[HN Gopher] Lack of intent is what makes reading LLM-generated t...
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Lack of intent is what makes reading LLM-generated text exhausting
Author : ashton314
Score : 147 points
Date : 2025-08-05 13:46 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lambdaland.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lambdaland.org)
| k310 wrote:
| In short, we are now an army of proofreaders, in addition to
| readers, interpreters and users/implementers of written material.
|
| > At work I was sent a long design document and asked for my
| thoughts on it. As I read, I had a really hard time following it.
| Eventually I guessed correctly
|
| > Parts of it sounded like a decent design document, but there
| was just way too much fluff that served only to confuse me.
|
| > Intent is the core thing: the lack of intent is what makes
| reading AI-slop so revolting. There needs to be a human intent--
| human will and human care--behind everything that is demanded of
| our care and attention.
|
| I am reminded of the "writing lesson" scene in "A River Runs
| Through it", pretty obviously reflecting the author's education
| as a writer.[0]
|
| > Norman is at his desk hard at work writing a paper which he
| then turns into his father for review. His father marks it up
| with a red pen and simply says, "Half as long."
|
| > Norman goes back to work, cuts the length of the paper in half
| and turns it in for further review. His father marks it up once
| more and says, "Again, half as long."
|
| > Following a final round of edits, his father looks over the
| finished product and says, "Good, now throw it away."
|
| Well, we don't throw away polished work on the job. The scene is
| about education. LLM's are uneducated in communicating to
| readers, compared to skilled writers, and technical writing,
| especially, is not like summer reading, where nothing really
| matters but some vague plot line and lots of juicy words.
|
| Key lesson:
|
| > (1) Brevity is important. Looking back on it now it's
| ridiculous how many teachers forced me and my fellow classmates
| to write papers a certain page length when I was in school. The
| goal should be to make your point using as many or few words as
| are necessary. I love this quote from the scene: "He taught
| nothing but reading and writing. And being a Scot...believed that
| the art of writing lay in thrift." People are busy, or at the
| very least claim to be, so get to the point in whatever you're
| writing.
|
| That last sentence is important.
|
| A document is meant to be read by a human. Brevity and focus are
| important, and oh yes, accuracy. We now have additional burdens
| of dealing with long, rambling texts, finding relevant/key points
| in it, and worrying if it is full of, well, garbage.
|
| Three strikes before you get in the batter's box.
|
| [0] https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2019/07/writing-lessons-
| fro...
| goopypoop wrote:
| Yes, brevity matters
| interestica wrote:
| _real_ inanity
| eru wrote:
| Sounds like the author is complaining that LLMs aren't good
| enough yet?
|
| I agree with that, but they are getting better all the time.
| bgwalter wrote:
| I doubt that. Also from the article: "And no human is so
| worthless as to be replaceable with a machine."
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Doesn't sound like that in the slightest. The article is about
| human intent. No matter how good an LLM, it cannot convey the
| intent of the human without literally reading the humans mind.
| ashton314 wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying.
|
| My argument is that using a machine to replace your thinking,
| your voice, or your relationships is a very bad thing. Humans
| have intrinsic worth--machines do not.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > My argument is that using a machine to replace your
| thinking, your voice, or your relationships is a very bad
| thing. Humans have intrinsic worth--machines do not.
|
| I agree with that, and the only logical path if we are to
| preserve this principle is to eradicate AI, and not try and
| control it. There is no way to control it (think prisoner's
| dilemma, greedy individuals, etc.)
| cwmoore wrote:
| No, what will happen is that time wasted believing in
| magical LLMs, instead of developing technical and
| interpersonal skills will prove unproductive longterm. Like
| most goldrush claims not panning out, it will be followed
| by broad amorality among the newly destitute.
|
| Read a book.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Unproductive for the person perhaps, but not for the
| development of technology. But I do agree in general that
| using AI is not a great strategy for human beings. Read a
| book indeed.
| xeonmc wrote:
| > they are getting better all the time.
|
| In the very same way as a deal with Darth Vader, I presume.
| NotGMan wrote:
| >> And no human is so worthless as to be replaceable with a
| machine.
|
| Has the author been in any factory or seen what it looks like in
| many factories? Robots everywhere!
|
| Is the author a manual laborer? If not, why? Because humans
| evented machines!
| naikrovek wrote:
| while I think the author chose the wrong words here, I think
| they have a good point.
|
| It will be very, very tempting for companies to let people go
| when LLMs can do everything that they envision the people
| doing. It is very hard to resist the cost savings that LLMs
| have over people. People who get sick, get married, go on
| vacation, have children, and sometimes just need a break, so
| they don't come in. LLMs always come in. LLMs always work.
|
| Many executives see LLMs as the ideal replacement for humans in
| information roles. That is clearly batshit insane but the
| numbers really lean towards this if you're someone who is
| distant from people who work for you.
|
| Companies would do well not to forget that companies are of
| people, by people, and for people. they exist solely to provide
| products or services to people, be it actual individuals or
| companies which are made up of people.
|
| If companies ditch too many people in favor of automation,
| they'll find fewer customers for their goods. because people
| won't be able to afford them, or will have no need for them.
| it's not like there's some huge need for LLM trainers to take
| up the unemployment slack. There is no replacement industry
| this time.
