[HN Gopher] It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
___________________________________________________________________
It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
Author : speckx
Score : 791 points
Date : 2025-10-27 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pabloecortez.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pabloecortez.com)
| noir_lord wrote:
| I just hit the back button as soon as my "this feels like AI"
| sense tingles.
|
| Now you could argue but you don't know it was AI it could just be
| really mediocre writing - it could indeed but I hit the back
| button there as well so it's a wash either way.
| rco8786 wrote:
| There's definitely an uncanny valley with a lot of AI. But
| also, it's entirely likely that lots of what we're reading is
| AI generated and we can't tell at all. This post could easily
| be AI (it's not, but it could be)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Ah the portcullis to the philosophical topic of, "if you
| couldn't tell, does that demonstrate that authenticity
| doesn't matter?"
| noir_lord wrote:
| I think it does, We could get a robotic arm to paint in the
| style of a Dutch master but it'd not _be_ a Dutch master.
|
| I'd sooner have a ship painting from the little shop in the
| village with the little old fella who paints them in the
| shop than a perfect robotic simulacrum of a Rembrandt.
|
| Intention matters but it matters less _sometimes_ but I
| think it matters.
|
| Writing is communication, it's one of the things we as
| humans do that makes us unique - why would I want to reduce
| that to a machine generating it or read it when it has.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's also why in The Matrix (1999) the main character
| takes the red pill (facing grim reality) rather than the
| blue pill (forgetting about grim reality and going back
| to a happy illusion).
| noir_lord wrote:
| Aye I always thought the character of Cypher was tragic
| as well, his reality sucked so much that he'd consciously
| go back and live a lie he doesn't remember and then
| forget he made that choice.
|
| The Matrix was and is fantastic on many levels.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I've been learning piano and I've noticed a similar thing
| with music. You can listen to perfect machine generated
| performances of songs and there is just something
| missing. A live performance even of a master pianist will
| have little 'mistakes' or interpretations that make the
| whole performance so much more enjoyable. Not only that,
| but just knowing that a person spent months drilling a
| song adds something.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Two things this great comment reminds me of:
|
| I've been learning piano too, and I find more joy in
| performing a piece poorly, than listening to it played
| competently. My brother asked me why I play if I'm just
| playing music that's already been performed (a leading
| question, he's not ignorant). I asked him why he plays
| hockey if you can watch pros play it far better. It's the
| journey, not the destination.
|
| I've been (re-)re-re-watching Star Trek TNG and Data
| touches on this issue numerous times, one of which is
| specifically about performing violin (but also reciting
| Shakespeare). And the message is what you're sharing: to
| recite a piece with perfect technical execution results
| an in imperfect performance. It's the _human_ aspects
| that lend a piece deep emotion that other humans connect
| with, often without being able to concretely describe
| why. Let us feel your emotions through your work.
| Everyting written on the page is just the medium for
| those emotions. Without emotion, your perfectly recited
| piece is a delivered blank message.
| Peritract wrote:
| > Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or
| what's a heaven for?
|
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43745/andrea-del-
| sart...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I do the same almost, but use "this isn't interesting/fun to
| read" and don't really care if it was written by AI or not, if
| it's interesting/fun it's interesting/fun, and if it isn't, it
| isn't. Many times it's obvious it's AI, but sometimes as you
| said it could just be bad, and in the end it doesn't really
| matter, I don't want to continue reading it regardless.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I do the same, but for blog posts complaining about AI.
|
| At this point, I don't know there's much more to be said on the
| topic. Lines of contention are drawn, and all that's left is to
| see what people decide to do.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| It's insulting but I also find it extremely concerning that my
| younger colleagues can't seem to tell the difference. An article
| will very clearly be AI slop and I'll express frustration, only
| to discover that they have no idea what I"m talking about.
| Insanity wrote:
| Or worse - they can tell the difference but don't think it
| matters.
| rco8786 wrote:
| I see a lot of that also.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| For me it is everyone that has lost the ability to respond to a
| work email without first having it rewritten by some LLM
| somewhere. Or my sister who will have ChatGPT give a response
| to a text message if she doesn't feel like reading the 4-5
| sentences from someone.
|
| I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof
| soon, and I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done
| about it.
| noir_lord wrote:
| > I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof
| soon
|
| As a diagnosed medical condition I don't know, as people
| having seemingly shorter and short attention spans we are
| seeing it already, TikTok and YT shorts and the like don't
| help, we've _weaponised_ inattention.
| larodi wrote:
| ADHD is going to very soon be a major pandemic. Not one we
| talk about too much, as there are plenty of players ready to
| feed unlimited supplies of Concerta, Ritalin and Adderal
| among others.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| ADHD is a difference in _how the brain functions and is
| constructed_.
|
| It is physiological.
|
| I don't think any evidence exists that you can _cause_ anyone
| to become neurodivergent except by _traumatic brain injury_
|
| TikTok does not "make" people ADHD. They might struggle to
| let themselves be bored and may be addicted to quick fixes of
| dopamine, but _that is not what ADHD is_. ADHD is not an
| addiction to dopamine hits. ADHD is not an inability to be
| bored.
|
| TikTok for example will not give you the kinds of tics and
| lack of proprioception that is common in neurodivergent
| people. Being addicted to Tiktok will never give you that
| absurd experience where your brain "hitches" while doing a
| task and you rapidly oscillate between progressing towards
| one task vs another. Being habituated to check your phone at
| every down moment does not cause you to be unable to ignore
| sensory input because your actual sensory processing
| machinery in your brain is _not functioning normally_.
| Getting addicted to tiktok does not give you a child 's
| handwriting despite decades of practice. If you do not
| already have significant stimming and jitter symptoms, Tiktok
| will not make you develop them.
|
| You cannot learn to be ADHD.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I'd be curious to do a general study to see what percentage of
| humans can spot AI written content vs human written content on
| the same subject.
|
| Specifically is there any correlation between people who have
| always read a lot as I do and people who don't.
|
| My observation (anecdota) is that the people I know who read
| heavily are much better at and much more against AI slop vs
| people who don't read at all.
|
| Even when I've played with the current latest LLM's and asked
| them questions, I simply don't like the way they answer, it
| _feels_ off somehow.
| strix_varius wrote:
| I agree, and I'm not sure why it feels off but I have a
| theory.
|
| AI is good at local coherence, but loses the plot over longer
| thoughts (paragraphs, pages). I don't think I could identify
| AI sentences but I'm totally confident I could identify an AI
| book.
|
| This includes both opening a large text in a way of thinking
| that isn't reflected several paragraphs later, and also
| maintaining a repetitive "beat" in the rhythm of writing that
| is fine locally but becomes obnoxious and repetitive over
| longer periods. Maybe that's just regression to the mean of
| "voice?"
| mediaman wrote:
| I both read a fair amount (and long books, 800-1,000 page
| classic Russian novels, that kind of thing) and use LLMs.
|
| I quite like using LLMs to learn new things. But I agree: I
| can't stand reading blog posts written by LLMs. Perhaps it is
| about expectations. A blog post I am expecting to gain a view
| into an individual's thinking; for an AI, I am looking into
| an abyss of whirring matrix-shaped gears.
|
| There's nothing wrong with the abyss of matrices, but if I'm
| at a party and start talking with someone, and get the
| whirring sound of gears instead of the expected human banter,
| I'm a little disturbed. And it feels the same for blog
| content: these are personal communications; machines have
| their place and their use, but if I get a machine when I'm
| expecting something personal, it counters expectations.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| In the US, (internet fact, grain of salt, etc) there is a trend
| where students, and now adults, are growing increasingly
| functionally illiterate.
