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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:

1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.

2. The prose style is horrible to read.

If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)

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> 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.

You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.

Alternative uses for reading:

1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written.

2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation.

3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)

If some Nerds for Nginx article is AI-written, it's probably subtly wrong. How does this influence your opinion of it?

The title, for example, should likely be Nginx for Nerds, and that error was human, not AI, right?

Yeah that's the point. Spammers have an infinite desire to make more spam, so statistically most LLM writing is garbage.

Readers are making this connection from their own experience. All these tells just associate it with garbage.

In the before times, sending a formal document full of typos and errors would show you didn't bother to proofread, now having a doc full of lazy "LLMisms" also looks like you were too lazy to proofread.

  > You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer

Yes, that's the risk of using an LLM to "clean up" your writing. It's human nature to think you're unique and everyone else should somehow instinctively realize your output is unlike all the LLM spam garbage and worth their time but that doesn't work in practice.

It's unreasonable to expect other people to suppress their intuitive heuristics formed from the bait and switch of being subjected to endless LLM spam every day and blame them for not giving you a fair chance.

Your rhetoric can and has been used to justify all kinds of prejudice, including racism.

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