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Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

Because not everybody got A* in English.

What we are seeing here is a Luddite reaction from artisans. A skill has been automated and those that have the skill are not happy about it.

For many writing is painful and the machines ease the pain. And like all machines it takes a while to use them skilfully. In particular remembering that like code it is write once and read many. What the reader needs should be at the forefront of a writers mind - both for code and prose.

Nobody gets on a motorbike and wins the TT in the first weekend.

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> Because not everybody got A* in English.

Bollocks. We managed to communicate before LLMs, but now suddenly everyone needs to write like a lobotomised Hemingway?

> What we are seeing here is a Luddite reaction from artisans.

I suggest reading up on and understanding the history of the Luddites, instead of repeating the same tired thoughtless meme.

> For many writing is painful

Then do something else! Draw, dance, sing, sculpt. Figure out what isn’t painful to you and express yourself that way.

> Nobody gets on a motorbike and wins the TT in the first weekend.

And no one wins ever by getting others to run for them.

"I suggest reading up on and understanding the history of the Luddites"

Are you from West Yorkshire? I am.

I went to school in Batley and I've been past the steeple at Cooper Bridge many times.

Given much of my family were mill workers, the Luddite tale is very much part of who I am.

Every person who has ever significantly won has done it by getting others to run for them. Tell me the billionaire that earned their fortune through the work of their own hands.

> For many writing is painful and the machines ease the pain

Along with removing the possibility for them to ever actually learn to write better.

This is not a good thing.

Oh humanity, crippled by the calculator to never again be given the privilege of achieving true excellence in long division

If people were using LLMs to do arithmetic every day, especially in business and industrial settings, it would be better to just do long division.

With the difference that long division is a purely mechanical process with no need for, expectation of, or benefit from creativity.

I wouldn't read a maths book produced by a calculator either. There would be nothing of value in it - if I know my times tables and plus tables.

Writing can be painful because putting pen to paper forces you to think through every word and sentence. You immediately realize that the first thought that came to mind, wasn't a 100% correct idea, and it'll be more accurate and better formulated this way or that way. Writing is a sort of extended thinking, in which you're being held accountable for every word (by yourself). Some people argue that slowing down the writing process even more, for example by going from keyboard to pen and paper, gives you more time to process your thoughts, and leads to better and more articulate writing.

When I read AI-enhanced writing, I always feel like I have to peer through the blinds to see the writer's true intention. This feels very dishonest and partly offensive, because it can sometimes take several paragraphs before I realize that I'm reading AI output, rather than someone's processed thoughts.

> What we are seeing here is a Luddite reaction from artisans. A skill has been automated and those that have the skill are not happy about it.

Seriously? Expecting basic school literacy is now being a Luddite? What else? Writing by hand is an ancient craft resorted to philosophers long gone?

I swear this AI polarization turns off brain on both sides.

You're saying writing by hand is not impractical and mostly obsolete?

You may think this is silly, but you actually think more when you write by hand than when you type on a computer, and especially more than when you just listen. When attending a lecture you should write notes on paper even if you just throw them away.

Not the person you're addressing, but writing by hand remains a very valuable tool. It's eminently practical and far from obsolete. [1]

[1] "There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529...

For which purpose?

I really, really despise this sentiment and the people that make it.

Writing has always been incredibly difficult for me, both due to incredible difficulties with handwriting and finding my own voice. That difficulty I find in writing is the friction that identifies what my voice is, the words I choose and the meaning I attempt to convey through my own understanding.

I cannot read AI-generated crap for the life of me because all of it simply has no meaning. I will go back and read through paragraphs, trying to grasp at the meaning of something that does not exist. If your argument is that AI-generated writing eases the pain then I will make the opposite argument: reading AI-generated slop increases the pain 10x. I would sooner read through an essay with endless punctuation issues and spelling mistakes than one passed through an LLM because one is an earnest attempt to communicate while the other is offloading all of the mental burden to me. Which gets to the root issue of a lot of the complaints around people slinging slop: you make it marginally easier for you, and then far worse for everyone around you.

"If your argument is that AI-generated writing eases the pain then I will make the opposite argument: reading AI-generated slop increases the pain 10x"

Then you didn't bother to read, or understand, my argument.