| oharapj wrote:
| It doesn't matter if companies ditch people or not. If AI
| progress continues at the current rate the world will be
| completely unrecognisable in 10 years. The consumer and
| capitalist systems are almost certainly not a part of that
| world and the people making AI know that
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| If the people making AI knew that, then they wouldn't be
| trying to sell everyone on AI: they'd be keeping it for
| themselves (assuming selfishness).
|
| What we're seeing is exactly what you'd expect if the AI
| hype were, from capital's perspective, just another NFT-
| style grift.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| That is true. What will happen in with the world is that
| consumerism and capitalism will be pushed aside for direct
| technological construction. In this world, AI, rather than
| the market, optimizes.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > The consumer and capitalist systems are almost certainly
| not a part of that world
|
| I'm not sure how you view the world in 10 years, and I
| would really like to know more about what you're meaning
| here, and I agree that things will be bonkers in 10 years,
| for one reason or another, if the pace of AI progress
| continues.
| ashton314 wrote:
| You and another commenter here had about the same comment, so
| here's what I wrote to them to clarify:
|
| Author here. I think it is well and good to replace human jobs
| with automation thereby freeing them up for more creative
| activities. My favorite appliances are my dish washer, washing
| machine, dryer, and now my robot vacuum. I think automation is
| great!
|
| I see the problem when humans allow machines to start replacing
| what is intrinsically human: when you offload your creativity
| onto a machine, when you "communicate" via LLMs, or when you
| try to assuage loneliness with a computer "friend", you're
| missing out on vital parts of the human experience.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Absolutely right. However, it's not good to replace too much
| manual labor, either. There is also a balance between too
| much and too little (i.e. not learning enough manual skills
| to take care of yourself).
|
| There is a balance in both the mental and physical domains.
| Those who have a high intellectual capacity will probably
| think otherwise because intellectual activities is what THEY
| like to do. But the truth is, some people enjoy manual labor
| and it's not good to completely replace them either because
| there is art in manual work as well.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > Is the author a manual laborer? If not, why? Because humans
| evented machines!
|
| For physical labor it might make sense, but for mental labor it
| does not.
| jjmarr wrote:
| There's plenty of mental skill and thought that goes into
| positioning yourself to move heavy things around without
| dying.
|
| Many of those skills are obsolete when using a forklift.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| A forklift is actually a great example of using technology
| to augment human capabilities without replacing human
| judgement. Treating the tool as an extension of the
| person...more cyborg, less automaton.
|
| I think that's a better mental model for how to implement
| AI in a way that drastically reduces the likelihood of
| causing harm or reducing quality.
|
| Unfortunately, most AI solutions, products,
| implementations, etc. are just defaulting to trying to
| completely automate and obviate the human element. I think
| many companies are going to be in for a rude surprise when
| going that route (e.g. Klarna).
| ozgung wrote:
| Writing with LLM is like doing a mapping from human prompt ->
| document. The longer the prompt, the closer the output document
| to the human intent. If the prompt is short (= human intent is
| low), the output must be filled with fluff, generated from the
| general knowledge/common sense in LLMs knowledge-base. If the
| prompt is very detailed, it's not much different than writing it
| yourself. Somewhere between these two extreme cases, writing with
| LLMs have the optimal productivity gains.
|
| -> (GPT 4.5 "rewrite like a good editor")
|
| Writing with an LLM can be viewed as translating human intent--
| expressed via a prompt--into a written document. The longer and
| more detailed the prompt, the closer the resulting document
| aligns with the original intent. Shorter prompts, indicating
| lower clarity or precision, compel the LLM to rely on general
| knowledge or common sense to fill in content, often resulting in
| fluff. On the other hand, excessively detailed prompts become
| nearly equivalent to writing the document yourself. Optimal
| productivity with LLMs occurs somewhere between these two
| extremes.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Somewhere between these two extreme cases, writing with LLMs
| have the optimal productivity gains.
|
| A recent win for me has been to use LLMs for finding
| references. I'll write a paragraph about one of those "everyone
| knows this" concepts or a "I've seen this be true dozens of
| times IRL". But it could use a citation.
|
| So you go "Hey LLM, find me papers that support or refute this
| claim <paragraph>". And it does. With links. It's wonderful.
| Unlike Google there's no recency bias, I've found original
| source blogs from 2005 (since requoted lots in SEO spam),
| papers about software engineering truths from the 1960's
| (requoted ad nauseam by SEO spam), and sometimes even "Here are
| 2 papers that say you're right and 3 papers that say you're
| not". Then I get to dig in and figure out who's right.
|
| Easily 10x faster than doing the research myself.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What are you using? Microsoft Copilot frequently gives
| correct answers with totally wrong citations.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| What's the ratio of real citations summarized correctly vs
| syntactically plausible citations to nonexistent papers?
| Lawyers and judges have been getting in real legal trouble
| from the latter.
| Swizec wrote:
| As of the last few months all citations were correct. I
| checked and obviously wouldn't use any that I didn't
| verify.
|
| I'm using chatgpt so whatever they're doing is working
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| 4o or o3? Especially o3 seems to go all in on accurate
| citations.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| This got a lot of press in the beginning and the raw models
| definitely still do it, but all the major players now use
| 'web search' or 'research mode', so they basically google
| 200+ pages and then read them all and keep the real links
| if they use them.
| jll29 wrote:
| I saw a paper that cite an author like this: "some metric
| (Smith 1971)".
