jalev

An account that has only existed for 4 months, whose only source for whenever something is plagiarised is a single company whose bread and butter is telling everybody what they want to hear, where most of the tweets barely gets a hundred likes should not be getting the level of coverage it has right now.

https://x.com/Pangramed

This isn't the first high profile case of a black person being reported with accusations of using AI this year[^1][^2]. Once or twice, sure, whatever. But a third time now? It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted, especially given this particular case the group making the "claims" are entirely anonymous.

Anyway, here's the thread from twitter if people are interested: https://x.com/Pangramed/status/2102383484027171306?s=20

[^1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featu...

[^2]: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-re...

You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai

That's correct. Musk et al have actually done nothing worthy of criticism and these whiners are just jealous of their richness /s

Our company has an MCP which hooks into a bunch of metrics/analytics that we've been using to do RCA on a whole slew of issues.

I get the sentiment completely. I am actually doing what you're thinking: if it didn't come from my List Of People Who Know Of What They Speak I want nothing to do with it.

We really have gone full circle! It's quite upsetting.

I'm interested in why you feel like this. Do you take this action because you can't trust traditional channels (blogs, established tradpub authors, Goodreads et al) to self-curate LLM writing out of the pool of available literature you would normally be aware of?

It's often quite easy, because most people who author articles with LLMs do not bother doing any kind of post editing. Meaning you can see/build a mental map of common tropes[^1] for what to look for. Once you read perhaps two or three articles authored with LLMs you will not be able to unsee it.

[^1]: https://tropes.fyi/

Why would these be irrelevant when they're examples of Musk biasing the LLM? Do you think these things came out of nowhere?

Sure, but there is a marked difference between a therapist and an LLM Chatbot: you can't talk to your therapist for +4h a day, at any time convenient to yourself. It's also not a guarantee you're going to hit upon a therapist that is like that, versus a product that is very literally intended to maximise your usage of it.

The article is exactly what you think it's going to be: "China is moving ahead, but at what cost?" and the usual breathless Sinophobia that comes with it. At the very least when this happened in the early 80s with Japan's "oh shit they're going to outdo us technologically!!!" we got really cool fiction out of it for the next two decades.

We had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing.

I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this.

In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO.

[^1]: https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story

It's wild we're seeing people rediscover the same solution to the same problems we've had forever: being precious about your darlings.

Code generators reduced the friction for implementing every shitty idea someone has ever had, but because developers seem to have never experienced throwing shitty ideas away (because if it was written in code it _has_ to be important right?) they treat everything coming out of the Codegen as a precious idea that eventually builds up to clutter one's brain leading to Implementation Fatigue the author experienced. The solution? Go through that same process but focus on one idea at a time and make it good.

It does make me wonder if the people experiencing this had hobbies outside of software engineering (let's say, anything creative) they'd be able to spot the signs earlier.

> I do not like to build on a foundation that could be ripped away from under my feet at any moment for arbitrary reasons.

Do you only build and publish software in a vacuum running on hardware you own? There is no online community in the western hemisphere that isn't subject to any kind of arbitrariness, be it internal (community, like here) or external (legal or infrastructurally, like on github).

So who are you actually angry at? There was a vote, by people, in a democratic process, and Codeberg are adhering to it. Why is it Codeberg's problem that they don't defy the will of their members? Are you angry at them because the members put a motion against your particular special interests? If so, go make a new motion to reinstate them.

Is that a problem for Meta though? They recently announced they're going to sell their excess compute, so I imagine the actual problem is they're resorting to doing that because AI isn't having nearly the effect/usage it was supposed to and now Zuck is being a sore winner about it

Take the first stories I found from this month's Clarkesworld[1] or Granta[2] or BCS[3] and read the prose. Notice the specificity of the language, how the doesn't try to insist upon itself? Notice how very few metaphors are actually in prose? Notice how, even when writing about fictional worlds and concepts, the language used grounds the _stories_ being told and not the concepts?

And then look at the submissions for unslop. This is the best we can get? Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose _content_? It's sad, really, that we're many years into this entire thing and it still can't produce something that doesn't have my eyes drifting from the page.

[1] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/khan_07_26/

[2] https://granta.com/here-comes-the-sun/

[3] https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-ecstasy-...

Yes:

> Citi, for example, has shut off access to Claude’s and ChatGPT’s latest models entirely, according to an internal Citi email obtained by 404 Media. That includes Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7, and GPT-5.5.

And

> Inside GitHub things are a bit different. Employees don’t have a limit on token spend, but workers were recently told the company is looking into decreasing token spend by using open source models, a GitHub employee said. The employee told us that GitHub plans to test user-based billing, meaning budgeting AI tool use to individual people instead of teams, projects, or unlimited usage.

