Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohyoutravel | Hacker News Reader

The article was written with a premise into a prompt for Claude, which then wrote the whole thing.

What do you think about the contents?

Unless there's evidence that all of it was fact-checked, it's a waste of time to look harder. You can get any output you like, it doesn't mean it's correct.

How different is this from humans? In my experience people fill in the blanks quite the same, they just do it less convincingly and sometimes maliciously. Having the sort of prejudice you describe against AI content doesn't make sense if you consider humans make mistakes and lie all the time, coming from a position of less knowledge than LLMs. You need to approach both with similar caution.

At least part of it is that we do attribute malice or lack of care (or madness) to people who repeatedly do it, and treat their output differently in the future.

For some reason, some people repeatedly defend machines that constantly do the same thing, and claim we should give it the benefit of the doubt.

Why give anyone benefit of doubt when you're just trying to extract true information. If a person BSs you, you don't believe them in the future either. Giving BS the benefit of doubt isn't serving anyone. Giving intent benefit of doubt makes sense, but intent isn't important when it comes to technical information and lying about it

Yes, that is my point about "AI" generated text. It's deep into "doubt by default, require evidence before bothering" territory. Hence I think it's strange to defend spending time on it by default.

> How different is this from humans?

Humans exercise judgement.

At least when humans lie they're usually doing it on purpose. When machines lie they don't know they're doing it.

Why does this make it better for you the consumer? You still need to detect the lie and respond to it appropriately. Machines lie more elegantly, I think is the scary part

I wouldn't say machines lie more elegantly.

They lie more unpredictably.

It’s poorly written and untrustworthy. I’d rather it not exist.

It’s interesting this AI-generated article references “Reddit threads” being “full of support” two or three times, yet I can’t find Reddit threads in the references.

I wonder if we are seeing what may be the result of a Reddit bot campaign to sway generative output.

I think I could prompt Claude to make me an opposite article telling me Americans love flock cameras

Why does that even matter? It's inauthentic, don't waste your time.

If the contents can be generated, why does the contents matter? They can just distill the blog down to a prompt and skip forcing us to read bullshit.

I value my time. I will not be reading any statistically composed slop that a human couldn’t even be bothered to spend time writing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com