In particular this bit: "remembering that like code it is write once and read many. What the reader needs should be at the forefront of a writers mind - both for code and prose."

Are you sure you haven't got to the stage where you don't read anything properly at all?

>Because not everybody got A* in English.

Nobody cares what your English grade is. Everyone would prefer to just hear you speak in your own voice. This isn't Luddism, this is the equivalent of people pushing their selfie through five Instagram filters until they look like an Oblivion character because they have no confidence in their own appearance.

This is not done in the service of readers, nobody wants the slop, it's writing dysphoria

> Nobody cares what your English grade is. Everyone would prefer to just hear you speak in your own voice.

Objectively false

the article we're commenting on quite literally cites a survey on reader behavior:

"Cynthia Dunlop recently shared survey results on reading AI-written articles entitled Report: How developers react to AI-scented blog posts. For the majority of readers, if they think an article is AI-assisted or AI-authored, they will stop reading (78%) and avoid the author in the future (71%)[...] the strongest result in the survey was people overwhelmingly preferred the author’s own writing (98%), with all its flaws and idiosyncrasies,[...]*

there's a say-do gap in play - similar to makeup/no-makeup studies: people claim to prefer natural/no-makeup while behavioral research reveals a preference for subtle/light/professionally-applied makeup

when it comes to ai people love to claim to hate it outright - this thread is full of descriptions of ai writing being impossible to read, totally incoherent, and superlatively bad/worse than average human writing. meanwhile evidence suggests that we might actually kind of like ai writing - with a growing portion of samples making hn's frontpage (https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/state-of-...)

I've seen my share of ai slop and I get where the rage is coming from - I think folks could do a lot better than shouting down every use of ai as slop, especially while hypocritically using ai in their own writing. the pompous elitism on display in this thread alone is gross even for hn

the fact that the HN (or other) frontpages feature a non-trivial amount of AI content is to a large extent owed to the fact that many commenters don't even read the content they're commenting on, another problem in and of itself.

There is no elitism in demanding that people use their own words, or if you want to call it elitism then elitism is healthy and good. Imagine ten years ago you talk to someone online and they told you they outsourced their posting to a call center guy in the third world, that's what this is. Literacy and agency aren't gross, it's what we ought to expect of an educated adult. It's fundamentally a sign of honesty that if I talk to you or read what you write I want to hear words out of your mouth, not some meat puppet version of you hooked up to a chatbot.

> elitism is healthy and good

demanding that people not use a technology that makes expression accessible to them, and insisting that they can only produce the sort of slop that you're sick of seeing, is not just elitist - it's indignantly pompous. it's neither healthy nor good - it's hateful and hurtful

> ..they outsourced their posting to a call center guy in the third world

nobody actually does this though - this exaggerated caricature dwells only in the hateful mind. to be fair there are content farms as there always have been and ai slop is bellowing from their stacks, but the article we're commenting on and your sentiment are not aimed at them - they're targeting the people we're not used to hearing from who might have interesting things to share now that technology is helping them organize their thoughts. you want to say "if you needed ai to organize your thoughts, your thoughts aren't worth organizing" there's nothing good or healthy about that sentiment - you think you're "demanding literacy of educated adults" but actually you're demanding a particular kind of linguistic fluency you happen to value - that's not a defense of literacy it's hallmark elitist gatekeeping

By this logic, we should allow e-bikes in the Tour de France.

The Tour de France is an elitist operation that filters out the majority of people. So you've rather made my point.

> What we are seeing here is a Luddite reaction from artisans.

They are hardly artisans. They are simply the vocal few who repeatedly conflate communication with art simply because the written word can be used for both.

"Easing the pain" is the foundation of many of today's problems. It's gotten too easy to avoid discomfort and effort. Also, if we are talking about disabilities, maybe we should start respecting different forms of communication instead of enabling people to "write" in a way that is not authentic to them at all, just so they can seem "normal".

So your solution is, "we don't need technology, we can just change how everyone in the world thinks and behaves instead"

Actually, yes. Even though you tried to make it sound ridiculous. I want to move towards a world where the worth of a person (and their thoughts, feelings, etc.) is not measured by an exclusive standard of "intelligence", especially if that standard is created/enforced by mega-corporations.

Then say it in brooooooo-ken English.

Grammar check is one thing, but AI mangles your thoughts.

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