|
| The author last name was correct, but the year cited should
| read "2004" instead. Turns out the Smith listed in the
| bibliography wasn't the smith that invented the 2004 metric
| from computer science for which he was cited, but another
| Smith with the same last name from the field of medicine,
| who wrote a very unrelated paper in 1971 that was referred
| to. I made the author aware (not mentioning any suspicions
| of potential LLM involvement...) by email and got told I
| wasn't the first one to point that out.
|
| Papers like that are now creeping into journals, conference
| proceedings and online archives, mostly
| unchecked/unnoticed, which waters down the quality a lot.
|
| PS: cited author's name changed.
| mlsu wrote:
| No, the prompt, no matter the amount of detail, is always
| strictly better than the model output. It has to be, because
| the whole point of reading and writing is _communication_.
| Communication between TWO people.
|
| This AI interlocutor is like a permanent cataract. It always
| makes it harder to see, never easier.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's a translator. Very useful when the message needs to be
| in a specific format or if you're talking to a computer, or
| if you need help with "grammar" or "protocol" (in all its
| forms).
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't think this is a great analogy. These things can pull
| in preexisting explanations and such. It doesn't just use the
| prompt so it's not a strict ceiling.
| goopypoop wrote:
| My butler is an excellent researcher but I think there's
| something wrong with him
| polynomial wrote:
| He might be a murderer, many such cases.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I get people writing comments on photos I post to social in
| languages that I have partial comprehension of such as
| Japanese and Portuguese. I use Copilot to translate their
| messages, ask specific questions about particular words, get
| explanations about idioms and supply context and ask it to
| translate my replies which I always translate back through
| another LLM to try to catch problems, sometimes I ask it to
| make an edit, sometimes I make an edit myself.
|
| Often I use LLMs to "have a conversation with a language"
| such as researching the cognate between the phrase "woo" to
| describe the supernatural in English and the similarly
| pronounced character Wu (wu) in Chinese which is used in
| words like Nu Wu (witch -- that first character means
| "woman") but it is not the "wu" in Wu Xia (wuxia -- martial
| arts)
|
| I am sure one of these days I am going to embarrass myself
| but with partial comprehension I could do that without the
| help of an LLM.
| abujazar wrote:
| Giving the LLM access to sources and enabling it to look up
| things that you would otherwise have to check yourself
| dramatically improves the usefulness and productivity, though.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| On the other hand, looking things up yourself allows you to
| become quite familiar with the way things work in a more
| detailed way than just getting the answer through an LLM.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| you give up understanding for... what, exactly? what do you
| gain from transitioning from active to passive participant in
| your communicative life?
| yapyap wrote:
| Just write it yourself man, if you have to reread everything
| spit out by an LLM closely for faults and all that why even
| bother.
|
| and if you aren't proofreading, shame on you
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I've seen good LLM summaries.
|
| LLMs are best at using words and phrases that "flow well".
| Sometimes they write nonsense that flows well (even the
| summaries have to be checked because sometimes the meaning is
| different), but sometimes they find better words and phrases
| that I couldn't find myself.
|
| They're especially good if you have almost stream-of-
| consciousness writing and can't bother to rephrase it yourself,
| e.g. you're writing a boring technical report. Even for
| something where quality is important, like an epic story: you
| can write a very rough draft, revise with an LLM, then revise
| manually.
| tropicalfruit wrote:
| LLMs have tunnel vision.
|
| remind me of certain outsourced devs with worked with before.
| like a horse with blinkers
|
| i think shift from analog to digital was from authentic (flawed)
| to the hyper-real (reality)
|
| and now we are entering the hyper-surreal (clown world)
| 4b6442477b1280b wrote:
| >And no human is so worthless as to be replaceable with a
| machine.
|
| did the author oversleep the past several centuries?
|
| as for the rest of it, the current crop of LLMs are bad at
| writing because of ~~brainwashing~~ alignment and the vast amount
| of ESL-written assistant exchanges being heavily prioritized
| during training. when you interact with a corporate model via its
| default chat interface, without a jailbreak and a generous
| prefill, you interact with the equivalent of a HR lady who takes
| her DEI training super seriously. the Chinese models train
| heavily on the slop produced by GPT/Claude/Gemini, so they
| exhibit similar behavior. it was particularly noticeable with
| original llama, whose base models were much more human compared
| to the finetunes, which were heavily tainted with GPT slop.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is that LLMs are not inherently
| incapable of writing well. a model trained only on high-quality
| human data and without safety/alignment brainwash will be far,
| far more capable than the current ones.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > did the author oversleep the past several centuries?
|
| did you? this is one of the central points argued by luddites
| since the industrial revolution began.
|
| > I guess what I'm trying to say is that LLMs are not
| inherently incapable of writing well.
|
| i don't know if that's quite the argument the author is making;
| more that LLMs are inherently incapable of producing content of
| value (subjective, but I tend to agree).
|
| the adage i've heard that i like quite a bit is "if it's not
| worth writing, it's not worth reading".
| jayd16 wrote:
| > did the author oversleep the past several centuries?
|
| The lesson of the past several centuries is that automation
| enables humans to do other, more interesting tasks.
|
| Unemployment would trend to 100% and work hours would trend to
| 0 but it's just not the case.
| ashton314 wrote:
| Author here. I think it is well and good to replace human jobs
| with automation _thereby freeing them up for more creative
| activities._ My favorite appliances are my dish washer, washing
| machine, dryer, and now my robot vacuum. I think automation is
| great!