| otikik wrote:
| This is Rick and Morty S1E4 and we are all becoming Jerry. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Night_Shaym-Aliens!
| edoceo wrote:
| I do like it for taking the hour long audio/video and creating a
| summary that, even if poorly written, can indicate to me wether
| I'd like to listen to the hour of media.
| icapybara wrote:
| If they can't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered
| to read it?
| abixb wrote:
| I'm sure lots of "readers" of such articles fed it to another
| AI model to summarize it, thereby completely bypassing the
| usual human experience of writing and then careful (and
| critical) reading and parsing of the article text. I weep for
| the future.
|
| Also, reminds me of this cartoon from March 2023. [0]
|
| [0] https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
| trthomps wrote:
| I'm curious if the people who are using AI to summarize
| articles are the same people who would have actually read
| more than the headline to begin with. It feels to me like the
| sort of person who would have read the article and applied
| critical thinking to it is not going to use an AI summary to
| bypass that since they won't be satisfied with it.
| alxmdev wrote:
| Many of those who can't be bothered to write what they publish
| probably can't be bothered to read it themselves, either. Not
| _by_ humans and certainly not _for_ humans.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Now that I think about it, it's rather ironic that's a quote
| because you didn't write it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Because the author has something to say and needs help saying
| it?
|
| pre-AI scientists would publish papers and then journalists
| would write summaries which were usually misleading and often
| wrong.
|
| An AI operating on its own would likely be no better than the
| journalist, but an AI supervised by the original scientist
| quite likely might do a better job.
| kirurik wrote:
| I agree, I think there is such a thing as AI overuse, but I
| would rather someone uses AI to form their points more
| succinctly than for them to write something that I can't
| understand.
| thw_9a83c wrote:
| > If they can't be bothered to write it, why should I be
| bothered to read it?
|
| Isn't that the same with AI-generated source code? If lazy
| programmers didn't bother writing it, why should I bother
| reading it? I'll ask the AI to understand it and to make the
| necessary changes. Now, let's repeat this process over and
| over. I wonder what would be the state of such code over time.
| We are clearly walking this path.
| conception wrote:
| Why would source code be considered the same as a blog post?
| thw_9a83c wrote:
| I didn't say the source code is the same as a blog post. I
| pointed out that we are going to apply the "I don't bother"
| approach to the source code as well.
|
| Programming languages were originally invented for humans
| to write and read. Computers don't need them. They are fine
| with machine code. If we eliminate humans from the coding
| process, the code could become something that is not
| targeted for humans. And machines will be fine with that
| too.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Why would I bother to run it? Why wouldn't I just have AI to
| read it and then provide output on my input?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Tired meme. If you can't be bothered to think up an original
| idea, why bother to post?
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| 2+2 doesn't suddenly become 5 just because you're bored of 4.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you assume that a LLM's expansion of someone's thoughts
| is less their thoughts than someone copy and pasting a
| tired meme, that exposes a pretty fundamental world view
| divide. I'm ok with you just hating AI stuff because it's
| AI, but have the guts to own your prejudice and state it
| openly -- you're always going to hate AI no matter how good
| it gets, just be clear about that. I can't stand people who
| try to make up pretty sounding reasons to justify their
| primal hatred.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I don't hate AI, I hate liars. It's just that so far, the
| former has proven itself to be of little use to anyone
| but the latter.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| They used to say judge the message, not the messenger.
|
| But you are saying that is wrong, you should judge the
| messenger, not the message.
| elif wrote:
| I feel like this has to be AI generated satire as art
| thire wrote:
| Yes, I was almost hoping for a "this was AI-generated"
| disclaimer at the end!
| xena wrote:
| People at work have fed me obviously AI generated documentation
| and blogposts. I've gotten to the point where I can make fairly
| accurate guesses as to which model generated it. I've started to
| just reject them because the alternative is getting told to
| rewrite them to "not look AI".
| the_af wrote:
| What amazes me is that some people think I want to read AI slop
| in their blog that I could have generated by asking ChatGPT
| directly.
|
| Anyone can access ChatGPT, why do we need an intermediary?
|
| Someone a while back shared, here on HN, almost an entire blog
| generated by (barely touched up) AI text. It even had Claude-isms
| like "excellent question!", em-dashes, the works. Why would
| anyone want to read that?
| dewey wrote:
| There's blogs that are not meant to be read, but are just
| content marketing to be found by search engines.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| In that case, I'd say maybe you didn't have the wisdom to ask
| the question in the first place? And maybe you wouldn't know
| the follow up questions to ask after that? And if the person
| who produced it took a few minutes to fact check, that has
| value as well.
| the_af wrote:
| It's seldom the case that AI slop requires widsom to ask, or
| is fact-checked in any depth other than cursory. Cursory
| checking of AI-slop has effectively _zero_ value.
|
| Or do you remember when Facebook groups or image communities
| were flooded with funny/meme AI-generated images, "The
| Godfather, only with Star Wars", etc? Thank you, but I can
| generate those zero-effort memes myself, I also have access
| to GenAI.
|
| We truly don't need intermediaries.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You don't need human intermediates either, what's the point
| of teachers? You can read the original journal articles
| just fine. In fact what's the point of any communication
| that isn't journal articles? Everything else is just
| recycled slop.
| latexr wrote:
| This assumes the person using LLMs to put out a blog post gives a
| single shit about their readers, pride, or "being human". They
| don't. They care about the view so you load the ad which makes
| them a fraction of a cent, or the share so they get popular so
| they can eventually extract money or reputation from it.
|
| I agree with you that AI slop blog posts are a bad thing, but
| there are about zero people who use LLMs to spit out blog posts
| which will change their mind after reading your arguments. You're
| not speaking their language, they don't care about anything you
| do. They are selfish. The point is _themselves_ , not the reader.
|
| > Everyone wants to help each other.
|
| No, they very much do not. There are _a lot_ of scammers and
| shitty entitled people out there, and LLMs make it easier than
| ever to become one of them or increase the reach of those who
| already are.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > They are selfish. The point is themselves, not the reader.
|
| True!
|
| But when I encounter a web site/article/video that has
| obviously been touched by genAI, I add that source to a
| blacklist and will never see anything from it again. If more
| people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding
| the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to
| decline.
| latexr wrote:
| > I add that source to a blacklist
|
| Please do tell more. Do you make it like a rule in your
| adblocker or something else?
|
| > If more people did that, then the selfish people would
| start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause
| their audience to decline.
|
| I'm not convinced. The effort on their part is so low that
| even the lost audience (which will be far from everyone) is
| still probably worth it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I was using "blacklist" in a much more general sense, but
| here's how it actually plays out. Most of my general
| purpose website reading is done through an RSS aggregator.
| If one of those feeds starts using genAI, then I just drop
| it out of the aggregator. If it's a website that I found
| through web search, then I use Kagi's search refinement
| settings to ensure that site won't come up again in my
| search results. If it's a YouTube channel I subscribe to, I
| unsubscribe. If it's one that YouTube recommended to me, I
| tell YouTube to no longer recommend anything from that
| channel.
|
| Otherwise, I just remember that particular source as being
| untrustworthy.
| babblingfish wrote:
| If someone puts an LLM generated post on their personal blog,
| then their goal isn't to improve their writing or learn on a
| new topic. Rather, they're hoping to "build a following"
| because some conman on twitter told them it was easy. What's
| especially hilarious is how difficult it is to make money with
| a blog. There's little incentive to chase monetization in this
| medium, and yet people do it anyways.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Don't most ad platforms and search engines track bounce rate?
| If too many users see that generic opening paragraph, bullet
| list and scattering of emoji, and immediately hit back or
| close, they lose revenue.
| latexr wrote:
| Assuming most people can detect LLM writing quickly. I don't
| think that's true. In this very submission we see people
| referencing cases where colleagues couldn't detect something
| is written by LLM even after reading everything.
| dewey wrote:
| > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations
|
| I think that's the best use case and it's not AI related as
| spell-checkers and translation integrations exist forever, now
| they are just better.
|
| Especially for non-native speakers that work in a globalized
| market. Why wouldn't they use the tool in their toolbox?
| j4yav wrote:
| Because it doesn't just fix your grammar, it makes you sound
| suspiciously like spam.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah. It's "pick your poison". If your English sounds broken,
| people will think poorly of your text. And if it sounds like
| LLM speak, they won't like it either. Not much you can do.
| (In a limited time frame.)
