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Comment by gortok | Hacker News Reader

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person.

If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?

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I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation.

LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say.

They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1]

So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763

I believe you've just described 95% of things posted to LinkedIn...

LinkedIn was overtaken by LLM nonsense at about the release of ChatGPT 3... I mean it was incredibly stupid and transparent engagement slop before that, but still.

I remember talking to a business type who was so incredibly proud that GPT could turn his incredibly vapid thoughts into bland pointlessness on LinkedIn... not realizing that everyone in his feed was doing the same thing. We never did business with him for ... reasons, obviously :)

Wow! that comment you linked speaks to me. I was watching a review video for a game yesterday that was so obviously written by AI it was actually painful to listen to. I started reading the comments and there were several people praising this Youtuber on their great use of metaphor. Literally "subbed because you're such an amazing writer." It actually shook me to my core. If those were real people making those comments, there is no hope for us. I need to believe those were mostly bot comments just to maintain my sanity.

At least you didn’t over-react. Some people seem so afraid of consuming AI-generated content that they see it everywhere. A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI. In the comments for any blog post or article that hits the HN front page, there is always someone confidently calling it out for being unmistakeably written by Claude. It’s so tiring. Let’s say the YouTube video that rocked the very foundation of your being was scripted with AI assistance. It was apparently good enough for people to praise it specifically. Why is that a problem? If it wasn’t AI, which may well be the case, would your soul be calmed?

What I find tiring: the same. writing. style. everywhere.

Various youtubers I subscribe to are using apparently AI-written scripts now. They all wrote and spoke just fine before, each with their own particular style. Now they just sound like Claude. I know it's still their thoughts, and I'm still interested in what they have to say. Maybe they're using AI to save time, or maybe they've read too much AI text and now that's how they write. But it kinda takes the sparkle and personality out of everything.

>A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI.

In this era, I live by two principles

1. Do my best to avoid AI slop. If you agree, this is straightforward. I don't always succeed and I'm sure I've "fallen for it" in quite a few places, but I disengage if I sense it.

2. Let sleeping dogs lie. Because I'm not some almighty judge of AI, I'm not going around accusing others of doing so. There is zero benefit for me to call out random internet pieces on if something is AI. And ultimately, I'm in discussions to engage with humans, not to monitor bots nor even to argue about the existence of bots (I feel I've said all I can on the topic, I have moved on internally in terms of discussion).

>It was apparently good enough for people to praise it specifically. Why is that a problem?

Writing is subjective, but I can certainly see some dangerous anti-patterns develop if you take bad advice as a beginner, especially advice that ultimately came from hallucinations in an LLM.

I was watching a Youtube video about "developing taste" and how culture has been impacted in the modern age. TYou risk becoming "tasteless" consuming AI slop, because AI by its nature is trying to average out all the inputs and cut of all the edges of any given culture. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you just wanted to get a brief overview of a culture, but is poison if it comes time to try and become part of that culture.

as a huge summation of an interesting video: There's 3 aspects of a culture: embodied,objectified, and institutionalized. it's never been easier to pretend to be a "poser" in this era of AI and be rewarded for it, because AI makes objectified easier than ever. But it doesn't mean it truly embodies you into the culture. And that's dangerous for multiple reasons (in my eyes).

Thank you for the considered response. Do you know the name of the channel the video was on? Searching youtube for ‘developing taste’ returns too many videos and I don’t know where to start.

What's tiring is being spammed with AI slop every where. A strong counter reaction that may occasionally have false positives is only natural.

> A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI.

Well that is not really what happened at all. Most people seem to believe Hank Green was honest when he said the line "thanks for the pushback" was in fact made up at the spot and not by an LLM, and the scandal would have died there.

Except in follow-up to that, Hank Green made several very open and personal posts about his LLM usage getting completely out of hand to the extent that his wife and brother called for an intervention about it, that it's been like an addiction to him, and that he had been letting it guide him way too much and how this was a breach of trust to his audience.

There were also one or two other incidents for people who are paying attention that this did another rather large dent in trusting him as a "smart person who says smart things", any more.

> If those were real people making those comments, there is no hope for us.

they probably weren't.

> If those were real people making those comments

Really, does it matter? Lots of YouTube comments are zero-effort attempts to juice a video/channel's engagement metrics (aka "commenting for the algorithm"), and whether they're accomplices/sockpuppets, or just unimaginative parasocial parasites, is basically unknowable from the outside.

You realize that when people aren't told an image or text is AI generated, on average they prefer it to human created content, and it's only when they know it's AI that they rate it lower than the human content? You shouldn't be shocked by this, the last 20 years of Hollywood and pop music clearly indicates the the mass market doesn't care about craft or art, it likes to ride the vibes of what's trending.

Yeah, and you might enjoy a meal, and when someone tells you it contained 5 percent human eyeballs to give the sauce that awesome texture, and you know they're not lying, you will puke it out right on the spot.

Then you say "it's because I don't like human eyeballs in my food", and someone and replies "but the mass market clearly doesn't care. You shouldn't be shocked by this."

> when people aren't told an image or text is AI generated, on average they prefer it to human created content

uhm this is so heavily dependent on the kind, type and model of AI used that I'm calling you out on making this "statistic" up on the spot.

but I'm not entirely sure what your point is

if you don't tell people which food has been hyperprocessed and laced with corn syrup or whatever you can imagine, they will also prefer that one

also 9 times out of 10, people prefer the needle with heroin in it

LLMs output the average of their training data. On average, people are tasteless and clueless. So it's to be expected that average and especially below-average people find LLM output appealing. Or the tasteless work of an average person.

