Comment by JasonADrury | Hacker News Reader

Why are these articles always AI written? What's the point of having AI generate a bunch of filler text?

Blog posts like this are for SEO. If the text isn't long enough, Google disregards it. Google has shown a strong preference for long articles.

That's why the search results for "how to X" all starts with "what is X", "why do X", "why is doing X important" for 5 paragraphs before getting to the topic of "how to X".

This is a tough one in my opinion because the content of the article is valuable. Yes while reading it i noticed several AI tells. Almost like hearing a record scratch every other paragraph. But I was interested in the content so I kept reading mostly trying to ignore the "noise". The problem I fear is that with enough AI generated content around, I will become desensitized to that record scratching. Eventually between over-exposure, those who can't recognize the tells, people copying the writing they see..., we might have to accept what might become a prevalent new style of writing.

It’s on the front page of HN, generating clicks and attention. Most people don’t care in the ways that matter, unfortunately.

1) the person is either too lazy to write themselves anymore, when AI can do it in 15 sec after being provided 1 sentence of input, or they adopted a mindset of "bro, if I spent 2 hours writing it, my competitors already generated 50 articles in that time" (or the other variant - "bro, while those fools spend 2 hours to write an article, I'll be churning 50 using AI")

2) They are still, in whatever way, beholden to legacy metrics such as number of words, avg reading time, length of content to allow multiple ad insertion "slots" etc...

Just the other day, my boss was bragging about how he sent a huge email to the client, with ALL the details, written with AI in 3 min, just before a call with them, only for the client on the other side to respond with "oh yeah, I've used AI to summarise it and went through it just now". (Boss considered it rude, of course)

Jason Meller was the former CEO of Kolide, which 1Password bought. I doubt he's beholden to anything like word count requirements. There is human written text in here, but it's not all human written -- and odds are since this is basically an ad for 1Password's enterprise security offerings that this is mostly intended as marketing, not as a substantive article.

Author here, I did use AI to write this which is unusual for me. The reason was I organically discovered the malware myself while doing other research on OpenClaw. I used AI for primarily speed, I wanted to get the word out on this problem. The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing it so it could be both safe and easily understood by others.

I very much enjoy writing, but this was a case where I felt that if my writing came off overly-AI it was worth it for the reasons I mentioned above.

I'll continue to explore how to integrate AI into my writing which is usually pretty substantive. All the info was primarily sourced from my investigation.

As a longtime customer (I have my challenge coin right here), and fan of your writing, I do implore you to consider that your writing has value without AI. I would rather read an article with 1/5 the words that expresses your thoughts than something fluffed out.

Thanks Shank, feedback received, and appreciate that you have enjoyed my other writing in the past. Thanks for being a customer.

> The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing it so it could be both safe and easily understood by others.

What risk would there be to sharing it? Like, sure, s/http/hXXp/g like you did in your comment upthread to prevent people accidentally loading/clicking anything, but I'm not immediately seeing the risk after that

Already received a private DM from someone who was accidentally infected from my comment upthread above and was angry at me. That's why.

Okay, but how? Is someone reading commands in a "how the exploit works" write-up and... running them?

Never underestimate human stupidity, especially when it comes to IT.

One thing is clear from this thread: you are a decent human. Thank you!

Thank you for the heartfelt reply - I wish to apologize for crude assumptions I made.

My view of how people are getting affected by AI and choosing to degrade values that should matter for a bit of convenience - has become a little jaded.

While we should keep trying to correct course when we can, I should also remember when it's still a person on the other side, and use kindness.

Yes!! I'm interested in the topic but the AI patterns are so grating once you learn to spot them.

I was in prison as AI became a thing, didn't spend all that much time on the internet. Regardless, the LLM-writing stood out immediately. I didn't know what it was, but it didn't take any learning to realize that this is not how any normal human writes.

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