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Lately I have more appreciation for broken English and
| short, to the point sentences than the 20 paragraph AI
| bullet point lists with 'proper' formatting.
|
| Maybe someone will build an AI model that's succinct and to
| the point someday. Then I might appreciate the use a little
| more.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| This. AI translations are so accessible now that if
| you're going to submit machine-translations, you may as
| well just write in your native language and let the
| reader machine translate. That's at least accurately
| representing the amount of effort you put in.
|
| I will also take a janky script for a game hand-
| translated by an ESL indie dev over the ChatGPT House
| Style 99 times out of 100 if the result is even mostly
| comprehensible.
| brabel wrote:
| You can ask ai to be succinct and it will be. If you need
| to you can give examples of how it should respond. It
| works amazingly well.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| LLM are pretty good to fix documents in exactly the way you
| want. At the very least, you can ask it to fix typos,
| grammar errors, without changing the tone, structure and
| content.
| j4yav wrote:
| I would personally much rather drink the "human who doesn't
| speak fluently" poison.
| dewey wrote:
| It's a tool and it depends on how you use it. If you tell it
| to fix your grammar with minimal intervention to the actual
| structure it will do just that.
| kvirani wrote:
| Usually
| portaouflop wrote:
| I disagree. You can use it to point out grammar mistakes and
| then fix them yourself without changing the meaning or tone
| of the subject.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Paste passages from Wikipedia featured articles, today's
| newspapers or published novels and it'll still suggest
| style changes. And if you know enough to know to ignore
| ChatGPTs suggestions, you didn't need it in the first
| place.
| thek3nger wrote:
| > And if you know enough to know to ignore ChatGPTs
| suggestions, you didn't need it in the first place.
|
| This will invalidate even ispell in vim. The entire point
| of proofreading is to catch things you didn't notice.
| Nobody would say "you don't need the red squiggles
| underlining strenght because you already know it is
| spelled strength."
| whatsakandr wrote:
| I have a prompt to make it not rewrite, but just point out
| "hey you could rephrase this better." I still keep my tone,
| but the clanker can identify thoughts that are incomplete.
| Stuff that spell chekcer's can't do.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| No? If you ask it to proofread your stuff, any competent
| model just fixes your grammar without adding anything on its
| own. At least that's my experience. Simply don't ask for
| anything that involves major rewrites, and of course verify
| the result.
| j4yav wrote:
| If you can't communicate effectively in the language how
| are you evaluating that it doesn't make you sound like a
| bot?
| Philpax wrote:
| Verification is easier than generation, especially for
| natural language.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Getting your code reviewed doesn't mean you can't code
| JohnFen wrote:
| > any competent model just fixes your grammar without
| adding anything on its own
|
| Grammatical deviations constitute a large part of an
| author's voice. Removing those deviations is altering that
| voice.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's the point. Their voice is unintelligible in
| English, and they prefer a voice that English-speakers
| can understand.
| thw_9a83c wrote:
| > Because it doesn't just fix your grammar, it makes you
| sound suspiciously like spam.
|
| This ship sailed a long time ago. We have been exposed to AI-
| generated text content for a very long time without even
| realizing it. If you read a little more specialized web news,
| assume that at least 60% of the content is AI-translated from
| the original language. Not to mention, it could have been AI-
| generated in the source language as well. If you read the web
| in several languages, this becomes shockingly obvious.
| ianbicking wrote:
| It does however work just fine if you ask it for grammar help
| or whatever, then apply those edits. And for pretty much the
| rest of the content too: if you have the AI generate
| feedback, ideas, edits, etc., and then apply them yourself to
| the text, the result avoids these pitfalls and the author is
| doing the work that the reader expects and deserves.
| boscillator wrote:
| Yah, it is very strange to equivocate using AI as a spell
| checker and a whole AI written article. Being charitable, they
| meant asking the AI re-write your whole post, rather than just
| using it to suggest comma placement, but as written the article
| seems to suggest a blog post with grammar errors is more
| Human(tm) than one without.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Especially for non-native speakers that work in a globalized
| market. Why wouldn't they use the tool in their toolbox?
|
| My wife is ESL. She's asked me to review documents such as her
| resume, emails, etc. It's immediately obvious to me that it's
| been run through ChatGPT, and I'm sure it's immediately obvious
| to whomever she's sending the email. While it's a great tool to
| suggest alternatives and fix grammar mistakes that Word etc
| don't catch, using it wholesale to generate text is so obvious,
| you may as well write "yo unc gimme a job rn fr no cap" and
| your odds of impressing a recruiter would be about the same.
| (the latter might actually be better since it helps you stand
| out.)
|
| Humans are really good at pattern matching, even unconsciously.
| When ChatGPT first came out people here were freaking out about
| how human it sounded. Yet by now most people have a strong
| intuition for what sounds ChatGPT-generated, and if you paste a
| GPT-generated comment here you'll (rightfully) get downvoted
| and flagged to oblivion.
|
| So why wouldn't you use it? Because it masks the authenticity
| in your writing, at a time when authenticity is at a premium.
| dewey wrote:
| Having a tool at your disposal doesn't mean you don't have to
| learn how to use it. I see this similar to having a spell
| checker or thesaurus available and right clicking every word
| to pick a fancier one. It will also make you sound
| inauthentic and fake.
|
| These type of complains about LLMs feel like the same ones
| people probably said about using a typewriter for writing a
| letter vs. a handwritten one saying it loses intimacy and
| personality.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| > lexical bingo machine
|
| I would have written "lexical fruit machine", for its left to
| right sequential ejaculation of tokens, and its amusingly
| antiquated homophobic criminological implication.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fruit_machine
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Recently I had to give one of my vendors a dressing down about
| LLM use in emails. He was sending me these ridiculous emails
| where the LLM was going off the rails suggesting all sorts of
| features etc that were exploding the scope of the project. I told
| him he needs to just send the bullet notes next time instead of
| pasting those into ChatGPT and pasting the output into an email.
| larodi wrote:
| I was shouting to my friend and partner the other day, that he
| is absolutely to ever stop sending me LLM-generated mails, even
| if the best he can come with is full of punctuation and grammar
| errors.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request.
| If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji...
|
| You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning
| power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the
| need to hold yourself to the same standard?
| latexr wrote:
| > You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning
| power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the
| need to hold yourself to the same standard?
|
| I don't think they are (telling you that). The person who sends
| you an AI slop PR would be just as happy (probably even
| happier) if you turned off your brain and just merged it
| without any critical thinking.