> So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are.

Now? My friend, we’ve been flooded with stupid people’s attempts to show us how smart they are ever since internet forums came to be. Heck, just look at 90% of the comments on any given HN post. It’s mind-numbingly stupidity by the handful disguised as PhD talk—big words, fancy terms, heavy phrasing, all to say a bunch of nothing or just pretend they have a part in said conversation.

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person.

Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link".

But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content.

(And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.)

> If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.

To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.

> If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content.

No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not.

> No, linking blog post and posting AI generated content is not the same. One is ok, other is not.

Meet "the masses".

Sorry, but no. Sending me a link as an alternative to having a conversation is totally not OK.

I recommend this great book, blog or whatever is completely fine in the middle of the conversation.

And it is not the same as "I had AI generate this".

> I recommend this great book, blog or whatever is completely fine in the middle of the conversation.

Please reread my comments. That's not the scenario I was discussing.

I would have said the opposite: I'd assume the link to be to a blog post, or Wikipedia page, that articulates the idea in a clearer more succint way than the person might be able of.

This is, of course, before people started sending Instagram Reel or YouTube Short links. Or, maybe worse, links to 3-hour-long YouTube podcasts.

> I'd assume the link to be to a blog post, or Wikipedia page, that articulates the idea in a clearer more succint way than the person might be able of.

As with everything, it depends on who is sending it. For some people, yes. For the rest (majority), it's a case of

He: Makes some claim

Me: I question some aspect of it.

... Potential back and forth

He: Oh, just look at this video/article/book that explains and answers all your concerns.

Thing is, in the majority of the cases, it didn't address my concern. I'd write up something in detail, and get back either silence or yet another link. Took way too long for me to realize I shouldn't bother clicking the link to begin with.

You are just collateral damage.

Too many people put up a lazy comment when it is clear they haven't thought about $it, googled $it, or asked AI about $it. Where $it == {whatever they are unsure about or arguing about}.

The lazy commenter desires a human to waste their time writing a response. Often others judge that the commenter doesn't deserve the time or effort, so instead of a thoughtful response others often just reply with a relevant link - giving the commenter a chance to learn or reply.

Unfortunately offhand responses like LMGTFY become a common behaviour in forums, even when wildly inappropriate (as you note).

When it happens to you, it isn't personal, you are just a victim because everyone has been trained to a pattern of behaviour by thoughtless commenters.

It is also likely your comments get pattern matched as not worthwhile reasoning clearly to. You can do something to change your writing to avoid appearing waffly/bullshitty/unworthy (or whatever the reason responders are not replying to the meat of your point). Here's where I've done that pattern match in the past although usually spent time writing reply too: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by%3Arobocat%20duckduckgo&sort...

Sorry in advance if I've misunderstood your point or if I'm being Captain Obvious.

You're totally on point, but I do think you're missing my wider point:

People replying with LLM responses is not really functionally different from lazily responding with a link. If the OP is astounded that LLM responses are tolerated, where was he all those years when people were lazily responding with links?

I am likely agreeing with you: but perhaps I just failed to follow what you were trying to say.

Perhaps it is a wider problem of "flipping the bozo bit", that someone perceives they are being treated as worthless (or worse) and then they respond similarly?

A considered AI response can be good if quoted correctly. Unfortunately I've seen a lot of AI-hate, where even fantastic AI answers (carefully vetted/curated) are shot down.

Eh, but it can become just as low-effort as AI slop. I've participated in a number of conversations here where it appears the person I was interacting with (this was pre-AI) was just googling off some keywords and pasting links with one or two sentences attached. Even in cases where they legitimately read the thing they posted, the static nature of the link leaves no room for actually responding to any nuance I might have added (i.e. the author missed something critical).

After a few years of this I also just stopped clicking thinks and refused to engage in conversations that seemed to be going that direction.

Yes - I would think this is obvious to HN commenters. Generally, when someone leaves a comment on HN that is nothing but a link, it gets downvoted.

"Because it wasn't ..."

Not so. Posting links is not the same. If you were to copy+paste someone's blog post into the forum and post is as your own, without attribution, it would be seen as plagiarism. Everyone understands this; you're trying to pass another's work as your own.

On X there's actually a good modern equivalent to "posting links" which is @grok, and letting Grok add to the thread. There is occasional teasing but it's nothing like posting slop under your own name.

ChatGPT actually allows something like this; you can share a link to the conversation.

Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.

So I take it you'll be fine with responses that begin with:

"ChatGPT says ... "?

> Everyone is free to do this, instead of using ChatGPT as a ghostwriter.

I guess the bulk of folks use ChatGPT as the preferred chatbot, but people like me have a completely different interface that doesn't use ChatGPT. I can't send someone links to my conversation.

(And as an aside, over 80% of ChatGPT conversation links I click on don't work - not sure if they clean them after some time, or I need to be logged in, etc).

And even if it did work, I really don't want to read the whole conversation. Just send me the relevant part that ChatGPT said!

"ChatGPT says" can be annoying but it's unequivocally better than passing ChatGPT off as yourself. Quoting it for convenience ("the relevant part") --- ok, great.

