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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading.

Theoritically yes. In practice:

- AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise, and who know to edit AI responses and not just paste them.

- I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.

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> Theoritically yes. In practice:

I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it.

We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, how can it be bad?".

Until their boss sat down and forced them to read the verbal diarrhea and they finally admitted that it was 90% hallucinations and AI-filling-the-blanks.

Yes, so the issue here was not AI but a lack of competence, prudence, integrity, responsibility, discernment etc.

It's the equivalent of vibe coding vs Ai assisted coding.

Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing.

Maybe you’re defending something that nobody here has a problem with.

Using AI to rephrase things is perfectly fine.

What? This entire thread and the OP and comment I originally replied to is people saying that Ai shouldn't be used for writing...

I was agreeing! You said it yourself: "Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing".

The people complaining are talking about vibe-writing or heavily-AI-assisted writing.

EDIT: My point is, most people taking the "anti-AI" stance here wouldn't have a problem with Grammarly or AI to double-check spelling. It's a gradient.

EDIT 2: I wrote a lot of stuff without double-checking. Just editing to clarify what I mean. :D

> What? This entire thread and the OP and comment I originally replied to is people saying that Ai shouldn't be used for writing...

No, the entire thread is literally called "Don't Paste the AI, please".

That's not the same as "Never use AI on your way to writing what you need conveyed".

> - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea

Evidently the people you are communicating with are not good writers/thinkers. That's the prerequisite for effectively using AI for writing help. Just as its the prerequisite for using it to produce code. If you can't code, you can't get Ai to produce good code.

So the real issue here, perhaps, is "vibe writing" rather than "Ai assisted writing".

> I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.

Agreed. But if people who don't understand the issue are feigning competence via AI then that's a fundamental problem of not just competence across many domains, but also character. As I said in another comment, the policy should be something to the effect of "you're paid for competence, integrity etc. If you don't have that, we don't need you. Take that into account when you use Ai"

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