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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop with this? The world has changed, LLMs exist, people use them, and "omg LLMs" is a very tired trope now. If you didn't like the article, you can critique it, but "you used a tool I don't like" is just boring.

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Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it? The fact is that generating large amounts of text without care or effort has become very easy, so it makes perfect sense to discard writing with LLM signatures.

> Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it?

The labor theory of value doesn't work in economics and it also doesn't work in literary criticism. You should spend time reading something if reading it is valuable. You shouldn't if it isn't.

The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess. Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.

Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.

Until recently, the only way to know whether the author put effort into writing the piece was to read it. Simply continue doing what you've always been doing.

That's simply not true. Before AI it took effort to write. Even rambly nonsense takes some effort, and even then rambly nonsense is usually obvious without having to read much.

AI changes things so that you can produce text that seem like it was written with care and effort very easily automatically. It requires significantly more effort from the reader to figure out that it is worthless.

It really is different.

> The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess.

This was true in the past, and is still true now.

> Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.

This isn't true now and wasn't true in the past.

I personally find LLM text exceptionally boring and tiresome to read. It is often incredibly voluminous and filed with trite phrasing that turns a one sentence idea into 3 paragraphs of pablum.

Yes, this has been inspired by a senior management figure in my company posting a clearly LLM assited 500 word slack message that could have been 2 lines.

"I find this article exceptionally boring and tiresome to read" is fine. "This article was generated by an LLM, and therefore it will be boring and tiresome" is just bias.

How about people who want to spam LLM output just provide their input alongside the output? I'd be happy to read their input.

My thought is that if you don’t care enough to even write it then why should I care to read it? The answer for me is that I don’t.

I and many others find it a useful warning. So I doubt people will stop noting it as part of a critique of things.

'You used a tool I don't like' is really missing the point.

'You generated text that is long and a bit boring and will probably include falsehoods.' is a more accurate description of why people pick up on this - the style is an indicator of using a tool that generates convincing garbage.

What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."

Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.

It's tiresome. I would rather read the bullet points he fed in and be done.

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