Hacker News Reader

Comment by zhovner | Hacker News Reader

I'm the author of this text. It was originaly writen in a mix of russian and english WITHOUT the AI and then polished and translated by editors. Here is the original draft https://blog.flipper.net/p/b5b7e9f8-a99f-4393-bf72-23fe5a42e...

View on HN

It’s a bizarre feeling isn’t it? Sorry you’re having to defend the act of thinking.

The problem is you can’t defend it right? Someone could say your evidence came from a prompt: “Take this article and reverse engineer a hypothetical unpolished first draft written in a mix of Russian and English”

I’m not sure what the right answer is here. Fwiw I have no doubt you wrote it unassisted.

Chain of trust from RFID chips embedded in their fingertips that authenticated to their keyboard, proving that at least their fingers grazed the keys that formed the message.

But what if they're reading off of a pre-written message?

And are those RFID chips firmware signed by a big tech overlord that we trust? And with kernel level anti-heat? Cause if not...

Are those RFID chips preventing me (or a physical robot) from typing generated text?

Proving a negative is nearly impossible. "Prove you didnt use ai"... its a common argument tactic used all the time.

I've seen many people on reddit use AIs to translate their text. Given that it clearly puts the "default AI voice" on top of their text, it makes me think that it is a fairly inaccurate translation. I suspect something like Google Translate is still better for most people, because it seems to do better at maintaining the voice. Of course in the limit, what I'm calling "voice" simply can't be translated between languages, but you can certainly do much better than slamming "default AI voice" on top of people's writing. I'm sure under the hood Google Translate is a whole bunch of LLMs too now, but special-purpose translation LLMs without the agent refinement can do a lot better. It's unfortunate that people think this is an easy way to translate but the chatbot LLMs, while capable of understanding multiple languages and superficially translating them, probably shouldn't be used for this purpose.

It may be possible to prompt the chatbots to also use a certain style in the target language to get it out , but I'm not fluent enough in a second language to know if it worked and I'm yet to see any of the several people I've suggested this to try it, so I'd be interested if anyone knows if this works.

In my experience, Google Translate is still so much worse than even free ChatGPT at translating that it is unusable for anything you want to put out and have it seem at least somewhat professional.

Especially the voice, ChatGPT seems to infer the formality and overall tone much better than Google Translate. YMMV.

Bummer. I'm sure someone could build a fantastic translator with our current AI stack but I can't argue with them that the return would not be worth it compared to training another general-purpose AI. But the general-purpose AIs impose way too much of their own voice on the translated results.

People hunting for AI text is reaching transvestigation levels

On one hand, you’re right. On the other, it’s normal that humans want to gauge the authenticity of the things they interact with. Some sort of uncanny valley thing.

Normal is humans living in caves.

And still, those humans would go outside and check when they heard an odd noise, so they could ascertain if it was a threat or not. This is more of this.

What happens when everyone learns they need to use something like https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md and emerge on the other side of the valley?

That’s fine. Most of the tropes, and the sameness, are themselves the problem.

https://xkcd.com/810/

oh people absolutely get off on this. it’s clear that some people feel a sense of moral superiority from it

I have trouble understanding this. I don't see anyone complaining that we use microwaves and ovens instead of going for lit wood to cook or using search engines instead of crawling through libraries, or using Google Maps instead of using paper maps. These are tools. If output of an LLM conveys the ideas to be told, then what is the problem?

Not everyone needs to be magicians with language.

One related problem I see, is the avoidance of accountability and responsibility thats prevalent. When people use AI words and don't check they actually match their intent or voice, and then if something was incorrect or didn't stand the test of scrutiny they avoid accountability and can say "The AI wrote it and I didn't check it closely". It seems similar to what we see in leadership chains in some organizations, we are struggling to hold those people accountable so we lash out on whomever and whatever we can so IMO thats part of the emotional undertone of the whiplash we see on AI content here.

Edit: Since this is possible, I think it's important to start to ask "did you use AI and disclose it?" as it sets the tone better.

You absolutely do see people complaining that restaurant food is microwaved over properly grilled, fried, etc. I think that's the better analogy.

