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Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

I'm a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and programming for a living, and I used to publish technical articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics—complete with em dashes—long before AI was a thing.

When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused mathematicians of churning out "calculator slop." A calculator is just a tool to make the complex work of mathematics easier. I now view AI as a calculator for writing, among other things. If the idea is good and the information is sound, I don't let the occasional awkward phrasing bother me. The truth is, most people can't write very well anyway, so if AI helps them communicate better—even if it is obviously generated by AI— more power to them.

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My points of disagreement are

- At least to me, AI writing (especially from Claude) is actively painful to read. It's worse than the average person who has flawed English (or just sucks at writing) because of how verbose and stylistically repetitive it is.

- AI writing is a strong probabilistic signal that what I'm reading is going to be crap in terms of the actual ideas and content too, even if it isn't the case 100% of the time. I just don't want to waste my time on that kind of thing.

When I use it for writing I usually have an idea or thesis to explore already. I typically write it out stream of consciousness. The core idea is mine.

I'm not using LLMs to think for me, instead just edit the writing so it has proper grammar and the run ons are reduced.

Even better for something that has data. You can pull PDFs with encoded tables and extract the data into consistent units to compare. You can have it write code to do it and cross check the outputs. You can do that in a minute. Would take hours without an LLM.

There's a bit of a difference to me between a calculator and writing.. Creativity. Words aren't just a vessel for ideas. If there were different calculation structures etc and space for people to develop their own styles and approaches to calculate things, then sure.

A person's writing style is developed through what they read. And if human's writing style becomes more homogeneous through AI then that's sort of a shame.

People that don't communicate well can't fix that with AI. Turning one line of confusing thoughts into a 30 lines text make it worse, not better.

Somebody at $formerwork wrote a "skill" that takes a poorly/briefly specified Jira ticket, and "fleshes it out", purportedly so that when an agent picks up the ticket it has more context.

Really at that point, with head in hands, rather than try to explain the foolishness, I decided I was better out.

"Zoom and enhance" used to be a joke/meme, apparently it's now "engineering".

And mathematicians who don't understand mathematical theory can't use calculators to write proofs.

Focus on the content and the idea; not how it was written.

One line of idea spread into 30 is the worse way to convene an idea. Only people terrible at writing think using AI for prose is good. Most of the times, they also hate reading it, but love asking people to read their AI slop.

Calculating is not math. Calculators make mathematicians better mathematicians by allowing them to spend their time on actual mathematics.

Writing is thinking. LLM writing makes authors worsr authors and even dumber people overall.

Also a calculator gives the same answer as a human (except for human errors where the calculator isa strict improvement). LLMs absolutely do not give the same output as humans.

Isn’t that expected, though? If 100 of us were to write a five page essay on the chaffing mechanics of an Underoos wedgie, the likelihood that any of them are the same is pretty small, isn’t it?

They don't just give different implementations of the same categorical output, but categorically different output. LLMs do not write like humans.

Hello friend, do we anything subjective from a calculator?

[edit]:

Someone already pointed this out.

Except calculators provide verifiably good results. AI slop sucks up and wastes everyone's time with nothing verifiably worthwhile.

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