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Comment by ademup | Hacker News Reader

I'll probably be downvoted to the bottom of the ocean, but I feel this needs to be said:

- Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing? And how would you know if the /content/ is worthwhile, unless you read it...

- The ability to "detect AI" is imperfect at best. 90% AI written? 5%? How would you know, unless you read it....

- If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"?

- If you are wrong, and you announce it to the world, how would it feel to someone who spent a lot of time and energy writing?

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> Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing?

Two reasons:

1. I can't effectively engage in follow-up conversation with the "author." I can't do it with the human (principal) because they didn't write it and can't explain it--and, in fact, they may not even personally agree with all if it!

2. It shifts the cognitive burden from writer to reader. What makes writing hard, and valuable, is the effort put into translating one's raw, unfiltered thoughts into writing that is easy to comprehend, and the writer's own unique personality that is expressed in it. As ambient prose, AI-generated writing is often not only more difficult to read than human-drafted prose, but it also has this "sameness" quality that makes every "author" have the same personality.

> Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing

The purpose of writing is to communicate. The person communicating is an important part of the message.

Consider the sentence "I'm waiting for you at home." It really matters if it's said by your loving wife or an evil clown. You can extrapolate from this.

Imagine a future where 99% of text is written by 1 unpassionate person. Reading the same patterns, the same tropes, the same flow across paragraphs, over and over, would be unpleasant. It already is unpleasant.

The problem is that some people think all AI-assisted writing is prompting "write me a post about X", so they see LLM prose and assume there has been no thought or effort put into it.

Because my time is valuable and if the person who sent me something didn't care enough to write it, then I don't care enough to read it.

Bragging about it is weird, but I will use it like I use 'RTFM'.

And detectability - My AI-DAR (radar), is fairly fined tuned but not perfect, so if I make a mistake, oh well, the point is I'm protecting my time.

So how much time do you deem a minimum amount for someone to spend on some unit of work before you're willing to read it? And what technologies are allowed -- are word processors allowed or does it have to be done with a writing instrument like a pencil? What about spell check? Do you care if they had done their research with a Wikipedia or do you prefer card catalog for the really important work?

I'm not sure. Another way to think about it: how _little_ time is someone able to spend on something where you will still be interested in reading it? If someone tells their unattended LLM agent to create a blog, write whatever content will maximize banner ad revenue, and then share each post on Hacker News, would you read it? What if the content is actually interesting in your opinion?

For me, the amount of time could be very minimal. A person can splash some paint on a canvas, tape a banana to a wall, press a shutter, or write 14 syllables and if it's well considered then that can be enough. Time spent just doesn't play into it for me, unless that's actually part of the point.

> If someone tells their unattended LLM agent to create a blog, write whatever content will maximize banner ad revenue, and then share each post on Hacker News, would you read it? What if the content is actually interesting in your opinion?

Yes, I think if one of that content had a headline that interested me I would definitely click on it, because that's already happened!

The shape of Claude’s writing style is horrible to read and easy to spot, and that’s a ground truth.

A belt-and-braces approach.

In one case, I could tell because the tone of the piece sounded exactly like the kind of stuff I would read after prompting an LLM and I had never heard of the author before, but I knew that they were like an intern or a new college grad and for some reason their piece was trying to persuade employees in a certain field about how they had to use AI itself. It just rubbed me the wrong way because if they did use AI, then they didn't even bother to rewrite the repetitive instances of "it's not X; it's y", and also "This isn't X".

Maybe you haven’t seen enough coworkers send you pages and pages of slop.

> Why does it matter who or what wrote a thing?

Because what the clanker produces is almost always bad output compared to what a capable human would produce. Furthermore, even an incapable human is better than a clanker, because at least humans have intrinsic value that they bring to the table. Finally, it's just plain disrespectful to refuse to take some time to answer a question and hand it off to the clanker.

> If you didn't read it, then why brag about it with an "AI;DR"?

It's a reference to TL;DR. If you can understand that, you can understand AI;DR.

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