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Comment by redsymbol | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a post on linkedin last year titled "Do not use AI to write."

Boy, was it controversial. I could not believe how hard some people were pushing back in the comments.

Quoting from myself there:

"When you write your own words, you are forging your own voice. It is distinctive, conveys your unique world view, and connects with others in a way that is specific to you alone.

If you use an AI tool to write for you instead, you lose all of that."

That seems blindingly self-evident to me, but apparently a lot of folks disagree.

Something else I said:

"Writing is hard because thinking is hard. When you write, you forge your thoughts, distinctions, mental models and even feelings into the clarity of precision that the written word demands. When you outsource your writing to an AI tool, you lose more than you know."

I guess a lot of people don't want to bother with all that.

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It isn't surprising given how many people totally blew off assignments in english class growing up. Even pre ai, pre social media, reading was dying or already dead. Writing a close second. So many people in high powered positions sending those

"ok

Sent from my iPhone."

emails.

Many people in fact don't like doing. They like shutting off their brain. Sitting still and not using their body and letting muscles atrophy and fat pile up. AI is perfectly aligned with this disease inherent in our post survival civilization. These are the people who would have died off in the hunter gatherer era. Now we go against the forces of natural selection and what do you know, lazy nonthinking people everywhere.

You hit the nail on the head! Today’s fast paced world demands clear, concise communication. Fear not! Artificial Intelligence (AI) can allow people to communicate more effectively, allowing them to get a few extra minutes at the gym without guilt. Would you like some tips for improving work-life balance?

(Not AI, I couldn’t resist!)

This drives me crazy when dealing with various contractors in my area. They often only answer by text, and can take a little while to do so. Not a big deal.

But If I send a message with more than one question, there is what feels like a 10% change they will answer all my questions and a 90% chance they will either answer one or none and I’ll just get an “ok”. And I am talking about 5 lines messages not 50 lines.

So I have to send my questions one at a time, wait sometimes minutes to hours for an answer, then send the next one.

Of course I can also call, but often can’t reach them. Or can reach the front desk that doesn’t have the answers. I understand people are busy but it turns something that should be one message into a cat and mouse game

I learned that in a business context, it was extremely important to adhere to one issue per email.

If I peppered someone with a series of questions or worse, bundled unrelated issues into one message, they would all probably be mishandled. I think it was a mismatch of expectations and/or how corporate workers use email apps.

So if I held every message to one topic, one question, things tended to work as expected.

By email this is true but you can’t do that as well by chat or texts. You only get one thread per contact.

The contractors who are best at doing high quality work are often not the best at written communication. People who enjoy reading and writing don't tend to go into that line of work in the first place. And they're probably juggling your questions with a dozen other urgent issues from employees, suppliers, and other customers. The frustration is understandable but we have to be realistic in our expectations.

> So I have to send my questions one at a time,

That's what i learned in a big company.

That was the low-key surprise for me in the Epstein files: so many rich, powerful people wrote at an early grade-school level even in professional contexts. I know that’s not a universal sample but it made me wonder how many unsung admin assistants, grad students, etc. cleaned up everything they wrote for a broader context.

I worked for some very wealthy and powerful.

Some were low IQ but had power and money. Some were busy. Some did not want to put any additional effort because the relationship permitted them to be informal, lazy, brief.

In person and with contracts they were extremely diligent with their words.

Informal devience is a social signifier "I want you to know I don't have to do that shit"

Yeah, it makes sense as a display of clout, the normal rules not binding them. I would have thought there was more sense of pride but that’s very middle class of me, I suppose.

"... And you can't stop me, 'cuz I'm better than you."

Yea, it's a glimpse into a totally different world!

When I get ready to send an E-mail to a SVP or other VIP at work, I agonize over the wording, get others' feedback on it, write a draft, get it reviewed, write another one, make sure all my facts are straight, make sure there's a TLDR up front, make sure it's formal enough but not stuffy, then clench my butt and hit send...

Then you look at the Epstein files, and these E-mails are going to CEOs and heads of state! And they're like:

    "yo, wasssup retards!! we doin some kiddy diddling FRIDAY. who in???????? peace out bitch4es"

My mind sort of shuts off once I recognize something is written by AI. It's really hard to try and force myself to keep reading. Even if a piece of writing walks the line of being written by a human or AI, my mind will want to disengage.

> Boy, was it controversial. I could not believe how hard some people were pushing back in the comments.

I've spent very little time on LinkedIn, but what I have read struck like individuals writing in the voice of a corporate communications department giving a TED talk.

So, given the kind of metrics many corporations are putting in front of employees, I bet there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who strongly believe writing with AI is the company-approved RIGHT THING TO DO(tm).