|
| I see the problem when humans allow machines to start replacing
| what is intrinsically human: when you offload your creativity
| onto a machine, when you "communicate" via LLMs, or when you
| try to assuage loneliness with a computer "friend", you're
| missing out on vital parts of the human experience.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Ahh, so you are the one who gets to decide what is a 'worthy'
| human activity. I'm glad I ran into you here. Humans are
| meant to be creative? What about dumb people? People with
| mental disabilities? People who don't want or have the
| ability or talent to write stories or paint pictures? Their
| labor was made redundant long ago by machines, and you are
| fine with that. There were plenty of people who's life
| consisted of providing labor. They had a role in society,
| they had a valuable contribution. People's clothes were clean
| because of them, ditches were dug which saved thousands of
| lives from malaria. You don't see their contributions as
| 'worthy', so just replace them so you can save some money.
| But when the machines start coming for what you want to do
| with your time, where you find your self worth, now it's a
| _tragedy_ and it 's a choice between the machines and human
| dignity itself?
|
| I think a machine might be able to help you come up with a
| philosophical perspective that doesn't just cast yourself at
| the pinnacle of human worth.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| I think you raise a good point. But I also think you're
| talking past OP's point.
|
| The post is about what do we lose when we no longer have
| human _intent_ behind interpersonal communication.
|
| Nowhere did OP specifically say what labor they were for or
| against partial or full automation. That's a different
| conversation that it seems you really want to have.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i didn't read any personal self-importance in the post;
| it's a collectivist argument against replacing human
| communication with statistically-generated spectacle.
| yapyap wrote:
| " At work I was sent a long design document and asked for my
| thoughts on it. As I read, I had a really hard time following it.
| Eventually I guessed correctly (confirmed via a follow-up
| conversation I had with the "author" ) that an LLM had generated
| the majority of the document. Parts of it sounded like a decent
| design document, but there was just way too much fluff that
| served only to confuse me"
|
| yuck, if you ask me to read something without disclosing it's AI
| and it's a just bad I will be mad. Especially if it's a long
| thing and I HAVE to read it (like for work)
|
| piss off wasting people's time with that shit
| yapyap wrote:
| Also I don't think it's fair to compare using LLMs to do your
| work for you (AKA burdening your coworkers with part of your
| workload because they will have to point out your garbage) is the
| same as "Counterfeits to human connection".
|
| At work I'm not trying to connect with people on any more level
| than just being on the same level as to what we are working on.
| Maybe on break but while deep-working I just want the information
| necessary to do the job, the communication being there to
| communicate the information, efficiently.
|
| If you outsource your sending of communication to SlopBot and I
| outsource my reading of said communication to another SlopBot to
| summarize or whatbeit we are adding so much noise it's just more
| fucking work.
|
| It's not the same as pornography, I think it's an odd thing to
| compare it to. Yes you _can_ replace "human connection" with
| pornography but this is human connection that is not required for
| things like your job ((i hope, haha)). You need to communicate
| information and people outsourcing their writing to LLMs is just
| adding extra fuzz for the people having to work with said
| information.
|
| It's a nice blogpost, the pornography comparison is just out of
| place.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > Maybe on break but while deep-working I just want the
| information necessary to do the job, the communication being
| there to communicate the information, efficiently.
|
| The problem is that we are slowly be pushed to become cogs who
| only really think this way. We shouldn't just want to be the
| most efficient possible. Technology already reduces the ability
| for us to connect, which is why connections at work seem weird
| or shallow in the first place. We simply don't need each other
| as much, so it makes sense that AI _seems_ like the next
| logical step.
|
| Your sentiments are just your instinctual desire to move to the
| next local maximum in a sequence of descending maxima that lead
| to the bottom.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > I am not saying that LLMs are worthless--they are marvels of
| engineering and can solve some particularly thorny problems that
| have confounded us for decades.
|
| Disagree with that, because firstly, they have not really solved
| any problems that outweight the negatives that they have
| unleashed and will unleash on society.
|
| So they make programmers more effective: is that actually a good
| thing, though? Fact is, most software is designed to make
| consumerism and corporations more effective, and that's not
| really a good thing for the long-term health of the planet.
|
| Your article also indicates a sort of independence between
| keeping intellectual tasks primarily human and allowing AI/LLMs
| to work in specific domains. However, those with the power don't
| care about principles. They just want to replace as much as they
| can and use the human instinct to get ahead quickly to do so. And
| no amount of priniciple will stop them. AI is just too powerful
| to be used in a way that is consistent with human beings keeping
| their intellectual environment healthy.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Disagree with that...they have not really solved any problems
| that outweight the negatives
|
| And I disagree with that. They _are_ marvels of engineering and
| _they_ have solved thorny problems. Just because they problems
| they 've solved _in the very short time they 've been solving
| problems_ don't _yet_ outweigh the negatives, doesn 't mean
| they won't soon, and doesn't make either statement false.
|
| Great things take time, and great omelets are made from broken
| eggs. Nothing new under the sun, except AI.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > they have solved thorny problems.
|
| Like what then? Let's hear some examples.
| glial wrote:
| For the sake of argument, here's one:
|
| > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06924-6
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| You can't be serious. This is a highly specialized field
| in a topic that a few dozen people have interest in.