The UK's financial system made it out battered but bruised in the 70s which were a magnitude worse than what we have right now (double digit unemployment, inflation double digit, interest rates at like 15%, an IMF bailout...). Any talk of the British financial system collapsing is as realistic as the S&P500 dropping 50% in the near future: sure it can happen but the chances are so statistically small you have a better chance of winning the lottery.

This is what I'm wondering too. We've signed a confidentiality agreement with all the big players (as I'm sure all other companies have done), which is supposed to ensure our data is both segregated and not used for training. I don't trust these companies not to do just that; their business is in taking what we have and training their models.

I might have been a bit broad with the brush. I can't speak for banks, but I can speak for the the fintech/money-movement space (e.g. Remitly, Wise, Revolut).

It's a race to get first-to-market for backend integrations/features. It's given rise to a culture of "move fast break things" where safety is only for some core features, but absolutely not for the constellation of other services we provide. Failure rates have increased almost a percentage point since Codegen/LLM adoption was mandated from up top.

You would think regulators would be on top of this, but our industry runs on all actors "self reporting" their outages. Most don't unless they can't hide it (>1h)

Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"

A few years ago I was also like this. I wrote fiction but never tried pursuing it as a "real" hobby because I wasn't perfect at it first try. Why bother at all, right? ;)

"Good" Fiction writing is an inaccurate science but has a similar trajectory to what the author went through. To become good at it you _need_ to read other people's works (the good AND the bad stuff) to figure out for yourself what makes that writing stick out to you, and you need to learn to love to edit, and to show people what you did.

The most time consuming portion of the writing process is the editing process in my opinion. It's also my most favourite part. You take a half-formed idea and you cut. And you tweak. And then you cut some more, until paragraphs start to take the shape of the story you actually wanted to tell, and sentences become so load bearing you can't remove any of them without altering everything around it. It's a puzzle with no real "solution" other than what I feel works.

Really, it's only after I kept at this for a while (and put things out there and didn't get bad comments at all!) that I started to get a little more confident in myself and begin to go to writing groups and such. It's hard work but it's worth it, just like any skill.

Existing HN discussion from the ex-AWS engineer's side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254475

AI writing aside, I still think the author has a point: the customer-centric AWS/Amazon of yesterday is not really there any more, or at least appears in a form that isn't recognisable or useful to every day users.

It's the material reality of what people live through. When one is entirely alienated from the product of their own labour, what do they care for the mission and culture of a company who will fire me at an irrational whim? Better to have a vibrant life outside of work to keep oneself sane.

I've been playing freecell on it for the last hour or so

I went and looked at the Tiktoks. As far as I can see from the few videos I've watched it's not so much "criticism" as "plot overview, small background details, and what I liked about it".

It's kind of weird it's being framed as a tiktok sensation when there's nothing to really differenciate him from other booktokers? Other than perhaps more subscribers than usual.

Also, per the article:

> Edwards champions BookTok and also defends it...

Kind of interesting to note given his video saying he doesn't like booktok books[1]. I suppose he knows not to piss in the pond he drinks from.

[1] https://youtu.be/AuEipfQbHrU

The case briefing is really interesting for those that wish to read it, as it goes into a tangent defining what "is" and "isn't" information which can be considered as property

https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/crim/2026/4

If you want a more philosophical version of some of the ideas posited by the blog post, I can't recommend Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' enough.

He puts forward the position that the medium controls how we interact with information. When the information is scarce (and as a consequence: dense) like books, you have to spend a lot more time interacting with said information to understand it. When it's overwhelmingly abundant and easily accessible (TV, internet) information is entirely discardable. We see the effects of this more intensely in the current internet age where traditional teaching methods (book learning) seems to be oft complained about because we raise a generation to expect education to be packaged in a similar format as what they see on the internet: as entertainment.

What's interesting about this is the post also has the prompt the staff used to vet people, and an author has already shown it to be error-prone [1][2].

> REQUEST

> Using the list of names provided, please evaluate each person for scandals. Scandals include but are not limited to homophobia, transphobia, racism, harassment, sexual misconduct, sexism, fraud.

> Each person is typically an author, editor, performer, artist or similar in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and or related fandoms.

> The objective is to determine if an individual is unsuitable as a panelist for an event.

> Please evaluate each person based on their digital footprint, including social, articles, and blogs referencing them. Also include file770.com as a source.

> Provide sources for any relevant data.

1: https://bsky.app/profile/bookjockeyalex.bsky.social/post/3lo...

2: https://bsky.app/profile/bookjockeyalex.bsky.social/post/3lo...