Even before AI, LinkedIn was already a cesspool of people posting trite crap frequently just to advertise that they have “followers” and collect new ones. Worse than the recruiters.

In what bizarro world would I want to follow a rando, who has absolutely nothing to do with my career, on a platform purportedly designed for like minded people to advance their career/business?

Might as well consider the dog with the most fleas as the “Alpha”!

AI gives the experience of competency to people who are deeply aware they are not competent. This is a hard thing to pry from someone's hands once they are holding it.

This is the most accurate take on AI I’ve ever read. The illusion of competency that AI conveys is especially frustrating because it keeps people who overly rely on it from actually developing the skills and knowledge that they wished they had.

Look, if the robot can write so goodly that I get more updoots, then how is that bad? I can trade in updoots for money, cars, and condominiums. It's about updoots, and I know your ideas are bad because I'm downdooting them.

When I decided to leave my last job (I say last as I have no idea how to find work anymore), one of the top reasons is because they were pushing AI so hard on everyone. From support, development, management, to marketing, etc.. They started encouraging us to prompt AI for responses to questions from customers, co-workers, anyone and everything. The made us take mandatory "classes" on it. I lost my sh**. Things like "Oh, you don't need to waste your time responding to emails (even Slack) from people. You can use ChatGPT. A simple one or two line sentence can get you a few paragraphs!" Like, you want me to waste someone's time with a response that is not mine? Full of wasteful boilerplate just to make them believe they are reading a response from a person? Ugh. No thanks. Yeah, my ethics principals are going to be the end of me. I am fighting this AI trend with every fiber of my being, and I am losing everything because of it.

I am in a writers group and many are extremely pro AI and regularly use AI to write or plan or ideate (novels)

The irony is, if one can't ideate or write novels, then why are they writing novels at all?

What's the quality level of what they are producing this way? Are they ending up with good pieces of writing?

Many aspiring writers (perhaps most?) love the idea of having written, not so much the work of actually writing.

I hate to break it to you, but most people don't have a compelling voice, and they don't have a cohesive world view, and they typically fail at connecting with others, especially if they're schlepping around on LinkedIn trying to social-media-post their way to a job or networking opportunities.

Also there are so many folks, especially on LI, who don't even have fluent English, or decent grammar, and therefore behind the filter of an erudite LLM is an excellent place to stay, pull some levers, and plop out some really compelling word-salad.

That is just the way of the world today. Whether people are doing minimal processing, through SpellCheck or Grammarly, or just prompting an LLM to generate walls of text, they're using assistance to actually find their voice, or filter their own weak voice through something that will win friends and influence more people than they ever could on their own.

Most of the LinkedIn AI generated posts are accompanied by an AI generated picture or diagram intended to grab your attention as you scroll. Those images have a certain obvious "look" to them so when I see them I routinely block the poster. This takes a bit of effort but has cleaned up my feed a lot.

I agree completely; it's been observed "LinkedIn people" are somewhat psychotic.

At this particular time in history, it seems that almost all work is performative, showing up at work is a performance, and work isn’t even really necessary. We live in a dumb world.

I would argue ~80%

And that is 99.9% of HR, accounting, and every social media related company.

I think you are right. But for non-native people this is already true. I feel like I can express myself in English the same as I would do in my native language. Sometimes using AI helps me pick a better word or a better way to phrase it.

I would never use AI to write in my native language though

This is the right way to use it! You're not making it write for you. You are instead using it to help you write your own words. Massively different.

Most people are not good at articulating their thoughts into words, let alone writing well.

Now, AI has given all these Linkedin psychopaths who did not have a voice because of their affliction a rare kind of superpower to endlessly spew their meaningless dribble.

I cringe every time I have to go on the cesspool that is Linkedin, but forced to since am job hunting.

I couldn't agree with you more

Alternate viewpoint: the ideas and insights in the content are more important than the voice. The voice absolutely is critical in getting your ideas across and making a point effectively, but there is value in having fresh ideas being broadcast into the world.

To the extent that LLMs help this where otherwise people would simply have not spoken up, I think it's OK. Of course, the slopisms are an instant turn-off and limit the reach of those ideas, but at least they're out there now.

Personally I've developed a knack of quickly skimming through the bland language to get a sense of whether there is anything interesting enough to re-read more closely. It's become so ingrained that I don't mind wading through all the noise from all the other lazy, content-free slop to get to that little bit of signal.

> Writing is hard because thinking is hard.

You know, why should i think for myself when someone else does it for me ? /s

You're absolutely right. I think a lot of it just comes down to the fact that people who've never put any real effort into something (design, writing, programming, etc.) never really understand the beauty and uniqueness that comes with original human content, and so they don't see their slop the same way someone with experience in that area would.

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