Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgriswald | Hacker News Reader

> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer.

Outsourcing thinking is bad. Using an LLM to assist in communicating thought is or at least can be good.

The real problem I think the author has here is that it can be difficult to tell the difference and therefore difficult to judge if it id worth your time. However, I think author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells.

View on HN

If you use an LLM to refine your ideas, you're basically adding a third party to the chat. There's really no need to copy-paste anything - you are the one that changes before you speak.

If you use an LLM to generate the ideas and justification and formatting and etc etc, you're just delegating your part in the convo to a bot.

> Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer.

Homogenization is good for milk, but not for writing.

Clarity is good for writing and homogenization can increase clarity. There is a reason technical writing doesn’t read like journalism doesn’t read like fiction. There’s a reason we have dictionaries and editors. There’s a reason we have style guides. Including an LLM in writing in any of these roles or others isn’t ipso facto bad. I think many people who think it is just don’t like the style. And that’s okay, but the article isn’t about the style per se but about effort. Both lazy writing and effortful writing can be done with or without an LLM.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement "homogenization is good for milk". What makes it "good"?

Fair enough, tastes vary. Many people prefer that milk not be chunky or lumpy, and want it to be uniform and consistent. Perhaps some do not.

> author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells

Hardly seems mutually exclusive. Surely you should generally consider the reputation of someone who posts LLM-responses (without disclosing it) to be pretty low.

A lot of people don’t particularly want to waste time reading the LLM-responses to someone else’s unknown/unspecified prompts. Someone who would trick you in to that doesn’t have a lot of respect for their readers and is unlikely to post anything of value.

I think valuing the source of information over its quality is probably a mistake for most contexts. I’m also very skeptical of people’s ability to detect AI writing in general even though AI slop seems easy enough to identify. (Although lots of human slop looks pretty similar to me.)

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to read (for example) AI fiction because I know there’s no actual mind behind it (to the extent that I can ever know this).

But AI is going to get better and the only thing that’s going to even work going forward is to trust publishers and authors who give high value regardless of how integral LLMs are to the process.

> Outsourcing thinking is bad.

I keep seeing this and I don't think I agree. We outsource thinking everyday. Companies do this everyday. I don't study weather myself, I check an app and bring an umbrella if it says it's gonna rain. My team trusts each other do do some thinking in their area, and present bits sideways / upwards. We delegate lots of things. We collaborate on lots of things.

What needs to be clear is who owns what. I never send something I wouldn't stand by. Not in a correctness sense (I have, am and likely will be wrong on any number of things) but more in a "yeah, that is my output, and I stand by it now" kind of way. Tomorrow it might change.

Also remember that google quip "it's hard to edit an empty file". We have always used tools to help us. From scripts saved here and there, to shortcuts, to macros, IDE setups, extensions and so on. We "think once" and then try not to "think" on every little detail. We'd go nowhere with that approach.

IMO it helps to take a scenario and then imagine every task is being delegated to a randomized impoverished human remote contractor, with the same (lack of) oversight and involvement by the user.

There's a strong overlap between things which bad (unwise, reckless, unethical, fraudulent, etc.) in both cases.

> We outsource thinking everyday. [...] What needs to be clear is who owns what.

Also once you have clarity, there's another layer where some owning/approval/delegation is not permissible.

For example, a student ordering "make me a 3 page report on the Renaissance." Whether the order went to another human or an LLM, it is still cheating, and that wouldn't change even if they carefully reviewed it and gave it a stamp of careful approval.

Right. I don’t think I disagee with anything you’ve said here.

However, if I had an idea and just fobbed the idea off to an LLM who fleshed it out and posted it to my blog, would you want to read the result? Do you want to argue against that idea if I never even put any thought into it and maybe don’t even care?

I’m like you in this regard. If I used an LLM to write something I still “own” the publishing of that thing. However, not everyone is like this.

Managers and business owners outsource thinking to their employees and they deserve huge paychecks for it. Entrepreneurs do it and we celebrate them. But an invention that allows the peon to delegate to an automaton? That’s where I draw the line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com