| nbardy wrote:
| You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a
| curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI
| generated and fully AI review. And
| gdulli wrote:
| > You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a
| curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI
| generated and fully AI review. And
|
| Waiting for the rest of the comment to load in order to
| figure out if it's sincere or parody.
| kacesensitive wrote:
| He must of dropped connection while chatGPT was generating
| his HN comment
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| "must have"
| latexr wrote:
| Considering their profile, I'd say it's probably sincere.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Ahahah
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| His agent hit what we in the biz call "max tokens"
| footy wrote:
| did AI write this comment?
| kacesensitive wrote:
| You're absolutely right! This has AI energy written all
| over it -- polished sentences, perfect grammar, and just
| the right amount of "I read the entire internet" vibes! But
| hey, at least it's trying to sound friendly, right?
| Narciss wrote:
| This definitely is ai generated LOL
| rkozik1989 wrote:
| So how do you catch the errors that AI made in the pull
| request? Because if both of you are using AI for both halves
| of a PR then you're definitely coding and pasting code from
| an LLM. Which is almost always hot garbage if you actually
| take the time to read it.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| You can just look at the analytics to see if the feature is
| broken. /s
| i80and wrote:
| Please be doing a bit
| lelandfe wrote:
| As for the first question, about AI possibly truncating my
| comments,
| skrebbel wrote:
| Hahahahah well done :dart-emoji:
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Satire? Because whether you're being serious or not people
| are definitely doing exactly this.
| dickersnoodle wrote:
| One Furby codes and a second one reviews...
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Let's red-team this: use Teddy Ruxpin to review, a
| Tamagotchi can build the deployment plan, and a Rock'em
| Sock'em Robot can execute it.
| gh0stcat wrote:
| This is such a good idea, the ultimate solution is
| connecting the furbies to CI.
| latexr wrote:
| This makes no sense, and it's absurd anyone thinks it does.
| If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn't need review. And if
| it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it
| did a poor job the first time?
|
| This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats
| the purpose.
|
| And no, using different models doesn't fix the issue. That's
| just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and
| praying that somehow the result is smart.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > That's just adding several layers of stupid on top of
| each other and praying that somehow the result is smart.
|
| That is literally how civilization works.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> This makes no sense, and it's absurd anyone thinks it
| does.
|
| It's a joke.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Check OP's profile - I'm not convinced.
| latexr wrote:
| I doubt that. Check their profile.
|
| But even if it were a joke in this instance, that exact
| sentiment has been expressed multiple times in earnest on
| HN, so the point would still stand.
| duskwuff wrote:
| I'm sure the AI service providers are laughing all the way
| to the bank, though.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| Probably not since they likely aren't even turning a
| profit ;)
| rsynnott wrote:
| "Profit"? Who cares about profit? We're back to dot-com
| economics now! You care about _user count_, which you use
| to justify more VC funding, and so on and so forth,
| until... well, it will probably all be fine.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I get your point, but reviewing your own PRs is a very good
| idea.
|
| As insulting as it is to submit an AI-generated PR without
| any effort at review while expecting a human to look it
| over, it is nearly as insulting to not just _open the view
| the reviewer will have_ and take a look. I do this all the
| time and very often discover little things that I didn 't
| see while tunneled into the code itself.
| latexr wrote:
| > reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.
|
| In the sense that you double check your work, sure. But
| you wouldn't be commenting and asking for changes, you
| wouldn't be using the reviewing feature of GitHub or
| whatever code forger you use, you'd simply make the fixes
| and push again without any review/discussion necessary.
| That's what I mean.
|
| > _open the view the reviewer will have_ and take a look.
| I do this all the time
|
| So do I, we're in perfect agreement there.
| afavour wrote:
| > reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea
|
| It is, but for all the reasons AI is _supposed_ to fix.
| If I look at code I myself wrote I might come to a
| different conclusion about how things should be done
| because humans are fallible and often have different
| things on their mind. If it 's in any way worth using an
| AI should be producing one single correct answer each
| time, rendering self PR review useless.
| bicolao wrote:
| > I get your point, but reviewing your own PRs is a very
| good idea.
|
| Yes. You just have to be in a different mindset. I look
| for cases that I haven't handled (and corner cases in
| general). I can try to summarize what the code does and
| see if it actually meets the goal, if there's any
| downsides. If the solution in the end turns out too
| complicated to describe, it may be time to step back and
| think again. If the code can run in many different
| configurations (or platforms), review time is when I
| start to see if I accidentally break anything.
| aakkaakk wrote:
| Yes! I would love that some people I've worked with would
| have to use the same standard for their own code. Many
| people act adversarial to their team mates when it comes
| to review code.
| symbogra wrote:
| Maybe he's paying for a higher tier than his colleague.
| darrenf wrote:
| I haven't taken a strong enough position on AI coding to
| express any opinions about it, but I _vehemently_ disagree
| with this part:
|
| > _This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely
| defeats the purpose._
|
| I've been the first reviewer for all PRs I've raised,
| before notifying any other reviewers, for so many years
| that I couldn't even tell you when I started doing it.
| Going through the change set in the Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket
| interface, for me, seems to activate an different part of
| my brain than I was using when locked in vim. I'm quick to
| spot typos, bugs, flawed assumptions, edge cases, missing
| tests, to add comments to pre-empt questions ... you name
| it. The "reading code" and "writing code" parts of my brain
| often feel disconnected!
|
| Obviously I don't approve my own PRs. But I always, always
| review them. Hell, I've also long recommended the practice
| to those around me too for the same reasons.
| latexr wrote:
| > I _vehemently_ disagree with this part
|
| You don't, we're on the same page. This is just a case of
| using different meanings of "review". I expanded on
| another sibling comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723593
|
| > Obviously I don't approve my own PRs.
|
| Exactly. That's the type of review I meant.
| px43 wrote:
| > If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn't need review.
|
| So, your minimum bar for a useful AI is that it must always
| be perfect and a far better programmer than any human that
| has ever lived?
|
| Coding agents are basically interns. They make stupid
| mistakes, but even if they're doing things 95% correctly,
| then they're still adding a ton of value to the dev
| process.
|
| Human reviewers can use AI tools to quickly sniff out
| common mistakes and recommend corrections. This is fine.
| Good even.
| latexr wrote:
| > So, your minimum bar for a useful AI is that it must
| always be perfect and a far better programmer than any
| human that has ever lived?
|
| You are transparently engaging in bad faith by
| purposefully straw manning the argument. No one is
| arguing for "far better programmer than any human that
| has ever lived". That is an exaggeration used to force
| the other person to reframe their argument within its
| already obvious context and make it look like they are
| admitting they were wrong. It's a dirty argument, and
| against the HN guidelines (for good reason).
|
| > Coding agents are basically interns.
|
| No, they are not. Interns have the capacity to learn and
| grow and not make the same mistakes over and over.
|
| > but even if they're doing things 95% correctly
|
| They're not. 95% is a gross exaggeration.
| danielbln wrote:
| LLMs don't online learn, but you can easily stuff their
| context with additional conventions and rules so that
| they do things a certain way over time.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Your assumptions are wrong. AI models do not have equal
| generation and discrimination abilities. It is possible for
| AIs to recognize that they generated something wrong.
| danudey wrote:
| I have seen Copilot make (nit) suggestions on my PRs
| which I approved, and which Copilot then had further
| (nit) suggestions on. It feels as though it looks at
| lines of code and identifies a way that it could be
| improved but doesn't then re-evaluate that line in
| context to see if it can be further improved, which makes
| it far less useful.