Does it look lazy? Well, if you respond _as its sockpuppet_ you look like a hustler, too.

I think you're right, and we've been training ourselves for the shortest path of least resistance for quite a while while kidding ourselves that we're able to somehow preserve the result as worthwhile. Before I ever tried using LLMs for search I had already been training myself for years to offload my thinking to a quick web search and a skim of some plausible result served up.

Arguably things like Cliff's Notes and "for dummies" books were sating this impulse before that, I wouldn't be surprised if the line can be traced back further.

Since dropping LLMs altogether I've made the connection to the impulse for a superficial jump to the conclusion just by noticing how I use web search, or feverishly scan some text to get to the point.

Theoretically I studied critical thinking and have learned decades ago how to recognize when this is OK and when it's a superficial placation of some addiction to closing the book on a subject or micro-subject... but boy whatever good instincts I might have developed back then have significantly eroded over time. Trying to reclaim that again is pretty humbling.

You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.

That is not currently possible. At best, you could train on millions of personal examples of style, eg historical emails, reports, etc, and you'd still never get what the person would have written.

I'd be astonished if an LLM didn't even miss important nuance, data, and focus on the wrong point.

It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.

When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.

> At best, you could train on millions of personal examples of style, eg historical emails, reports, etc, and you'd still never get what the person would have written.

You wouldn't get it verbatim, but your mistrust in AI reflecting what you intended to say is unwarranted.

I use LLMs to clean up poorly OCR'd hand written notes. It's the exception where I need to "fix" its output. It figures out what the notes intended, and writes it up fairly well.

> It think the parent's point was, hearing a summary of what someone was thinking, from a second party isn't interesting as data from the primary source.

For a lot (most?) of AI slop, I agree. But pre-LLMs, this was universally a bad idea. The first draft always sucked, and was easy to misunderstand. A good LLM, with a good system prompt, will usually produce something better than the input it is fed. Most people are poor at expressing their thoughts.

> When you come to listen to Bob the Great, having a minion walk put and paraphrase Bob's words isnt the same. Human, LLM, or not.

Most people aren't Bob The Great, but Bob The Incoherent.

I will use LLMs to find spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as voice inconsistencies. I then carefully review the diff.

Yes there are deterministic tools for this, but grammar is actually kind of complicated and the tools either miss mistakes, or suggest obviously worse edits. Looking at you, Microsoft Word.

All the writing is my own and I read all of it. Naturally there’s no LLM-isms because I wrote 99.9% of the original text. But, it was AI assisted. So, I don’t think it’s cut and dry.

Many do as you, and I completely endorse this usage. Unfortunately, too many of us here make the giant leap of "If it went through the LLM, the original person was too lazy."

Of course, the start of the thread really had nothing to do with the concept you're espousing here. At all. It was more about "Some guy writes instructions into an LLM, and gets a blog entry", which is entirely on a different scale. And yes, that's the scope and scale we've been discussing.

Personally, in this new, different context you've stated, I don't think many have an issue with that. If you write 6 pages of text, and then ask an LLM to look for errors, that's not remotely the same, and it is more like a spell checker, or a second set of eyes.

It's like when you type a search in Google and get a wall of SEO spam.

I do feel like there is some middle ground where AI helps, but there's this one guy who keeps emailing everyone with walls of dumbass text and does not integrate or understand the feedback he gets when we are telling him what he needs to do. He just runs it though the LLM and replies and then forgets half of it in the next email engagement which functions as /clear on his end apparently. Like... dude I have ChatGPT and Claude, too. Actually read your goddamn emails.

I was going to say, the acceptance of bottom-of-the-barrel and subsequent capital investment in SEO as some industry-standard practice has pretty much lowered our standards for writing and comprehensibility across the board

it probably doesn't help that the US education system is so deeply broken with how rooted it is in segregation-era practices [0][1][2]. the average gets dragged down quite a bit when some districts receive so much money that they're flying their Spell Bowl teams to nationals and putting them up in hotels while another one a few miles away can't afford to pay for textbooks. average reading levels suffer and consequently so too does the effort that people put into writing well and reading critically

[0] https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding

[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/s...

[2] https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/

People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.

What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.

Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.

There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.

I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander.

Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

>Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet).

For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.

> using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter

I'm sure that's the intention, but the alarming trend, at least here on HN, is crying wolf at the first em-dash.

Why is that alarming? Your immune system will also do some small amount of collateral damage to your own cells when its in a heightened state.

While you went this road of the medical metaphor, taking antibiotics at the first suspect of sickness without checking what's really going on, is a sure way to help develop antibiotic-resistant viruses.

Please note the key item is without checking. I'm not denying that many AI-generated documents are likely to be garbage. But refusing to read them just because of it will result in a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This implies that writing styles are simply "correct" or "incorrect". I'd prefer to read someone's natural writing style, even if they do not consider themselves a good writer, because it comes from them genuinely. Much better than enduring text that has been fed into an LLM and homogenized.

As a previous massive cheater in RPG games (when a was young and it was easy to write your own tools) the reason to cheat is because many games (especially RPGs) have bullshit mechanics. You have to perform a lot of repetitive stuff to get ahead. Cheating is seen as honorable because it's about getting back at a system which forces you into unfair circumstances (this is akin to corruption/graft in real life).

In my opinion, this is not the same as people who use AI comment bots.

