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Comment by gfody | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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