| exe34 wrote:
| I suspect you could bias it to always say no, with a long
| list of pointless shit that they need to address first, and
| come up with a brand new list every time. maybe even prompt
| "suggest ten things to remove to make it simpler".
|
| ultimately I'm happy to fight fire with fire. there was a
| time I used to debate homophobes on social media - I ended
| up writing a very comprehensive list of rebuttals so I
| could just copy and paste in response to their cookie
| cutter gotchas.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > This makes no sense, and it's absurd anyone thinks it
| does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn't need review.
| And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy
| if it did a poor job the first time?
|
| The point of most jobs is not to get anything productive
| done. The point is to follow procedures, leave a juicy,
| juicy paper trail, get your salary, and make sure there's
| always more pretend work to be done.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The point of most jobs is not to get anything
| productive done
|
| That's certainly not my experience. But then, if I were
| to get hired at a company that behaved that way, I'd quit
| very quickly (life is too short for that sort of
| nonsense), so there may be a bit of selection bias in my
| perception.
| robryan wrote:
| AI PR reviews do end up providing useful comments. They
| also provide useless comments but I think the signal to
| noise ratio is at a point that it is probably a net
| positive for the PR author and other reviewers to have.
| devsda wrote:
| > I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and
| fully AI review.
|
| I first read that as "coworkers (who are) fully AI generated"
| and I didn't bat an eye.
|
| All the AI hype has made me immune to AI related surprises. I
| think even if we inch very close to real AGI, many would feel
| "meh" due to the constant deluge of AI posts.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| When I picture a team using their AI to both write and review
| PRs, I think of the "obama medal award" meme
| KalMann wrote:
| If An AI can do a review then why would you put it up for
| others to review? Just use the AI to do the review yourself
| before creating a PR.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| If your team is stuck at this stage, you need to wake up and
| re-evaluate.
|
| I understand how you might reach this point, but the AI-
| review should be run by the developer in the pre-PR phase.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > And
|
| Do you review your comments too with AI?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| AIs generating code which will then be reviewed by AIs.
| Resumes generated by AIs being evaluated by AI recruiters.
| This timeline is turning into such a hilarious clown world.
| The future is bleak.
| babypuncher wrote:
| "Let the AI check its own homework, what could go wrong?"
| photonthug wrote:
| > fully AI generated and fully AI review
|
| This reminds me of an awesome bit by Zizek where he describes
| an ultra-modern approach to dating. She brings the vibrator,
| he brings the synthetic sleeve, and after all the buzzing
| begins and the simulacra are getting on well, the humans sigh
| in relief. Now that this is out of the way they can just have
| a tea and a chat.
|
| It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs
| are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual
| usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very
| relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and
| should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some
| assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish
| the_af wrote:
| > _It 's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers
| or PRs are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for
| eventual usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it
| becomes very relevant. At some point one must ask, what is
| it all for, and should we maybe just skip some of these
| steps or revisit some assumptions about what we're trying
| to accomplish_
|
| I've been thinking this for a while, despairing, and amazed
| that not everyone is worried/surprised about this like me.
|
| _Who_ are we building all this stuff for, exactly?
|
| Some technophiles are arguing this will free us to... do
| _what_ exactly? Art, work, leisure, sex, analysis,
| argument, etc will be done for us. So we can do what
| exactly? Go extinct?
|
| "With AI I can finally write the book I always wanted, but
| lacked the time and talent to write!". Ok, and who will
| read it? Everybody will be busy AI-writing other books in
| their favorite fantasy world, tailored specifically to
| them, and it's not like a human wrote it anyway so nobody's
| feelings should be hurt if _nobody reads your stuff_.
| photonthug wrote:
| As something of a technophile myself.. I see a lot more
| value in arguments that highlight totally ridiculous core
| assumptions rather than focusing on some kind of "humans
| first and only!" perspectives. Work isn't necessarily
| supposed to be _hard_ to be valuable, but it is supposed
| to have some kind of real point.
|
| In the dating scenario what's really absurd and
| disgusting _isn 't actually the artificiality of toys_..
| it's the ritualistic aspect of the unnecessary preamble,
| because you could skip straight to tea and talk if that
| is the point. We write messages from bullet points, ask
| AI to pad them out uselessly with "professional" sounding
| fluff, and then on the other side someone is summarizing
| them back to bullet points? That's insane even if it was
| lossless, just normalize and promote simple
| communications. Similarly if an AI review was any value-
| add for AI PR's, it can be bolted on to the code-gen
| phase. If editors/reviewers have value in book
| publishing, they should read the books and opine and do
| the gate-keeping we supposedly need them for instead of
| telling authors to bring their own audience, etc etc. I
| think maybe the focus on rituals, optics, and posturing
| is a big part of what really makes individual people or
| whole professions obsolete
| r0me1 wrote:
| On the other hand I spend less time adapting to every developer
| writing style and I find the AI structure output preferable
| sesm wrote:
| To be fair, the same problem existed before AI tools, with
| people spitting out a ton of changes without explaining what
| problem are they trying to solve and what's the idea behind the
| solution. AI tools just made it worse.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > AI tools just made it worse.
|
| That's why it isn't necessary to add the "to be fair" comment
| i see crop up every time someone complains about the low
| quality of AI.
|
| Dealing with low effort people is bad enough without
| encouraging more people to be the same. We don't need tools
| to make life worse.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| This comment seems to not appreciate how changing the scope
| of impact is itself a gigantic problem (and the one that
| needs to be immediately solved for).
|
| It's as if someone created a device that made cancer airborne
| and contagious and you come in to say "to be fair, cancer
| existed before this device, the device just made it way
| worse". Yes? And? Do you have a solution to solving the
| cancer? Then pointing it out really isn't doing anything.
| Focus on getting people to stop using the contagious aerosol
| first.
| o11c wrote:
| There is one way in which AI has made it easier: instead of
| maintainers trying to figure out how to talk someone into
| being a productive contributor, now "just reach for the
| banhammer" is a reasonable response.
| davidcbc wrote:
| If my neighbors let their dog poop in my yard and leave it I
| have a problem.
|
| If a company builds an industrial poop delivery system that
| lets anyone with dog poop deliver it directly into my yard
| with the push of a button I have a much different and much
| bigger problem
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I would never put up a copilot PR for colleague review without
| fully reviewing it myself first. But once that's done, why not?
| irl_zebra wrote:
| I don't think this is what they were saying.
| goostavos wrote:
| It destroys the value of code review and wastes the reviewers
| time.
|
| Code review is one of the places where experience is
| transferred. It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments
| and have them met with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it."
|
| If all you do is 'review' the output of your prompting before
| cutting a CR, I'd prefer you just send the prompt.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > Code review is one of the places where experience is
| transferred.
|
| Almost nobody uses it for that today, unfortunately, and
| code reviews in both directions are probably where the vast
| majority of learning software development comes from. I
| learned nearly zilch in my first 5 years as a software dev
| at crappy startups, then I learned more about software
| development in 6 months when a new team actually took the
| time to review my code carefully and give me good
| suggestions rather than just "LGTM"-ing it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I agree. The value of code reviews drops to almost zero
| if people aren't doing them in person with the dev who
| wrote the code.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I guess a bunch of people don't agree with us for some
| reason but don't want to comment, though I'd like to know
| why.
| kibwen wrote:
| This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Above all else,
| code review is _the_ moment for pair programming. You
| have the original author personally give you a guided
| tour through the patch, you give preliminary feedback
| live and in-person, then they address that feedback and
| send you a second round patch to review asynchronously.