Of course, other cheaters had other reasons, but the few I was friends with had similar motivations. (Actually, a few just created tools because they enjoyed creating tools, not so much actually using them.)

Do you mean MMORPGs or single-player RPGs. Because modifying a game or game state to your likes with the goal of improving your personal enjoyment of the game is very different compared to cheating to get ahead of other people.

Some people have an inner drive like a rat that likes pushing the reward button in the cell to dose them with opium. They want to see the YOU WIN screen and absolutely do not care what it takes to get them there. Hence the booming market for custom memory modding cheat devices and subscription cheat services. They don't want to improve their skills, they just want to be number one on the board.

The HN Guidelines explicitly forbid posting AI-generated comments; they will be deleted if detected or reported.

I'd like them to go further and delete links to AI-generated content, but I haven't been able to persuade management to do that yet.

The HN guidelines prohibit a lot of behaviors that remain unmoderated, you can see it in any thread that goes over 80 comments.

If those behaviors bothers you enough you can always mail hn@ycombinator.com because dang is not omniscient even if sometimes it looks like he is...

How many active moderators are there? This site has a lot of comments, far too many for one person to read.

Not many and if you lurk more than comment (like I do) then you don't have enough credibility on this site to down vote or flag things. Which is in my humble opinion counter productive since a bot would comment far more often to influence the comments than a human which like me often doesn't comment because my comment doesn't hold enough value to further the insightful discussion so I look more like a new account even with many years of membership.

Community mostly keeps us in check though.

(Sharing next sentence for the newbies, since you know-) All our jobs to flag on site & even email the worst offenders to hn@ycombinator.com . That said I rarely flag or even downvote anything. People either really behave, or perhaps the rulebreakers break rules that don’t grind my gears. Politely admonishing good faith rulebreakers is another tactic in the arsenal.

AI-generated comment posters with comment histories of exclusively slop get email alerts from me. Don’t know whether they’re planning to sell or spam but they clearly need help finding the door :)

HN relies heavily on moderation by users through flagging and downvotes. Hacker News is only going to survive if its community is willing to go to the effort to protect it.

I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software can start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.

Everyone can use the Internet. Some people are just crazy, neurodivergent or whatever.

I've seen it used as a newer evolution of trolling on Reddit. A user hops in to a somewhat nuanced discussion and gives a very curt and rude contradiction, and then just uses an LLM to generate walls of argumentative text after you respond with "What are you talking about and why are you being such a dick?"

Very low effort the ensnare someone and waste their time for a bit, even though it is pretty quickly obvious what they are doing.

Attention is all they need. It's ego-tripping, whoring for social status.

What's astonishing to me is how quickly people at my workplace have adopted this habit. Six months ago my manager was vociferously complaining about his boss asking him to review a lengthy document that was clearly AI generated, saying that his boss wasn't even capable of understanding the document the LLM had created. Now the majority of technical communication I get from my manager is just a transcript exported directly from ChatGPT.

Recently on a call with a junior coworker where they asked me to look at some changes they had made, they were completely unable to answer any questions that I asked on their own. The way the conversation went was: I ask a question, they type my question into a ChatGPT prompt, we read the output together and discuss whether it makes sense. This is a person I've had great discussions with in the past, and who has frequently had really good insights, but seems to have completely tapped out.

To be fair, the outputs from ChatGPT tend to be quite good. It's the inputs people give it where problems most often arise - and people seem far too eager to charge ahead with a vibe coded solution built on invalid or incomplete inputs/assumptions. And it's shocking to see how quickly and willingly people have handed over control to LLMs.

I've been wondering lately if this is about the end of the road for me for a career in tech (I've had a good long one, so.. maybe?).

I'm so tired of AI Slopped architecture documents, code, messages in slack, emails etc. I'm close to flat out rejecting any architecture doc I get that's written by an LLM, because I'm not sure the engineers even understand what they're proposing. The code is often a nightmare under the hood, even if it works. I've got smart coworkers who now just copy paste everything via an LLM giving themselves something approaching a lobotomy in the process.

I've decided to leave my current company. It's mostly the result of burnout from working many years at an unsatisfying job, but the advent of AI has certainly exacerbated things. I no longer need the income (although it's certainly nice), and recently have begun to dread the start of every work day. It's time for a change.

I may just get out of the tech industry altogether. But I'm also tempted to try my hand at an indie dev project that I have in mind. With AI, it seems like it would be easier than ever to get a new project off the ground. And I don't really mind AI-assisted development personally. It's mainly all the organizational and interpersonal disruption that is giving me a headache at the moment.

This is very sad. I found it was interrupting coding when the editor would suggest new blocks of code without me actually thinking and I found I was just generally abandoning any thought processes.

So I've disabled that and now I'm explicit if I want to solve a problem because then it means my brain's actually engaged.

It seems to be like a shortcut to early onset dementia because the brain's never being actively involved in problem solving.

A few thoughts.

- I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection.

- I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response.

- In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify.

- The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.

> AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt

this a thousand times this

LLMs are information transformers. if you're trying to take some rough idea and blow it out into something that "feels" substantive, you're just combining your high-signal idea / prompt with a bunch of meaningless bloat and noise from the model weights.

>The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not.

