I'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written by a human for at least a full month.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
LLM-written content is now too common to be interesting and complaining about it does not make it stop, it just derails comment sections. The reptitive complaints are getting as annoying as the LLM-written content!
Personally, I usually check the comments before deciding to read something so I appreciate that others have saved me the trouble of reading this article in particular. If the author doesn't care enough to use human time to write it then I am not going to use human time to read it.
Likening this to restaurant reviews and publishing houses is disingenuous. One is nothing like this and the other is not helpful in that it’s such a generalization of influence as to be not useful. Everything is an influence doesn’t mean anything.
Presumptuous.
Why should your opinion be worth more than those who would like to retain a semblance of meaning in what we use to convey ideas? LLM writing is sheer trash. It comes off like a coke-addled car salesman who is making a pitch to VCs about his latest scientific discovery that will 200x their investment.
Poorly written LLM content is NOT a tangential annoyance. If this is too much, maybe you should simulate HN using
Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442
Because it's like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a few sandbags.
Maybe people in their 20s and early 30s have enough energy for this and everything else that life demands, and I applaud their effort. But I have nothing left to give after this industry has already taken so much.
I LOVE reading LLM content. I find that they tend to present things in a way that keeps my attention - something I have struggled with my whole life. I also use LLMs to assist with managing my own thoughts and helping make things coherent overall.
Sure, there is a LOT of slop out there, but the promotion of quality content is what crowd-sourced curation like HN tends towards. Much of the LLM assisted content here has a high signal to noise ratio, and is clearly a lot more involved than simply prompting "write an article on X" - despite what the haters say.
And generally I find that the content isn't that high quality. You're getting someone who superficially appears like an expert and looks like they've thought through the problem, but if you know anything about the problem, you'll find that the articles are usually weak (Gell-Mann Amnesia).
That sounds like a you problem. Develop the mental discipline to reduce your response to negative thoughts and you'll lead a more content life.
Everyone should aim to be this lazy. Everyone is trying to maximize their time. This is what software has always done. It helps people be lazy in some respect, and then, so far, we have always found new stuff to do with the time we freed up.
LLMs got decent at writing, and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.
Of course, this is contingent on your current goal: If you want to get better at writing, you should do the writing, just like you want to do the math, if you want to learn multiplication. Writing is fine as a tool just to get information across. It needn't be more than that for everyone.
Delegating this task to automation serves to undermine all the masters and indeed strengthen the servants.
Short term this offload is good for people; long term it’ll lead to mental rot where people are hard pressed to put their ideas forward and give up in exasperation when they don’t have the assistance of their servants. Their ability to even make the proper requests to the servants may deteriorate enough that their existence may come to rely on the benevolence of their servants.
Judging by people's response, that doesn't seem to be the case.
> and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.
I'll read articles written by them if and when that happens, but not before.
When you start digging in you realize that (like most things) there are multiple different definitions. LLMs are very good at putting together a lot of words that are spell correctly with grammatically correct sentences (better than me - though I'm particularly bad at this). However people often want to add other things like "correct" (the facts are right...), or some notion of not using too many words. LLMs tend to not be as good at those.
I think if this post had not gone the AI-generated-text-route, some people here would easily have considered it interesting for its content, even if it was entirely AI generated.
That only applies when the article's author just prompted an LLM (and did not supply the LLM with any data you did not have) and then posted the results.
I'd expect most article authors who use LLMs are more involved then that, checking the results and correcting (or telling the LLM to correct) thing that it got wrong.
If the article is from someone who knows more about the subject then you do then that will be more valuable that what you would get asking the LLM yourself (even if the prompt used in the article didn't include anything that your LLM didn't know).
Kill me. With a spoon. Slowly.
I stopped reading at this point. I cannot emphasize how much I HATE this AI writing style.
Is this in the same vein as using — em dashes?
Are people with minimal regard to typography and style doomed to lower their standards because the masses can't even?
It's kind of sad. I compare it to when Memes started becoming popular as communication tools on the internet (mid 2000s from what i recall): Instead of writing text to convey the idea they wanted, people just pasted a meme (my face when ... whatever).
Now with AI, everyone write everything in the same way.
I'm looking at this as having the potential to destroy one of the most harmful technologies to have been invented: social media.
If it gets sloppy enough, people may revert to more humane communications.
I stopped here, anytime an author (or likely AI) feels the need to tell me they're being honest or "genuine" I don't need to read any further.
I'll assume honesty but the minute you explicitly tell me, you've probably got an angle that I'm too dumb to see, but I'm not dumb enough to keep reading.
I hate LLM writing, but the economics checks out.
That's the thing, good writing is expensive, massively so, much more than people think.
Letting the machine do the writing however shows us that many people have no idea why writing is expensive, nor do they respect that perhaps it needs to be expensive. Communication is incredibly hard, very few master it. I'd even go so far as to say that clear, precise and readable communication is so hard that we do not have sufficient training data to build an LLM that can do it.
Letting a person write article, like this one, doesn't necessarily improve the quality, but it does show us that some thought and effort have at least been put into it. There was a cost and you deemed that cost worth it for conveying your message. Without the cost there's nothing stopping you from wasting peoples time.