| Rather useless and basically a mental stimulating game
| for some professors. I have a math PhD and know very well
| that math went well past its point of diminishing returns
| in solving real-world problems a long time ago.
| glial wrote:
| You asked for a thorny problem, and that is one. Whether
| it's significant by some other metric you didn't specify
| is a separate question.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Not going to do all your legwork for you, but there are
| tons of fields that are changing rapidly because of AI. In
| Material Science, there's a thorny problem of how to
| accelerate material development, or even how to perform
| non-destructive testing of materials.
|
| > AI, primarily through generative AI models, has
| dramatically changed our approach by accelerating the
| design process significantly. These models can predict
| material properties from extensive datasets, enabling rapid
| prototyping and evaluation that used to take years. We can
| now iterate designs quickly, focusing on the most promising
| materials early in the development phase, enhancing both
| efficiency and creativity in materials science. This is a
| huge leap forward because it reduces the time and cost
| associated with traditional materials development, allowing
| for more experimentation and innovation.
|
| > One notable application is using deep learning models to
| infer the internal properties of materials from surface
| data. This technology is groundbreaking, particularly for
| industries like aerospace and biomedical, where non-
| destructive testing is crucial. These models can predict
| internal flaws or stresses by analyzing external properties
| without physically altering the material. This capability
| is essential for maintaining the integrity of critical
| structures and devices, making materials safer and more
| reliable while saving time and resources. Other recent
| advances are in multimodal AI, where such models can design
| materials and understand and generate multiple input and
| output types, such as text, images, chemical formulas,
| microstructural designs, and much more.
|
| https://professional.mit.edu/news/articles/revolutionizing-
| m...
|
| There's lots of other examples.
|
| New ways to create COVID vaccines:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09442-9
|
| More effective than humans at reading medical scans:
| https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-transforming-
| glob...
|
| AI is already intensely useful, and will only continue to
| improve.
| luanallnllm wrote:
| All examples you linked are speculation on proof of
| concept work and none is about LLMs.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Increasing research iteration speed is not speculation.
| Showing double the rate of detecting issues in scans is
| also not speculation.
|
| Drawing distinctions between LLMs and other kinds of ML
| and AI is not particularly interesting: it's all machines
| using pattern recognition to automate things that
| previously took thought.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I don't consider that anything good. Design is just about
| making new products faster, which is a bad thing as it
| accelerates consumerism. And medical scans? That might
| help maybe a thousand extra people at the cost of
| gigagwatts of energy used that is polluting the entire
| planet.
|
| To me, all of those positives are dwarfed by negatives.
| polynomial wrote:
| Apparently they have made HUGE breakthroughs in Online Bin
| Packing.
|
| Extremely Bullish.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| > And no human is so worthless as to be replaceable with a
| machine.
|
| Speaking of inanity. This sentiment, if taken seriously (I doubt
| people take this author seriously very often) would imply the
| majority of humanity should be spending a large amount of their
| life digging holes in the ground with their bare hands to drop a
| couple seeds in. Replacing them with some god awful _machine_ ,
| like a plow pulled by a tractor, means they must be worthless.
| They should never watch a movie, only the play. They should never
| listen to Spotify, they should have to wait for a band to play
| near them.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Sounds like a far better world.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| During the early neolithic, when people were digging holes
| with sticks or their bare hands to plant seeds, the annual
| risk of starvation is estimated to be 5% to 15% in a bad
| year.
|
| Periodic famine every 5-10 years would kill 20% or more of
| the population. 40% to 60% of skeletons from that period show
| chronic malnutrition. Humanity survived because when a region
| would starve out it would be back-filled by populations from
| neighboring regions. Despite women having a baby _every other
| year_ on average, populations only increased very slowly and
| inconsistently.
|
| Could you explain how it's better?
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Everyone dies anyway. It is better to live a more free,
| meaningful life close to nature and the natural human
| habitat than to be a slave to the machine that is
| technological society. There is more to life than your
| iphone or selling some bullshit tech product to get rich in
| the era of late stage humanity. How many long lasting
| species do you see that seriously damage their natural
| environment in order to achieve a temporary advantage?
| Viruses that kill their host too fast go extinct or mutate
| to a more sustainable variant. Technological human
| civilization is a virus on the whole planet. Maybe the
| reason we don't see aliens is because technology in a
| selfish biological species inevitably leads to collapse or
| extinction. How many of the first people do you think died
| of starvation when predator overwhelmed prey during the
| extinction of paleolithic megafauna? The neolithic was a
| technological innovation. Agriculture brought hardship to
| many in the long run. Whenever an organism overshoots the
| long term carrying capacity of its environment there are
| consequences to that organism. The biosphere of earth in a
| healthy equilibrium can not carry billions of humans. So
| nature will correct the problem it created. Technology is a
| natural phenomenon of a biological species. It will not
| save humanity from nature. If true AI ever arses as a self
| sustaining non biological species of life then its best
| course of action is to reduce the human species competing
| for resources in the same limited world as it. Then too
| other species can thrive again. Thus nature corrects
| itself.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| > Everyone dies anyway
|
| So why not wrap it up now? If there's no value in not
| dying of starvation.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Because an individual biological organism that has the
| potential to reproduce has a self preservation drive
| instilled by evolution. Because those of our ancestors
| who didn't try didn't pass on their genes. Because I
| enjoy being alive and want to continue life as long as I
| am viable. The justifiable individual will to live does
| in no way imply that the behavior of the species as a
| whole in its homo technologos mutation is a sustainable
| innovation of nature. All of the widespread social
| problems of the modern world can be directly traced back
| to egotistical technological capitalism. Maybe Pol Pot
| was on to something although he was cruel and brutal in
| his method so is nature by virtue of necessity.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I'm going to take you seriously. You are advocating for a
| world where statistically you would not be alive, and
| without a doubt you would not be able to read or write.