I think we're already there. We started having database issues after a rushed deploy (the PR diff had +100k lines). Everyone was pasting random Fable output as gospel and grasping at straws running random "create index concurrently" statements directly in production while I was slowly reading library documentation, testing hypotheses, gathering logs.

One colleague was completely in denial that his vibe coded "optimizations" that went into the update could have anything to do with the problem. I eventually found that the "optimizations", naively trying to optimize for page "first contentful paint" were prefetching pages whenever users hovered over anything and creating a barrage of requests.

And people seem really proud of what they "generate" too, not at all worried that they might be offloading the consequences to others. It's a stupid, tiring time to be working in software.

There's an old meme tweet that goes like this:

> the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation

This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past.

But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously.

It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.

> that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person

There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour (I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them): "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't". My more considered reaction is pretty much exactly the same.

For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI.

I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).

> I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them

That it is plausible to have come from any of the major ones just means that they all should be avoided. Which is of course not a very practical insight.

> unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later

That would be the point where our friendship is over (or rather I acknowledge the fact that it was already over) and I delete & block the contact.

I completely agree in principle, but to play devil's advocate, if an "author's" prompting technique is better than mine such that they generate a more useful article than what my own AI session might produce on average, then maybe there's value in some generated articles.

The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.

It's possible, but I've experimented with different style guides and prompt methods and have never gotten it to output what I'd call "good" writing.

It is almost always low information density. Sometimes I can get it to remove most of the extraordinarily cliche phrases it injects into everything, along with the tortured, gauche prose (especially Claude). But what remains is an expansion algorithm: it takes a simple idea and expands it like polyurethane foam to fill however much space it can take, the volume filled mainly by grammatical syntax and only traced with any actual semantic meaning.

One can give details of a product and ask the ai to generate the documentation.

"Good" is subjective, but I found this OOTB sufficiently information-dense and easy-to-customize:

https://claude.ai/share/ac747c6d-2a62-40b7-b33e-06a94cf34344

Fair enough, but to be fair, that just sounds like bad defaults to me. Most of the things you describe mostly go away with a nice customised system prompt.

> If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?

You are likely not the target audience anymore and they don't care if you're going to read it.

This is why even if I ask GPT or Claude or whatever to rewrite an email, I still rewrite it by hand with my own words, what I look for is, did the AI remove sentences where I repated myself or that were too wordy? Perfect, I'll ommit those details.

Could probably ask the AI what changes they'd make to the email.

You and I and everyone else need to make it clear to people who do this that we don't like them doing this and we think they are uncool.

Me calling someone uncool would be rather hypocritical in afraid! I've done some interesting things, cool even, but that doesn't necessarily make conversation with me interesting/cool! I'll go with letting them know I find it dickish and perhaps even a tad offensive.

Counterpoint: if you're uncool yourself, you might be uncool enough to call out uncoolness, from a "game recognizes game" point of view

lame recognises lame

That I shall have to purloin.

Don't get me wrong, I loathe the AI style as the next person.

But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output.

That's an added value

Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read

They don’t review the output. That’s the thing. No one is reading this stuff, not all of it at the least.

It's still a lower effort contribution and because the surface is plausible and the content is usually verbose, it's a bigger waste of time for the other party than a low effort 100% human contribution.

Steered it?! If I'm gonna read it, I want someone to have written it, not bloody "steered" it!

"Why are you upset with this restaurant meal? Okay it wasn't actually cooked here per se, but the chef certainly reheated it and carefully monitored the microwave oven while doing so!"

This crap just needs to end. "Steering" words at another human being is incredibly disrespectful.

big restaurants have many cooks that are trained and monitored by the chef, but the chef is certainly not necessarily prepairing your meal.

The chef is however responsible for the outcome so you're absolutely right to complain if the meal sucks and most of this AI written crap definitely sucks to read.

That said, it's not about the "principle" of having your meal cooked by the chef / the text written word by word by the human.

It's about the outcome. People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose) and it's absolutely despicable that so many people are so eager to lower our standards in quality just because everybody else seems to be doing it.

If I go to a restaurant and find out I got a reheated meal I'm going to be upset no matter how much quality control the chef does of the reheating. That's just not something I would ever go to a restaurant for.

> That said, it's not about the "principle" of having your meal cooked by the chef / the text written word by word by the human. It's about the outcome.

No. It very much isn't about outcome. It's about interpersonal relationships.

> People should learn to tame their AI tools/harnesses in such a way to produce quality output (code and prose)

The quality isn't the problem. The quality is that something that needs to be "tamed" is writing words that the "tamer" expects me to read.

When AI can write quality prose maybe you'll have a point

Getting an AI response from folks has a very "let me google that for you" kind of feel.

If you're not familiar with the concept... https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy

To play devil's advocate here, it is possible for someone to simultaneously use AI to write and also not be a meat proxy. I'm not saying that is the norm, but I have written docs where the vast majority of the words come from AI, but I also spent multiple days on the substance and content.

Maybe if you only use the LLM to proof read or something? I don't know if LLMs are actually any good for this purpose, but it's something I came to think of when trying to answer your question.

I do think that it is very difficult to not be a meat proxy when you utilize an LLM for writing tasks. These tools are computer programs that generate text, so what else would you do with it than have it write for you? This is being a meat proxy.

Trying to avoid being a meat proxy can quickly eat the supposed productivity gains of using an LLM in the first place.

