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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

> Is everyone really this lazy now?

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.

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The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it. I too can just prompt “What’s the rate of self hosted email?”. If an article is signaling that its value is zero, then everyone should just move on as it’s not providing anything to anyone. Effort is the economies main signal of value, good boots that last cost more in the classic example. The only time it’s not zero is when there’s a shared understanding between those consuming the output - a company wanting your llm code, friends making funny images for an inside joke to share, etc. And some people grouped may be specifically interested in AI output - people sharing music on Suno. But in my experience no one cares about your AI generated song, image, article, app if it appears to just be my own prompt away from me having it too. Give a significant other an AI image printed out for an anniversary gift - see how excited they are about it. Versus getting an artist or photographer to do the same. As Claude might say, it’s not laziness, it’s effort.

> The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it.

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’s the worst part if they had just spent 10 minutes editing it it would’ve been fine but either they couldn’t even put in 10 minutes of effort into the article (bad) or they can’t tell that it’s written obviously like an LLM (also bad). Neither outcome makes me want to read the article more.

> The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it. I too can just prompt “What’s the rate of self hosted email?”. If an article is signaling that its value is zero, then everyone should just move on as it’s not providing anything to anyone.

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).

Sure but if they aren’t editing their copy to make it readable then I probably won’t trust anything else. It’s not hard to read what comes out of an LLM and make it readable.

And soon, I'll be lazy and use an LLM to do the reading for me. Eventually the LLMs will train on the state of the world and decide to be lazy also, and the "writer's" LLM prompt will just be shared with the "reader": nobody actually needed all those words anyway! Maybe someday we'll get rid of the links on HN and we can just share and consume headlines.

>LLMs got decent at writing,

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.

Friends of mine say that internal reports from their workplaces are often worse.

Nobody expects anyone to read those anyway.

What does "decent at writing mean"?

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.

The ability for people to communicate is paramount. Without the ability to communicate there is no progress. We might as well be deaf, dumb and perhaps blind.

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.

Efficiency and lazyness are two very distinct things. As is quality and quantity.

Isn't that a variant of utilitarianism basically? The only things worth doing are the ones which allows us to do less.

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