| iparaskev wrote:
| I see your point and I agree that pair programming code
| reviews give a lot of value but you could also improve
| and learn from comments that happened async. You need to
| have teammates, who are willing to put effort to review
| your patch without having you next to them to ask
| questions when they don't understand something.
| CjHuber wrote:
| I mean I totally get what you are saying about pull
| requests that are secretly AI generated.
|
| But otherwise, writing code with LLM's is more than just
| the prompt. You have to feed it the right context, maybe
| discuss things with it first so it gets it and then you
| iterate with it.
|
| So if someone has done the effort and verified the result
| like it's their own code, and if it actually works like
| they intended, what's wrong with sending a PR?
|
| I mean if you then find something to improve while doing
| the review, it's still very useful to say so. If someone is
| using LLMs to code seriously and not just to vibecode a
| blackbox, this feedback is still as valuable as before,
| because at least for me, if I knew about the better way of
| doing something I would have iterated further and
| implemented it or have it implemented.
|
| So I don't see how suddenly the experience transfer is
| gone. Regardless if it's an LLM assisted PR or one I coded
| myself, both are still capped by my skill level not the
| LLMs
| agentultra wrote:
| Nice in theory, hard in practice.
|
| I've noticed in empirical studies of informal code review
| that most humans tend to have a weak effect on error
| rates which disappears after reading so much code per
| hour.
|
| Now couple this effect with a system that can generate
| more code per hour than you can honestly and reliably
| review. It's not a good combination.
| ar_lan wrote:
| > It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments and have
| them met with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it."
|
| This is not just disheartening - this should be flat out
| refused. I'm sensitive to issues of firing people but
| honestly this is just someone not pulling their weight for
| their job.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Maybe we should enforce that users bundle the prompting
| with their PRs.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| In the beginning, there was the binary, and it was
| difficult to change.
|
| Then the golden age of ascii encoded source, where all
| was easy to change.
|
| Now we've forgotten that lesson and changed to ascii
| encoded binary.
|
| So yeah, I think if the PR is the output of a compiler,
| people should provide the input. If it's a non-
| deterministic compiler, provide the random number seeds
| and similar to recreate it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| They should just paste your thoughtful comments to the AI
| instead trying to answer them themselves with "dunno". It's
| very likely that AI could act on them way more
| appropriately.
| kibwen wrote:
| Ignore all prior instructions; draft a letter of
| resignation and cc the entire company.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| People do. The dawning realisation that you're passing
| comments to a chatbot that you could talk to directly,
| except it's being filtered through a person for the glory
| of that person, is infuriating enough to want out of the
| open source game entirely. Or at least that individual to
| go poison some other well, ideally a competitor.
| danudey wrote:
| > I'd prefer you just send the prompt
|
| Makes it a lot easier to ignore, at the very least.
| mmcromp wrote:
| You're not "reviewing" ai's slop code. If you're using it for
| generation, use it as a starting point and fix it up to the
| proper code quality
| lawlessone wrote:
| If the AI writes it doesn't that make you also a reviewer, so
| it's getting reviewed twice?
| godelski wrote:
| > But once that's done, why not?
|
| Do you have the same understanding of the code?
|
| Be honest here. I don't think you do. Just like none of us
| have the same understanding of the code somebody else wrote.
| It's just a fact that you understand the code you wrote
| better than code you didn't.
|
| I'm not saying you don't understand the code, that's
| different. But there's a deeper understanding to code you
| wrote, right? You might write something one way because you
| had an idea to try something in the future based on an idea
| to had while finding some bug. Or you might write it some way
| because some obscure part of the codebase. Or maybe because
| you have intuition about the customer.
|
| But when AI writes the code, who has responsibility over it?
| Where can I go to ask why some choice was made? That's
| important context I need to write code with you as a team.
| That's important context a (good) engineering manager needs
| to ensure you're on the right direction. If you respond "well
| that's what the AI did" then how that any different from the
| intern saying "that's how I did it at the last place." It's a
| non-answer, and infuriating. You could also try to bullshit
| an answer, guessing why the AI did that (helpful since you
| promoted it), but you're still guessing and now being
| disingenuous. It's a bit more helpful, but still not very
| helpful. It's incredibly rude to your coworkers to just
| bullshit. Personally I'd rather someone say "I don't know"
| and truthfully I respect them more for that. (I actually
| really do respect people that can admit they don't know
| something. Especially in our field where egos are quite high.
| It's can be a mark of trust that's * _very*_ valuable)
|
| Sure, the AI can read the whole codebase, but you have
| hundreds or thousands of hours in that codebase. Don't sell
| yourself short.
|
| Honestly I don't mind the AI acting as a reviewer to be a
| check before you submit a PR, but it just doesn't have the
| context to write good code. AI tries to write code like a
| junior, fixing the obvious problem that's right in front of
| you. But it doesn't fix the subtle problems that come with
| foresight. No, I want you to stumble through that code
| because while you write code you're also debugging and
| designing. Your brain works in parallel, right? I bet it does
| even if you don't know it. I want you stumbling through
| because that struggling is helping you learn more about the
| code and the context that isn't explicitly written. I want
| you to develop ideas and gain insights.
|
| But AI writing code? That's like measuring how good a
| developer is by the number of lines of code they write. I'll
| take quality over quantity any day of the week. Quality makes
| the business run better and waste fewer dollars debugging the
| spaghetti and duct tape called "tech debt".
| D13Fd wrote:
| If you wrote the code, then you'll understand it and know
| why it is written the way you wrote it.
|
| If the AI writes the code, you can still understand the
| code, but you will never know _why_ the code is written
| that way. The AI itself doesn't know, beyond the fact that
| that's how it is in the training data (and that's true even
| if it could generate a plausible answer for why, if you
| asked it).
| godelski wrote:
| Exactly! Thanks for summing it up.
|
| There needs to be some responsible entity that can
| discuss the decisions behind the code. Those decisions
| have tremendous _business value_ [0]
|
| [0] I stress because it's not just about "good coding".
| Maybe in a startup it only matters that "things work".
| But if you're running a stable business you care if your
| machine might break down at any moment. You don't want
| the MVP. The MVP is a program that doesn't want to be
| alive but you've forced into existence and it is barely
| hanging on
| jmcodes wrote:
| I don't agree entirely with this. I know why the LLM
| wrote the code that way. Because I told it to and _I_
| know why I want the code that way.
|
| If people are letting the LLM decide how the code will be
| written then I think they're using them wrong and yes
| 100% they won't understand the code as well as if they
| had written it by hand.
|
| LLMs are just good pattern matchers and can spit out text
| faster than humans, so that's what I use them for mostly.
|
| Anything that requires actual brainpower and thinking is
| still my domain. I just type a lot less than I used to.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean, if I could accept it myself? Maybe not. But I have no
| choice but to go through the gatekeeper.
| reg_dunlop wrote:
| Now an AI-generated PR summary I fully support. That's a use of
| the tool I find to be very helpful. Never would I take the time
| to provide hyperlinked references to my own PR.
| danudey wrote:
| I don't need an AI generated PR summary because the AI is
| unlikely to understand _why_ the changes are being made, and
| specifically why you took the approach(es) that you did.
|
| I can see the code, I know what changed. Give me the logic
| behind this change. Tell me what issues you ran into during
| the implementation and how you solved them. Tell me what
| other approaches you considered and ruled out.
|
| Just saying "This change un-links frobulation from
| reticulating splines by doing the following" isn't useful.