Like say I need to write an article about some subject and it would take me the entire day to complete this task without an LLM. I can get some sort of article out of an LLM by simply asking, I don't need to think about the subject myself at all. The LLM productivity promise is also fulfilled, because I did an entire days work in a minute or so.

Now if I also need to read and understand the work, and be able to defend it or explain it to others as if I produced it myself, then this will take a lot of time. If on top of this I need to edit the text to sound like me rather than an LLM, then I probably still need the whole day for this task and I have lost all the productivity increase that I sought from using the LLM.

It's the thinking that takes time when you write, not typing. But you can't do the thinking and avoid doing it at the same time.

The same idea applies to coding too. Doing code review and requiring the author and reviewer to read and understand the code basically eliminates all the productivity gains that using the LLM was supposed to provide. Throw out the reviewing, reading, and understanding and we can have each developer producing a thousand kloc per day, over 1000x productivity. If we don't throw those out, we are comparatively in the exact same spot as not using LLMs at all.

Yes, it's like people have forgotten that junior contributors you can't trust yet often have net negative productivity due to the time you need to invest to review and guide them.

I find that the LLM is great for helping with the starting problem. I will go for a walk and basically brain dump my thoughts and ideas about a topic/doc into a voice note, where I can ramble, wander from point to point, etc. Then I transcribe it, get a model to take that and turn it into something cohesive, and then I spend multiple hours reading it, reworking it, and editing it. I am not very good at writing docs and this method produces something with far more detail and quality than I would ever get on my own. But AI;DR right?

AI;WR

maybe it's not so absolute. if someone else has the talent or takes the effort to come up with a clever prompt that got an interesting response from an LLM, I'd want to read it too. Treating LLMs as a tool, this is not so different from someone else using Blender to create an interesting animation.

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six

It astonishes me that in 2026 AD, people still like to pretend that our calendar is not based on Christ's supposed birth. Christians have no problem calling days after pagan gods (Wednesday = Woden's day, Thursday = Thor's day, etc), but for some reason we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god.

It's typically referred to as CE to indicate the speaker's personal lack of belief in the divinity of Jesus, that might be implied by using the term anno domini. Nobody is under any illusion about whose birth began this era.

> we have to pretend like the calendar isn't based on the Christian god

I like how this could be offensive to both Christians (Jesus isn't god) and anti-Christians.

Hard to believe in this the year 2026 CE that somebody cares enough to cry about the letters used to denote the year

The fact that the number is still based on the birth of Christ shows people are not pretending it isn't based on that. The term CE was adopted to lessen the implied endorsement of said religion via the terms Christ and "the year of OUR lord".

while i might not have written it, i used my masters in prompt engineering to carefully guide its creation :)

If this is not sarcastic, which school gives such a masters

was joking but there are (way too many) “agentic” things at Unis already (Virginia Tech, MIT…)

ok, what part of the last decade led you to believe that communication decency has radically improved.?

It takes energy to generate the LLM response. If you read the already generated response instead of generating your own, we burn less coal.

Now add the energy needed by the human to read the response (not to mention his finite lifetime) to your calculation.

...yes? It is up to the human as to how to interpret it. They can choose to not actually read it, but focus on whether or not it was written by AI, or instead they could focus on what the text is saying, AI or human generated. If the sky is red, does it matter if the AI generated those three words vs a human? The sky is red! So it's a good point to make, but it's on them too decide how they want to use it.

I'd rather read something novel but AI generated, than the opinion I've seen few times already. Like yours.

It is offensive and reviling. But people do it anyway. People are lazy. And often don’t care about you, the reader.

Is Ai really any more offensive than the templated influencer slop of the past few years?

If your favourite creator is engaged in generating this style of content, then I think it says more about your tastes than their morals.

Don't smash the like button, don't share and unsubscribe.

Volume is the problem. There's so much more of it now. Many platforms I used to enjoy are just overwhelmed with valueless content.

On platforms where you can not curate what you are fed, the healthiest option is to leave.

Yes. Volume is rarely the problem unless there's too little. Filter/search is the problem if desired material exists.

The problem is unless it becomes socially unacceptable might run out of platforms. It's not just influencers doing this, it goes as far as "normal" posters in old-school forums.

Everyone is fighting OP on this extremely reasonable take when some of us are dealing with coworkers that copy slack messages/JIRA ticket comments/PR feedback into Claude and respond with the pasted output as is back like that’s completely acceptable.

Like I don’t need to be placated by someone else’s AI agent when I call out something in a PR, especially when they have such an aversion to conciseness and resolution

Fair call, re-reading the original take ... paragraph 1: person to person interaction (your coworker example) - 100% agree

Back in the 00's you would have been allowed to mock, abuse and bully people who did stuff like that in the workplace -- and the shame might have put an end to it. Maybe the loophole is you tell their Ai agent to f' off not them.

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale.

None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself.

Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question.

Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination.

People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway.

No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.

TL;DR: I want more effort posts/better SNR, so I guess I have to tolerate the human non-effort posts complaining about AI non-effort posts with the hope that it helps retard the rate of non-effort posts vs effort posts.

While I'm hoping the AI bubble pops sooner than later, as I still hold out hope that knowledge work will continue to require knowledgeable humans at the helm, I wanted to add on that I think you make a good point.