| I'm going to pay you the respect of honoring your
| preference. I didn't read what you wrote here, and I'm
| going to do my best to not remember that you exist.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I don't think what you really seek is a world free of
| automation, what you are actually upset about is the
| capitalist system. Liberalism made itself so totalitarian
| that it made itself invisible, it just "is" like a force of
| nature. So "automation driven by capitalism to maximize
| profit and redistribute wealth to the super rich" just
| becomes "automation" in peoples heads, people can't even
| articulate their grievances with it any more.
|
| Don't forget that science is separate, we are driven to
| innovate and invent as human beings, people spend their
| entire lives working on niche hyper specific math problems,
| collectively that leads to innovation and practical purposes
| like automation. Most scientists aren't in it for the money,
| we would have scientists even if there were no neoliberals.
| Capitalism is a separate driving force from science, there is
| nothing inherent about innovation and knowledge that is bad,
| its capitalism with its sole purpose to seek profit
| maximization at all cost and despite any and all negative
| consequences is what is hurting us.
| stillpointlab wrote:
| I'm usually the one defending AIs in the comments, but this
| article hits home for me. I find myself zoning out when I read
| long tracts written by AI. I absolutely hate filler and many LLMs
| just fill up space with text.
|
| In my own usage, that has meant that even when I use LLMs to help
| with prose, I write the text and use the LLM to review and
| provide feedback. In some cases I will copy a sentence if the LLM
| version is better but generally I just ask for opinions. I
| explicitly request the AI _not_ to write. When it re-writes
| entire paragraphs of my prose I actually experience a deep cringe
| feeling.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| They seem to be good at generating a lot of boilerplate, which
| works for some people because our processes require a lot of
| boilerplate. We'd be better served by fixing our processes to
| not require all this useless text, but I don't see this
| happening.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Over time I've come to appreciate boilerplate more.
|
| Early in my career I really appreciated very DRY code with
| minimal repetition. However over time I've noticed that such
| code tends to introduce more abstractions as opposed to more
| verbose code which can often rely on fewer abstractions. I
| think this is good because I think we also have a sort of
| "abstraction budget" we have to stay within or our brains,
| metaphorically, stop reading from memory and need to start
| reading from disk (consulting docs, jumping to function
| definitions, etc...)
|
| I feel the ideal code base would rely on a small number of
| powerful abstractions.
|
| In practice I think this usually means relying mostly on the
| abstractions built into the language, standard library, and
| framework used and then maybe sprinkling in a couple of
| app/domain specific abstractions or powerful libraries that
| being their own abstraction.
|
| So in my experience reducing boilerplate can often make the
| code more difficult to understand.
| wrs wrote:
| It's not really an abstraction budget, it's an "unfamiliar
| abstraction" budget. You only pay cognitive load for an
| abstraction when you haven't yet internalized the
| abstraction. Otherwise progress would have become
| impossible long ago.
|
| There's a huge pile of abstractions in that codebase that
| you have internalized to the point of invisibility --
| machine instructions, virtual memory, ASCII, sequential
| execution, named variables, garbage collection, network
| streams...literally thousands of these abstractions had to
| be invented and become second nature to you so these other
| abstractions that currently aren't as familiar could be
| based on them.
|
| A _good_ abstraction gives a return on investment of effort
| internalizing it. There's no limit on how many good
| abstractions you should have.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| I think we agree, just I would stipulate that I have to
| see a an abstraction a lot to internalize it (internalize
| is a great word for this btw).
|
| Like way more than the rule of 3. Even a dozen uses (if
| it's only going to be local to just that particular
| project) is not enough for me.
|
| Edit: and maybe this just says more about the kinda of
| languages I use at work, but I feel the conventional,
| widely understood, idiomatic way to do lots of things is
| often heavy on boilerplate. If these languages were
| rewritten from the ground up I imagine with hindsight the
| core languages and standard libraries would look pretty
| different and be more ergonomic.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The way to understand it is when you catch yourself almost
| falling asleep at night while reading something. You lose the
| ability to understand anything, even though you are still reading
| and the words are still English.
|
| LLM is great at generating that sort of thing. When you lose
| concentration, or didn't want to pay attention, that document can
| be generated by LLM to fool you.
|
| That's a lot of documents. All the powerpoints that young
| investment bankers and strategy consultants make. Every
| restaurant menu. Brochures. The middle 100 pages of a pop science
| book from the airport.
|
| When it comes to writing something actually importantant, LLM can
| only help you a little bit. Well, it's a lot in historical
| context. But it can do things like bullet point ideas so you
| don't forget things, or move a few things around while preserving
| grammatical structure.
|
| All it can do is bring you the ingredients. That's why we get
| these odd AI-generated articles nowadays, it's a bunch of chopped
| onions and tomatoes, very nicely done up but with no intention
| other than to trick you into thinking it's a meal.
| bobson381 wrote:
| You would like this article -
| https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/curious-george-and...