You are paying restaurants for food to be prepared in the way you want. But this is not the same. Someone created some content the way they want. You haven't ordered that content. And you complain it's not prepared the way you like.

"Translation tools" is AI, so it's correct that our AI-sensors went off.

Edit: Also, speaking as a trans person, the analogue would be looking at a trans person and noticing that they are trans. Which is not a transvestigation. (You wouldn't normally announce that said person is trans, because it's usually not relevant. It often is relevant if an article is written with AI.)

There is no hunting involved. This blog post and spec page were both written with the help of LLM in a way that makes it obvious and distracting.

Thanks for posting this.

Ive been using translation tools a bunch these last few years. Nobody seemed to have any hate for better accessibility.. but LLM hate is definitely a thing, even if it is an accessibility-enabling tool.

Don't be discouraged by the comment section here. HN is a cesspool at this point.

"cesspool" is pretty overboard. Have you read virtually any other site lately?

It's obviously subjective, but I have a feeling this community has descended into hardcore cynicism and cheap meta analysis of most article I care about. Maybe it's the times we live in.

I barely spend much time in the comment sections nowadays - once I stopped visiting this website I started following a bunch of makers on youtube and printables, and got looped into some discord groups and meetups. It was a breath of fresh air - would definitely recommend.

Phoronix is so much worse... but in general I think it's mostly a problem with older tech "experts". They have developed a jaded, egotistical world view where only their own opinions can matter, and everyone else is wrong.

I never spent much time there but I have heard people say that. A part of me worries that I might have become the old "get off my lawn" type of person in some ways.

I just don't relate to a lot of the upvoted content here, so instead of singing my soul trying to make sense of things, I moved on. Perhaps it's not my place to be any more. These new places I have joined are much easier for me to talk in, and there are no upvotes/downvotes so people tend to be pretty chill and genuine, even if it causes friction sometimes.

> They have developed a jaded, egotistical world view where only their own opinions can matter, and everyone else is wrong.

That describes HN

Sorry but I call bullshit. There’s em-dashes all over, even in your original text. Were the editors or translators an AI? Did the editors use AI to “polish” it?

The emojis used in the bullet points (which are missing from your original text, but were added in at some point) are also dead giveaways that AI was involved here.

The em dash "gotcha" is so fucking tiring at this point.

It is perfectly possible, and even easy, to write e[nm] dashes manually. With compose key sequences it's barely more effort than typing a normal dash/hyphen, even. (Just compose key + `-.` for en dash, and `--` for em dash.)

I can't understand why people defend improper typography. If you're writing a proper, professional-looking blog post, they think you now should use double-minus -- instead of em-dash to make it look non-AI like, only for that reason?

In Russia, we have many typography keyboards/addons, because, well, it historically looked very silly to use double-minus or "-quotes instead of «»-quotes.

I've no idea how some countries got their typography standardized on the PCs and have it from the very beginning (Germany with their quotes for example), but the other countries need to setup external software and configuration. Apparently, US also didn't got their "third level" keyboard as a standard.

I used em-dashes before Gen AI was a thing and I refuse to stop using them. Doing so is admitting the AI companies won. I am not going to change the way I write just to appease some terminally online folks who lack the ability to understand that LLMs learned to write from our writings.

Then eat a pile of different dashes made by the same guy back in 2013 [0].

[0] https://habr.com/ru/articles/191654/

formal Russian is 'em dash heavy', here's South Korea Wikipedia arcticle in Russian, Dec 2021 version: https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%A0%D0%B5%D1%8...

Ignoring references, just in article text: 5800 words (spaces); 78 em dashes (1.3%); 0 en dashes; 90 hyphens (1.5%).

English version of same timeframe: 16000 words; 0 em dashes; 32 en dashes (0.2%); 262 hyphens (1.6%).

> The emojis used in the bullet points

They're used in one list, where sub-projects are listed. Emojis used in that list are consistent with ones used for same sub-projects on Wiki https://docs.flipper.net/one Someone thought it would be better than plain text, that's it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com