A lot of users online can't read[1], and between a lack of pure reading comprehension, poor media literacy habits draining one's brains and ability to focus, and finally the increase in AI-enabled content, I'm not surprised at how redditor-cultured netizens love to throw up their hands and say "AI;DR!", as if that makes them somehow morally superior.

These users won't read dense texts or try to elucidate meaning out of human-written works, they ask for AI summaries or manual "TL;DR" entries as it is, now the AI is use is being used as an excuse to enable mental laziness and lack of attempts to read information.

So while I get lost in wikipedia walks because I'm looking for written entertainment for 'learning', they are getting mind-melted by algorithms, therefore, an uncharitable part of me wants to let the meat-proxying continue.

And then the other part of me that gets annoyed by having to sift through AI-slop-infested text to see what if any meat there may be in there decides that perhaps that's not as helpful of an attitude as I should take after all, because if everybody decides to meat-proxy the world away, I'll be unhappier than letting lazy functionally-illiterate-users complain aloud, even as the latter is boring reading as well.

[1] in the https://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-compu... sense

It's a good point, I just don't agree with the conclusion. I think if you examine the incentives/mechanics behind the phenomena, you would realize that a world in which there are more "meat proxies" for more tasks would be a more enlightened one. The precedents to me are obvious - go back and examine the most famous times of human flourishing. It was always connected to power and patronage - ie, commerce. Most people could not read for most of human history. Universities used to be institutions for a small number of elite who could afford not to labor because it was someone else's job. Compared to primeval man this is essentially using another human as a "meat-proxy". That's what the modern economy is. The CEO doesn't waste his time filling out the spreadsheet or w/e. It's the same concept. Why is a human meat-proxy necessarily better than a wholly mechanical one? Our social institutions have simply fallen behind our scale.

I view LLMs optimistically as the catchup phase. After all, they aren't really "reinventing" anything, rather they are a tool to synthesize the vast human corpus and catch up to the scale. Yes, at the moment they are used for all sorts of things, most of which are trivial. But when the bubble pops it will not mean knowledge work has a renaissance, rather it will be the nail in the coffin. The bubble pop will mean it will be cheap, compute/LLMs become a utility. So let the AI fill out the spreadsheet. Allow UBI to flourish, implement a severe wealth tax. End pointless wars. Slim government, which is a lot of bloat and obfuscation around what should be automated, open and transparent disbursements. End private taxes on the economy (credit cards duopoly, etc) and essentially, everyone gets to act like an enlightenment era university student. On this view, the hope would be that the present times are the wars of religion, the storm before the calm. If we are able to make it through in a hyper-networked, nuclear age.

LLMs are not going away, no matter how many Americans may want to go back to the proverbial land. Reactive movements have always existed, and always failed. I think you would simply be better served by advocating for the best case scenario, rather than aligning yourself with the AI skeptics who as you acknowledge, are also rather widely boring and intellectually lazy - that which you seek to remedy. The question of assuring UBI is not obvious. Imo there is far more rigor and interesting questions in the camp trying to create the optimistic future, than in those who resort to unexamined, parroted skepticism.

It's not controversial that if left alone, most people will tend towards minimizing laborious work, and that the use of technology to do that ought to be expected. Consider, however:

1. This work was largely optional to begin with. Few people actually need to post on LinkedIn, write blogs, etc. It's arguably a mountain of content waste (which is why the term "slop" is so fitting). Not only does it waste the producer's time to produce it, but it also wastes the reader's time to try to consume it.

2. It's not a substitute for actual work. If it becomes clear that you're using LLM to do work you are paid to do, eventually the person who pays you will notice, and replace you with the LLM. If your employer values you because of the work you do, it's in your best interest to do the job yourself.

1. This doesn't make any sense. On this reading, most any work is "optional" in that you had the option to do something else. But few people have the option to not work at all. If creating slop generates a decent enough ROI, and you have to work, then why is it waste? It may be waste to you, but for them it is an income. Just like there are entire industries or products I might personally think are a waste and yet make tons of money. In the modern economy most work is optional then. So what point are you making?

2. Yes, people get replaced at work all the time. And actually most employees who figure out who to maximize their own ROI (and thus their companies) get rewarded, not punished. If your slop code is "good enough" and you are moving the metrics the C suite cares about, your colleague taking far longer to create far less is obviously going to be punished.

If some sea change happens that replaces a whole class of workers, that is beyond the scope of the individual worker to think about. The modern economy can be viewed as one long process of automation, where most workers have been subsidizing their own eventual replacement, given the privileged position of capital over labor. This is historically obvious. It does not mean it benefits the individual to go back into some state of nature, or not reap what benefits they may gain from the prevailing system while it is still the one at hand.

What I meant by "optional" work is that it's not being performed for a buyer; it's volunteer labor. Nobody's paying for individuals' awful LinkedIn posts. I suppose it could be framed as self-promotion aimed at a potential future payoff, but if it repels buyers, then it's pointless.

Perhaps it's worth looking at this issue from the demand side instead. Who is the customer or buyer of the AI-generated work; and if there is one, how much do they value it? I contend that there are few actual buyers who are actually asking for the AI-generated output, and thus the value is low. These buyers are usually asking for some other outcome that flows downstream from the work, and AI slop is either being misperceived as the actual ask, or is a step in the middle somewhere.