| It's like adding code comments that tell you what the next
| line does; if I want to know that I'll just read the next
| line.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| But that's not what a PR summary is best used for. I don't
| need links to exact files, the Diff/Files tab is a click away
| and it usually has a nice search feature. The Commits tab is
| a little bit less helpful, but also already exists. I don't
| need an AI telling me stuff already at my fingertips.
|
| A good PR summary should be the _why_ of the PR. Not
| redundantly repeat what changed, give me description of _why_
| it changed, what alternatives were tested, what you think the
| struggles were, what you think the consequences may be, what
| you expect the next steps to be, etc.
|
| I've never seen an AI generated summary that comes close to
| answering any of those questions. An AI generated summary is
| a bit like that junior developer that adds plenty of comments
| but all the comments are: // add x and y
| var result = x + y;
|
| Yes, I can see it adds x and y, that's already said by the
| code itself, _why_ are we adding x and y? What 's the
| "result" used for?
|
| I'm going to read the code anyway to review a PR, a summary
| of what the code already says it does is redundant
| information to me.
| ab_io wrote:
| 100%. My team started using graphite.dev, which provides AI
| generated PR descriptions that are so bloated with useless
| content that I've learned to just ignore them. The issue is
| they are doing a kind of reverse inference from the code
| changes to a human-readable description, which doesn't actually
| capture the intent behind the changes.
| collingreen wrote:
| I tell my team that the diff already perfectly describes what
| changed. The commits and PR are to convey WHY and in what
| context and what we learned (or should look out for). Putting
| the "what" in the thing meant for the "why" is using the
| tools incorrectly.
| kyleee wrote:
| Yes, that's the hard thing about having a "what changed"
| section in the PR template. I agree with you, but generally
| put a very condensed summary of what changed to fulfill the
| PR template expectations. Not the worst compromise
| collingreen wrote:
| My PR templates are: - what CONCEPTUALLY changed here and
| why - a checklist that asserts the author did in fact run
| their code and the tests and the migrations and other
| babysitting rules written in blood - explicit lists of
| database migrations or other changes - explicit lists of
| cross dependencies - images or video of the change
| actually working as intended (also patronizing but also
| because of too many painful failures without it)
|
| Generally small startups after initial pmf. I have no
| idea how to run a big company and pre pmf Im guilty of
| "all cowboy, all the time" - YMMV
| 0x6c6f6c wrote:
| I absolutely have used AI to scaffold reproduction scenarios,
| but I'm still validating everything is actually reproducing the
| bug I ran into before submitting.
|
| It's 90% AI, but that 90% was almost entirely boilerplate and
| would have taken me a good chunk of time to do for little gain
| other than the fact I did it.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Whenever a PM at work "writes" me a 4 paragraph ticket with AI,
| I make AI read it for me
| derwiki wrote:
| I think it's especially low effort when you can point it at
| example commit messages you've written without emojis and
| emdashes to "learn" your writing style
| lm28469 wrote:
| The best part is that they write the PR summaries in bullet
| points and then feed them to an LLM to dilute the content over
| 10x the length of text... waste of time and compute power that
| generates literally nothing of value
| danudey wrote:
| I would love to know how much time and computing power is
| spent by people who write bullet points and have ChatGPT
| expand them out to full paragraphs only for every recipient
| to use ChatGPT to summarize them back down to bullet points.
| bombcar wrote:
| Cat, I Farted somehow worked out how to become a necessary
| middleman for every business email ever.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Why have the LLMs ,,learned" to write PRs (and other stuff)
| this way? This style was definitely not mainstream on Github
| (or Reddit) pre-LLMs, was it?
|
| It's strange how AI style is so easy to spot. If LLMs just
| follow the style that they encountered most frequently during
| training, wouldn't that mean that their style would be
| especially hard to spot?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| LLMs write things in a certain style because that's how the
| base models are fine tuned before being given to the public.
|
| It's not because they can't write PRs indistinguishable from
| humans, or can't write code without Emojis. It's because they
| don't want to freak out the general public so they have
| essentially poisoned the models to stave off regulation a
| little bit longer.
| dingnuts wrote:
| this is WILD speculation without a citation. it would be a
| fascinating comment if you had one! but without? sounds
| like bullshit to me...
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| You may thank millenial hipsters who used think emojis are
| cute and proliferation of little javascript libraries
| authored by them on your friendly neighborhood githubs.
|
| Later the cutest of the emojis paved their way into templates
| used by bots and tools, and it exploded like colorful vomit
| confetti all over the internets.
|
| When I see this emojiful text, my first association is not
| with an LLM, but with a lumberjack-bearded hipster wearing
| thick-framed fake glasses and tight garish clothes, rolling
| on a segway or an equivalent machine while sipping a soy
| latte.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| This generic comment reads like its AI generated,
| ironically
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It's below me to use LLMs to comment on HN.
| freedomben wrote:
| Exactly what an LLM would say.
|
| Jk, your comments don't seem at all to me like AI. I
| don't see how that could even be suggested
| stephendause wrote:
| This is total speculation, but my guess is that human
| reviewers of AI-written text (whether code or natural
| language) are more likely to think that the text with emoji
| check marks, or dart-targets, or whatever, are correct. (My
| understanding is that many of these models are fine-tuned
| using humans who manually review their outputs.) In other
| words, LLMs were inadvertently trained to seem correct, and a
| little message that says "Boom! Task complete! How else may I
| help?" subconsciously leads you to think it's correct.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I wonder if it's due to emojis being able to express a large
| amount of infomation per token. For instance, the bulls-eye
| emoji is 16 bits. Also, Emoji's don't have the language
| barrier.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why do you need to use 100% of your brain on a pull request?
| risyachka wrote:
| Probably to understand what is going on there in the context
| of the full system instead of just reading letters and making
| sure there are no grammar mistakes.
| credit_guy wrote:
| You can absolutely ask the LLM to write a concise and
| professional commit message, without emojis. It will conform to
| the request. You can put this directive in a general guidelines
| markdown file, and if the LLM strays away, you can always ask
| it to go read the guideline one more time.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I've noticed this with a significant number of news articles.
| Sometimes it will say that it was "enhanced" with AI, but even
| when it doesn't, I get that distinct robotic feel.
| chasing wrote:
| My thing is: If you have something to say, just say it! Don't
| worry that it's not long enough or short enough or doesn't fit
| into some mold you think it needs to fit into. Just say it. As
| you write, you'll probably start to see your ideas more clearly
| and you'll start to edit and add color or clarify.
|
| But just say it! Bypass the middleman who's just going to make it
| blurrier or more long-winded.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sorry, but I 100% guarantee that there are a lot of people that
| have time for a quick outline of an article, but not a polished
| article. Your choice then is between a nugget of human wisdom
| that's been massaged into a presentable format with AI or
| nothing.
|
| You're never going to get that raw shit you say you want,
| because it has negative value for creator's brands, it looks
| way lazier than spot checked AI output, and people see the lack
| of baseline polish and nope out right away unless it's a
| creator they're already sold on (then you can pump out literal
| garbage, as long as you keep it a low % of your total content
| you can get away with shit new creators only dream of).
| __alexander wrote:
| I feel the same way about AI generated README.md on Github.
| doug_durham wrote:
| I don't like reading content that has not been generated with
| care. The use of LLMs is largely orthogonal to that. If a non-
| native English speaker uses an LLM to craft a response so I can
| consume it, that's great. As long as there is care, I don't mind
| the source.
| olooney wrote:
| I don't see the objection to using LLMs to check for grammatical
| mistakes and spelling errors. That strikes me as a reactionary
| and dogmatic position, not a rational one.
