Comment by NeutralCrane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NeutralCrane | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think the need to jump through hoops to disclose anything and anything that might offend someone’s particular sensibilities is a losing battle. What if I want a disclosure on if the content is being hosted via AWS vs some non-magacorp that agrees with my sensibilities more? Or that the power being used by the data center is renewable? Or a disclosure for the author’s every political position so I know if I agree with them and if I should amplify their message and/or generate ad revenue through their site?

At the end of the day, the ideas within the content are what matters. An idea has or does not have merit regardless of if it was produced entirely by a person, or by a person using AI as an editor, or 100% generated by AI. If you need a disclosure on if an idea was produced by AI, you are saying that you have no interest on debating the content on the grounds of the arguments it is making, while simultaneously ceding you can’t tell the difference between someone using AI and someone who isn’t (which undermines one of the primary arguments against AI, that it makes for inferior outputs).

> if the content is being hosted via AWS vs some non-magacorp

> power being used by the data center is renewable

That doesn't change anything about the content itself. AI writing is a disservice to the reader. Why should I even care to read an article you didn't even care about writing yourself? At this point a 300-character tweet would've achieved the same effect.

That’s my point. The AI writing either affects the content or it doesn’t. If you require a disclaimer to tell the difference, then it isn’t affecting the content.

Requiring a disclaimer is essentially admitting the content isn’t meaningfully different than human generated content. At that point, who cares? Just engage with the premise on its own merits, rather than on how it was written.

Then you're totally right. In this case, it's a poor usage of AI because we are able to tell it's slop.

Odds are very high at this point that I've come across a piece of content I enjoyed that was at least partly written by an LLM without having detected it.

> Requiring a disclaimer is essentially admitting the content isn’t meaningfully different than human generated content. At that point, who cares? Just engage with the premise on its own merits, rather than on how it was written.

The problem is the reader has to invest time to find out and LLM written text will (on average) lower the quality towards "meh" and spend more words doing so. Even if the author is making an earnest effort to produce high quality content, they need to admit to themselves and others that their results will be more hit or miss. The disclosure allows the reader to make a more informed decision about how to engage with the material (e.g., have an LLM summarize or analyze the content, or just dive in because we know it will very likely be a good read). Editing what someone has written is like reviewing code, you're by default not as invested, so the results will likely reflect that reality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com