Hacker News Reader

Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback,

For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea.

The people arguing that round-tripping their thoughts through AI still means that it's their thoughts apparently also believe that the game of telephone always results in perfect comms.

It's not just AI; adding more hops to a route changes the message when each hop is a human too, it's just that we notice it more when the hop is an LLM because of just how different they write compared to humans.

View on HN

I don't think you quite realize the implications of what you're saying.

Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?

If someone is feigning competence via AI, that's the problem. Not Ai.

If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.

> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.

My point is that it is still a problem, regardless whether they are asking an AI to write it for them or a human to write it for them.

Round-tripping a message through a 3rd party changes the message; in this specific context ("Don't Paste the AI, please"), there is no pretense of understanding or review from the human.

In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.

> In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.

Um, I've literally said throughout this entire thread that I regularly get Ai to assist with my writing, to great effect. It often helps me be more concise and certainly more kind - I have a tendency to be neither in writing, especially online.

It is also helpful in formatting, say, a github issue. Though, I do need to be careful with that as it is very easy for it to just appear as an Ai slop post, even if lots of thought went into it all.

To be very clear, at no point have I ever supported/advocated for thoughtlessly copy pasting whatever Ai writes for you. This thread has been about using it judiciously, as we can/should be doing for coding or anything else.

>Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?

Nothing they said implies that.

What they said is they want the understanding of the person to be revealed in the communication. Not masked via AI.

>If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.

Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.

> For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea

It doesn't say the (level of) understanding of the person, but that they understand the idea. They might have misspoken, but they already replied to that comment and didn't object to my framing or further clarify.

> Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.

Well, this entire thread is me saying this happens in the real world, and people objecting to it

They don't though; I have never seen this happen. I have seen many people claim that's what they do, but not convincingly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com