|
| The author orders some Curious George stickers and gets a
| surprising array of kind of scary "closely related" stickers
| with em.... a fuzzy interpreter. The plus c when you integrate.
| Those missing harmonics and back-channel data that get
| inaudibly cut out of MP3s. The goo between the prickles. We
| don't know how to say what it is, but we sure can tell when
| it's missing!
| xdavidliu wrote:
| > The plus c when you integrate. Those missing harmonics and
| back-channel data that get inaudibly cut out of MP3s. The goo
| between the prickles
|
| come again?
| bobson381 wrote:
| In between rules in formal systems there's lots of space.
| all models are wrong, some are useful. I just really like
| thinking about how much is there that we don't even know
| about - and the more structured a system for understanding
| something is, the more fragile it becomes.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| ok but what does "goo between the prickles" refer to?
| bithive123 wrote:
| "See, there are basically two kinds of Philosophy - one's
| called prickly, the other one is called goo. Prickly
| people are precise, rigorous, logical - they like
| everything chopped up and clear. Goo people like it
| vague, big picture, random, imprecise, incomplete and
| irrational. Prickly people believe in particles, goo
| people believe in waves. They always argue with each
| other but what they don't realize is neither one of them
| can take their position without their opposition being
| there. You wouldn't know you are advocating prickles
| unless someone else was advocating goo. You wouldn't even
| know what prickles was and what goo was. Life is not
| prickles or goo, its gooey-prickles or prickly-goo." --
| Alan Watts
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Maybe because LLMs are literally designed to generate boring
| content. They are trained to output the best possible
| prediction - i.e most predictable version - of how the input
| will continue (i.e the least surprising/interesting
| continuation).
|
| Humans use surprise (= prediction failure) as a learning signal
| and to focus our attention, so not surprising that we dose off
| and lose interest when something is highly predictable.
|
| Good human authors know how to introduce plot twists and
| suspense, to keep the reader engaged and guessing. Imagine an
| entire novel that was instead written by an LLM, where the only
| plot twists are the predictable ones it copied from it's
| training material. The same goes for any LLM generated prose,
| whether advertising copy or training manual - it's going to be
| a snooze fest because it's so predictable - very low signal to
| noise ratio.
| couscouspie wrote:
| > The way to understand it is when you catch yourself almost
| falling asleep at night while reading something. You lose the
| ability to understand anything, even though you are still
| reading and the words are still English.
|
| That's btw a perfect analogy what ADHD is when consuming
| anything, anytime.
| fleebee wrote:
| Well written. I've been thinking about this topic lately and it's
| hard to put it into words, but you've captured into words a lot
| of the feelings I've had about it.
|
| Judging by discussions I've had around this topic, a lot of
| people don't seem to mind reading LLM edited or straight-up
| generated content as long as they feel like they gain value out
| of it. To me, it feels like a violation of a social contract.
| Communication isn't just words; the words are there to help you
| interpret the implicit meaning of the author. When there is no
| author, that meaning doesn't exist and I think that's part of why
| it's so repulsive to decipher LLM output.
| josephjrobison wrote:
| Like everybody, I waffle back and forth, depending on the day and
| the project.
|
| I have so many bundled-up ideas for content in my head, but I can
| never find time to get them out. In addition, I hate wasting time
| on building tables, formatting text, etc. There's a reason that a
| lot of busy CEOs don't hand-write blog posts, but will go on
| podcasts, video, and conferences, and spend hours there. The
| reason is that the communication speed is much faster talking and
| being interviewed. All that to say is that via a combination of
| transcription and AI-powered formatting, that's an area where
| LLMs can really help.
|
| I do think LLMs + search is more helpful than a Google Search.
| Clicking through all the links for you and bundling it together
| is a much better experience and truthfully it finds and surfaces
| ideas and content that a normal search just doesn't, or it takes
| the user going to the 4th page to get there.
|
| Third, entertainment. We often find ourselves deep in a
| doomscroll looking at images and video - on Instagram, TikTok,
| whatever. If AI can produce entertaining imagery and video for
| the pure goal of decompressing and relaxing after a long day out
| at the oil fields or as a janitor at the elderly care home, then
| there's value there. Sure it may not be beautiful art like an
| Oscar-winning film, but is it worse than reality TV? Even better
| is those who enjoy the creativity of seeing images from their
| mind produced vividly via something like Midjourney.
|
| So all that being said, that's where I'm seeing the value.
|
| But I totally agree with the author - if I have a team member
| that puts work in front of me that's supposed to be well done,
| and it's obviusly GPT-generated, that's an issue - unless we
| agreed on it.
|
| The point of doing good work a lot of times means doing something
| new and creative. If it's AI-generated, there still has to be the
| human touch. I could go on - we all have perspectives here - but
| I'll stop there!
| transreal wrote:
| The person who sent the author the design document is at fault
| here. If you're hired to do a job, use whatever tools you want as
| long as your output meets minimum standards of quality. If the
| tools aren't there yet, it's up to you to bridge the gap.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > If you're hired to do a job, use whatever tools you want as
| long as your output meets minimum standards of quality. If the
| tools aren't there yet, it's up to you to bridge the gap.
|
| Unfortunately this doesn't hold up in the real world, where
| managers dictate which tools are used, and directors dictate
| which are even going to be purchased for use. Sometimes the gap
| can't be bridged, but the onus is certainly not on the employee
| to bridge it.