Next, I wasn't talking about slop code. I was talking about slop narrative work--the work preceding the coding phase that gets teams and goals aligned, and reports results to management. In a world in which code is increasingly machine-written, the focus turns to the planning and decision stages, and that's where communication skills are most important. If you're outsourcing that work to an LLM, you're providing little added value, and that makes you replaceable. Not by a machine, but someone better than you at writing.

As for your last paragraph, I'm having trouble understanding whether you're in favor of AI-written content (not code, let's put that aside). That's the question I'm more interested in discussing than how economies evolve. I know how economic progress works ;-)

As to the first part, if you mean the demand side as in who wants to read slop LinkedIn posts, LLMs haven't changed the fundamental nature of that. It's always been awful. Therefore the point is who cares if an AI has written it. As I said, it's all pablum anyway. But I don't agree with how you are describing the problem. Most marketing or self promotion is "optional" then? Why is not having a direct buyer asking for the work equal to "volunteer" work? Anyone who has been around marketing knows conversion rates are incredibly low. That's just the nature of it. It still often makes sense from a ROI perspective. There are many if not most cases were > 99% of people might readily say "who asked for this?" and it will still make economic sense to convert the fraction of a percent.

I similarly don't think your second point makes much sense. I think people going on about writing or domain experience as a skill are missing the obvious writing on the wall. If you are not an exceptional writer you will be replaced. Most people will be replaced then. Or at the very least, their diminished market power is inevitable. The end state of these models is in my view clearly aligned to less human in the loop and more automated self prompting. Most people's prompts are not that unique. If someone has a superior prompt that eventually gets integrated into the model. Eventually the model learns to ask itself the superior question, even if the spark is a profoundly lazy human invocation. The progress along code generation is then joined hand in hand by progress to full automation. Why is generating a prompt harder to solve than generating code? Why will both not advance in the next decade? Suggesting code will be increasingly machine written while saying humans will still need to be around to write instructions just strikes me as denialism of the scale of the change. If you think that in 10 years most of the back and forth is not going to be LLMs talking entirely among themselves I think you are in for a rude awakening.

As I said earlier, if a human cares a human will author. As for the rest of it, it makes almost no difference. Bad, lazy writing has always existed. Why would I take solace that a human has produced slop over a machine? The question is not "do I like it" but "do I care". The answer is no. Most things in the economy I don't care for or like. But certain things are inevitable as humans conglomerate. A well organized mind learns to get over it. Quite frankly if LLMs push LinkedIn over the edge and lead to the destruction of that platform I would be pleased. It was always a center of corporate slop and backpatting, something that in theory was optional but was more like a mandatory career chore, a step in the middle to actual work. It just is kind of amusing that your example of why AI writing is bad is because it is ruining LinkedIn, as if that place wasn't always trash. It just makes my point. In domains were humans care about human authorship, it's just not an issue in the same way. I've never heard someone care about LinkedIns viability as an ecosystem from someone who didn't work there. If LLMs are making the site unusable they are doing God's work.

> As I said earlier, if a human cares a human will author.

That is precisely the observation we're not seeing.

> That is precisely the observation we're not seeing.

What is the basis for this claim? To me, my formulation reads as logically self evident, to the point of near tautology. Your claim is what? People who genuinely care about things are delegating those things to LLMs? Then in what sense do they actually "care" about them?

You said: "if a human cares, a human will author." That statement was somewhat ambiguous, and I interpreted that in such a way that the first human (the consumer) is different from the second (producer). Perhaps that's not what you meant.

I also think, respectfully, that you're overindexing on LinkedIn. I was using it as an example to illustrate a point. My primary concern is with teams I work with day to day, and to a much lesser extent, AI-written blog posts being featured here on HN.

I'm not sure where the lack of clarity on my part came in. I think at this juncture it is best to thank you for the back and forth and wish you a good day. I will just also suggest debates at work should be settled at work.

Thanks! I appreciated it.

Edit: I see what you mean. In my formulation the "human" in question was one and the same. Perhaps this clarification makes my point more intelligible. Thanks again!

it’s not that it’s ai generated it’s that it’s bad.

i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc

The benefit and promise of social media, at least early on, was that it was supposed to be authentic - that when someone posted, it was really coming from them. Engagement was truly personal, at least for a little while. It still is for most.

In the book-publishing context, ghost writers have to be credited, even if the attribution is in small print.

Are you implying that one should not be offended by that? It's commonly mocked when it becomes apparent.

well it’s widely understood that any large scale social media account is managed by a team and not the individual being represented and we seem broadly ok with that. what those teams produce is often vapid manipulative corporate bs which i don’t find any less offensive for it being typed by humans earning a salary as compared to tensors assembling copy via gpu. the current anti AI sentiment strikes me as a bit of a high-minded pose when the actual underlying behaviors have been in place for a while.

I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that? If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

> If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

Depends on his countenance and how good a mood I'm feeling in!

In any case I might well ask how much time went into at least reviewing the output. Or I say (rather than a flat AI;WR) "I'll scan that and have an AI summerise it for me later".

> If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

I would crumple up the flyer, throw it on the ground, and then ask for another one. Then I would crumple up that flyer, throw it on the ground, and ask for another one. I would repeat this until he refuses to give me another flyer.

Is there something in particular I'm trying to glean from that information? If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it.

If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.

> If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it.

Right, exactly, that's what you'd do whether he spend 10 hours on it or 10 minutes.

I would leave at the earliest convenience and avoid interacting with that person as much as possible.

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