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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Use AI to write things for you to read that you wish someone else had written. ‘Give me a summary of the research on this topic’; ‘Write a report on this data to help me make a decision’. ‘Take this transcript of a meeting and write me the email it could have been’.

Don’t use AI to write things that you are producing for someone else to consume.

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I think that's somewhat reasonable, but not always: the effort of researching and of writing yourself will teach you better then reading something someone else wrote, especially an LLM that will get things wrong in surprising ways that a human would not.

I'm not saying you should never do this: our time is valuable, and we shouldn't spend it on things that are not genuinely worthwhile to us if we can help it. But we're still losing something by having an LLM write for us, even if the intended audience is just ourselves.

This is 100% my take. It's nice and easy.

I do not personally even think AI is useful for editorial purposes; I would rather read and re-read my own text and edit it down (which, despite my overlong comments here, I actually do), than have someone else do it. The reason is simple: editing is my search for the clearest way to express my thoughts.

I tend to turn grammar checkers off, but leave spelling checkers on, because they catch typos and a handful of my spelling gremlins like "liaise".

I am someone else, if AI can write something that I want to and can consume then it can do the same for other’s consumption. Perhaps a disclaimer would be nice, “co-written with ____” but I see no difference between the two though of course I understand what you are trying to convey conceptually

There is a higher tolerance for LLM-isms if you asked an LLM to write something for you

Elsewhere it’s painful and irksome when you didn’t ask for it

this is where I perhaps differ from other commenters, I do not have higher tolerance, regardless of whether I asked it or am reading something someone else posted, fully or partially written by LLM.

> this is where I perhaps differ from other commenters, I do not have higher tolerance, regardless of whether I asked it or am reading something someone else posted, fully or partially written by LLM.

Perhaps English is not your first language? To people who are well-read, LLM-ism grate on their nerves like the high-pressure sales pitch you hear on 3am shopping channels.

This isn’t English first/second language thing to me. I find LLM writing unbearable (even with humanizer skills and all the other bullshit, I can smell it from a mile away). What I was trying to convey is that, to me, there is no difference in reading “can you summarize this shit for me” vs. reading someone’s blog, LLM-written/assisted, that did the same thing and posted it publicly. If I like/tolerate the former (I don’t), I’d like/tolerate the latter

There's a difference between me getting AI to write something I want to read, and getting it to write something you want to read. The difference is that I know me, but I don't know you.

The other difference is that, if I get AI to write something for me, I expect something AI-written. If I am writing something for you, you expect something that I wrote, not something that AI wrote.

Moreover, when you wrote it yourself, you are intellectually responsible, you can defend it, while if the LLM wrote it for you, nobody is really responsible: The LLM didn't write it "out of its own motivation", it was merely extrapolating your prompt; and you only provided the prompt, not the extrapolation.

So the intellectual responsibility is diluted to a substantial degree: The text is not the opinion of anyone who can be expected to honestly defend it. It's bullshit in the technical sense.

The words of a machine are not of interest to me. I want to hear what you, the human, have to say, imperfections and all. Reading something written by an LLM is actively annoying, and it's not very respectful to inflict that upon others.

so you never use LLMs like at all?

When I seek input (whether passively or actively; it doesn't matter) from another person, then I generally want that person's input. I want their words.

They can be broken and jumbled, or terse AF, or combine to be Pulitzer-quality prose. Either way: I want to consume their own unique human expression of a concept.

There's value in raw human expression, including in the missteps.

If I instead want the regurgitated waggyings of a bot, then: I know how to get that on my own.

We've all got web browsers and pocket supercomputers. We've all (well, most of us) been alive and aware of LLMs since their recent rise from infancy.

It's a no-brainer for us to paste some paragraphs into our favorite chatbot and get a summary or an artificial expansion or whatever else we wish to have. If that's what our goal is, then we can do that on a whim -- and we can still retain the original expression.

But doing it on our behalf is deleterious, unsettling, and unhelpful. It has negative value to the beholder.

> When I seek input (whether passively or actively; it doesn't matter) from another person, then I generally want that person's input. I want their words.

There's a (probably subconscious) reason for you wanting that (and I just posted this elsewhere on a different story, but it bears repeating): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767867

That's logical, yes. If person A wants to read a summary (even a generated one) outlining the state of modern space dinosaur research, or whatever, and person B also wants the exact same thing, then person B should be happy to read the summary that person A prompted.

The same is true if the thing they both want is a stale cupcake bought from a gas station. But this still doesn't mean that person B wants to be presented with person A's stale thing, because the overhead of the social transaction isn't worth the object. Which is to say, it makes a terrible gift.

But the reader cannot be sure they ARE understanding what you are trying to convey. Maybe the LLM added something you never thought of, maybe it made form to your various thoughts in a way that isn't actually true to the way you would have communicated them if you did it yourself.

The exercise of writing is an important step of actually understanding your own thoughts properly. Readers are reading to get a sense of your own experience and ideas on the topic, if it turns out you didn't actually write the final thing yourself they'll always feel a sense – in whatever way – of being conned by the author. Intentional or not.

Technical documentation, where what the reader wants to come away with is the clear facts on what something does and how to use it/whatever, is a different matter. But even then editing is key – overlong text, unnecessary information, these will again fight against what the reader is there to get.

With that said, if you do want to do it, a disclaimer is at least upfront and may well show there's no intentional attempt to deceive.

> Technical documentation, where what the reader wants to come away with is the clear facts on what something does and how to use it/whatever, is a different matter.

I don’t agree with this one. Writing technical documentation can be a slog, but quite often you will discover very annoying design decisions in the process. Like you’ll write a tutorial for a CLI and realize that actually some flag makes no sense, or some default should be changed.

This also goes for dogfooding. If you’re using AI to write and run the tools, try to use them yourself and see how nice they are. AI will happily run whatever jank it’s working with.

Docstrings perhaps, but even then I find myself editing heavily to avoid cruft sneaking in.

I just explained why this is a bad idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767867

TLDR: Communication from a human is not only the material being communicated, it's also a signal that the human understands the message they are sending you. When you pass that message via an intermediary (regardless of whether the intermediary is a human or an LLM), the receiver is never sure that what they received is what you intended.

It's doubly worse when you review it, notice a few additions and think "Great - that makes me sound smart and knowledgeable about this topic", because the receiver now has an inaccurate view about your skill.

At any rate, using an LLM to construct a message for someone else to read is basically sending the wrong signals about your skill levels.

(This probabyl explains why so many people are so ready to use an LLM to write the material - in their minds, it makes them sound smarter than they actually are, but as we've seen from people on this forum vigorously defending the practice with "pangram is wrong" and similar nonsense, they themselves are not skilled enough to recognise slop)

> TLDR: Communication from a human is not only the material being communicated, it's also a signal that the human understands the message they are sending you. When you pass that message via an intermediary (regardless of whether the intermediary is a human or an LLM), the receiver is never sure that what they received is what you intended.

100% right. The fundamental point here is:

- it's OK to be wrong

- it's OK to be wrong and not know

- it's a little less OK to be wrong when you should have known

- it's much less OK to be wrong when you haven't put any effort into being right

- it's far less OK to be wrong when you are pretending to know either way

Relying on AI writing risks pushing you further down the path to worse kinds of wrongness.

What is the difference here between using LLMs and, from the days of Yorn, use Google etc to “summarize” what I read? Assuming that if it appears I wrote it, I understand it, I don’t think makes sense. I know some people that have written some very techy blogs (some made it to front page) that really don’t know jack shit about it (we worked together so I know firsthand they know javk shit about it…)

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