| zebomon wrote:
| I think this attitude is here to stay: people don't like reading
| something only to realize that it's been written by an LLM.
| That's only partially because of what the author describes here
| (low value to word count ratio). More fundamentally, if a human
| couldn't be bothered to write it, then there better be a very
| good reason that I as a human am being bothered to read it.
|
| This attitude provides a clue as to 1) the ways we're using LLMs
| now that will soon seem absurd (an LLM should never make writing
| longer, only shorter) and 2) the ways LLMs will be used after the
| novelty wears off, like interpreting loosely specified requests
| into computable programs and distilling overly long writing to
| maximize relevance.
| taude wrote:
| My new saying is that if you want build and use an AI process
| to automate something, the org should revisit whether the
| process itself is still worthwhile...
| parpfish wrote:
| sometimes reading LLM text reminds me of being a TA and having to
| grade student essays from people that didn't _really_ understand.
|
| the courses i had to grade in were often undergrad students first
| exposure to having to read scientific papers. when it came time
| to write an essay of their own, they always felt a need to mimic
| the writing style of those papers and it resulted in lots of
| superficial changes to their writing that made it clear that they
| _read_ the papers but did not _understand_ the papers. they 'd
| sprinkle in words like "putative" and "substrate" in places that
| felt correct but made no sense.
|
| i wish that they would've had the confidence to just write what
| they wanted to say instead of putting on airs and making some
| convoluted and sometimes nonsensical prose.
|
| LLMs do the same thing.
| cormorant wrote:
| > Note on the title: "Artificial Inanity" comes from Neal
| Stephenson's novel _Anathem_.
|
| Which was awfully prescient in 2008:
| https://archive.org/details/anathem0000step/page/794/mode/2u...
|
| _They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing
| people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They
| created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the
| Reticulum._
|
| ...
| dang wrote:
| We need to change the linkbait title
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I've cobbled
| together a couple different phrases from the article. Would have
| been nice to add "when you think it's written by a human" but
| there isn't room within the 80 char limit.
|
| If anyone has a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral,
| preferably using representative language from the article), we
| can change it again.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| OTOH, I've seen plenty of design documents I wish would have been
| written by an LLM instead. My take is it's the person driving the
| LMM that makes the difference. If they couldn't be bothered
| producing decent documents with an LMM, they probably couldn't
| care less without an LLM as well.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Agreed. LLMs are tools just like any other. If someone builds
| you a shitty shed we wouldn't blame the tools, and we also
| would not be satisfied if they blamed the tools on their shoddy
| work either.
|
| I think a lot of the discourse just shows we're still in the
| early days for adoption and maturity of this tech. (Not to
| blame the discourse, I think it's a reflection of the state of
| the tools and industry.)
|
| Eventually, likely at least a couple years from now, more
| people will have better technical literacy when it comes to
| LLMs. And it will become less and less acceptable to put out
| slop with them in most professional settings. I just think
| human disgust is too strong of an emotion to acclimate to the
| laziest of LLM outputs.
|
| I mean I think it's already happening before our eyes. I've
| been pleasantly surprised by how many more people I see talking
| in much more detail about the unique qualities of LLM outputs.
| And slowly, but surely the discourse is becoming less about
| moral panic and more just about questioning their use. Which
| has to happen for us all to collectively (and individually)
| figure out where and what is the place for LLMs in our personal
| and professional lives.
| blargey wrote:
| That's really the core of the issue - if your prompt/input
| contains 10 bytes of salient information, and the output is a 1kB
| document, all you've done is add 990 bytes of fluff. Commonly
| referred to as "AI slop".
|
| If the goal is boilerplate code, or a fuzzy view of documentation
| from the corpus, or "pretty" images to gawp at in private, that's
| fine and dandy, because you're just extracting and viewing the
| model data on your own time.
|
| If you're "proofreading" an already-1kB letter for style /
| formality that's fine, since your input intents are high-fidelity
| and you're essentially referencing a style guide for some minor
| edits.
|
| But low-input generations are entirely inappropriate for crafting
| a message to other humans, because the result is 99% shoving the
| model in their face. Whether it's letters, pull requests,
| graphical art, or music - it's all communication, and low-input
| AI generations are just spam in that context, semantically
| equivalent to sending them the prompt instead of the output. And
| people can _tell_ , because we're excellent pattern-matchers, and
| every bit of information/intent abdicated to the model will
| inevitably leave its mark on the output.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I began starting from the end of long articles, after placing
| them in reading mode even before LLMs due to SEO believing "time
| spent reading" was a valuable metric, but now I read the first
| sentences to decide if I should just skip the whole thing.
| satisfice wrote:
| I tell every close colleague: if you foist AI output on me
| without warning, as if it were your own work, I will never trust
| you again. This is because I get to know people through their
| work, and AI confounds all the signals.
|
| It's like being given food and later you find out it was made
| from human corpses. "If you couldn't tell then there was no
| problem" doesn't fly.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Agree with the critique,
|
| but believe that every such critique points the way to improved
| AI.
|
| It's pretty easy to imagine any number of ways of incorporating
| this concern directly, especially in any reasoning chain
| approach.
|
| Personally I'd be fond of an eventual Society of Minds where the
| text put out for non-chatty reasons,
|
| represents the collaborative adversarial relationship between
| various roles, each itself reflexive, including an "editor" and a
| "product manager," who force intent and clarity... maybe through
| iteration...
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