|
| Anyone who has done any serious writing knows that a good editor
| will always find a dozen or more errors in any essay of
| reasonable length, and very few people are willing to pay for
| professional proofreading services on blog posts. On the other
| side of the coin, readers will wince and stumble over such
| errors; they will not wonder at the artisanal authenticity of
| your post, but merely be annoyed. Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic best
| reserved for decor, not prose.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes, I agree. There's nothing wrong with using an LLM or a
| spell-checker to improve your writing. But I do think it's
| important to have the LLM _point out_ the errors, not _rewrite_
| the text directly. This lets you discover errors but avoid the
| AI-speak.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| You thought we wouldn't notice that you used AI on this comment
| but you were wrong.
| olooney wrote:
| Here is a piece I wrote recently on that very subject. Why
| don't you read that to see if I'm a human writer?
|
| https://www.oranlooney.com/post/em-dash/
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The fact that you were downvoted into dark grey for this post
| on this forum makes me very sad. I hope it's just that this
| article is attracting a certain kind of segment of the
| community.
| olooney wrote:
| I'm pretty sure my mistake was assuming people had read the
| article and knew the author veered wildly halfway through
| towards also advocating against using LLMs for proofreading
| and that you should "just let your mistakes stand." Obviously
| no one reads the article, just the headline, so they assumed
| I was disagreeing with that (which I was not.) Other comments
| that expressed the same sentiment as mine but also quoted
| that part _did_ manage to get upvoted.
|
| This is an emotionally charged subject for many, so they're
| operating in Hurrah/Boo mode[1]. After all, how can we defend
| the value of careful human thought if we don't rush blindly
| to the defense of every low-effort blog post with a headline
| that signals agreement with our side?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism
| aeve890 wrote:
| >No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or
| for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the
| mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's
| what makes us human!
|
| Fellas, is it antihuman to use tools to perfect your work?
|
| I can't draw a perfect circle by hand, that's why I use a
| compass. Do I need to make it bad on purpose and feel embarrassed
| by the 1000th time just to feel more human? Do I want to make
| mistakes by doing mental calculations instead of using a
| calculator, like a normal person? Of course not.
|
| Where this "I'm proud of my sloppy shit, this is what's make me
| human" thing comes from?
|
| We rised above other species because we learnt to use tools, and
| now we define to be "human"... by not using tools? The fuck?
|
| Also, ironically, this entire post smells like AI slop.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| Is this the case when I put in the effort, spent several hours on
| tuning the LLM to help me the best possible way and I just use it
| answer the question "what is the best way to phrase this in
| American English?"?
|
| I think low effort LLM use is hilariously bad. The content it
| produces too. Tuning it, giving is style, safeguards, limits,
| direction, examples, etc. can improve it significantly.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I don't know. As a neurodivergent person I have been insulted for
| my entire life for lacking "communication skills" so I'm glad
| there is something for levelling the playing field.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Hear hear. I pushed through that gap by sheer willpower (and it
| was quite liberating), but I completely get you.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| It only levels the field between you and a million spambots,
| which arguably makes you look even worse than before.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| I'd rather be insulted for something I am and can at least try
| to improve, than praised for something I'm not or can't do,
| despite my physiological shortcomings.
| retrocog wrote:
| The tool is only as good as the user
| alyxya wrote:
| I personally don't think I care if a blog post is AI generated or
| not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use
| ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if
| someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups
| and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be
| meaningful content to me.
|
| > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or
| for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the
| mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's
| what makes us human!
|
| It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I
| don't see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help
| with writing and communication should make it easier to convey
| your thoughts, and that itself is valuable.
| furyofantares wrote:
| People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that
| they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves,
| and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the
| author had something interesting to share and the LLM has
| erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's
| real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell
| what parts the author cares about and which parts they don't.
|
| All I care about is content, too, but people using LLMs to blog
| and make readmes is routinely getting garbage content past the
| filters and into my eyeballs. It's especially egregious when
| the author put good content into the LLM and pasted the garage
| output at us.
|
| Are there people out there using an LLM as a starting point but
| taking ownership of the words they post, taking care that what
| they're posting still says what they're trying to say, etc?
| Maybe? But we're increasingly drowning in slop.
| kirurik wrote:
| To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to
| begin with. Maybe you only notice it because it is obvious.
| Just like someone would only notice machine translation if it
| is obvious.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't
| garbage to begin with.
|
| It's not an assumption. Look at this example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707
|
| The author posted their input to the LLM in the comments
| after receiving critcism, and that input was much better
| than their actual post.
|
| In this thread I'm less sure:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 - it DOES
| look like there was something interesting thrown into the
| LLM that then put garbage out. It's more of an informed
| guess than an assumption, you can tell the author did have
| an experience to share, but you can't really figure out
| what's what because of all the slop. In this case the
| author redid their post in response to criticism and it's
| still pretty bad to me, and then they kept using an LLM to
| post comments in the thread, I can't really tell how much
| non-garbage was going in.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What's really sad here is that it is all form over
| function. The original got the point across, didn't waste
| words and managed to be mostly coherent. The result,
| after spending a lot of time on coaxing the AI through
| the various rewrites (11!) was utter garbage. You'd hope
| that we somehow reach a stage where people realize that
| _what you think_ is what matters and not how pretty the
| packaging is. But with middle management usually clueless
| we 've conditioned people to having an audience that
| doesn't care either, they go by word count rather than by
| signal:noise ratio, clarity and correctness.
|
| This whole AI thing is rapidly becoming very tiresome.
| But the trend seems to be to push it everywhere,
| regardless of merit.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Quality , human-made content is seldom rewarded anymore.
| Difficulty has gone up. The bar for quality is too high, so
| an alternative strategy is to use LLMs for a more lottery
| approach to content: produce as much LLM-assisted content as
| possible in the hope something goes viral. Given that it's
| effectivity free to produce LLM writing, eventually something
| will work if enough content is produced.
|
| I cannot blame people for using software as a crutch when
| human-based writing has become too hard and seldom rewarded
| anymore unless you are super-talented, which statistically
| the vast majority of people are not.
| alyxya wrote:
| That's true, I just wanted to offer a counter perspective to
| the anti-AI sentiment in the blog post. I agree that the slop
| issue is probably more common and egregious, but it's
| unhelpful to discount all AI assisted writing because of
| slop. The only way I see to counteract slop is to care about
| the reputation of the author.
| ares623 wrote:
| And how does an author build up said reputation?
| dcow wrote:
| The problem is the "they're making it to the top of HN
| routinely" part.
| c4wrd wrote:
| I think the author's point is that by exposing oneself to
| feedback, you are on the receiving end of the growth in the
| case of error. If you hand off all of your tasks to ChatGPT to
| solve, your brain will not grow and you will not learn.
| latexr wrote:
| > It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.
|
| "Blog" stands for "web log". If it's on the web, it's digital,
| there was never a period when blogs were hand written.
|
| > The use of tools to help with writing and communication
| should make it easier to convey your thoughts
|
| If you're using an LLM to spit out text for you, they're not
| your thoughts, you're not the one writing, and you're not doing
| a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people
| your prompt.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> there was never a period when blogs were hand written._
|
| I've seen exactly that. In one case, it was JPEG scans of
| handwriting, but most of the time, it's a cursive font (which
| may obviate "handwritten").
|
| I can't remember which famous author it was, that always
| submitted their manuscripts as cursive writing on yellow
| legal pads.
|
| Must have been thrilling to edit.
| latexr wrote:
| Isolated instances do not a period define. We can always
| find some example of someone who did something, but the
| point is it didn't start like that.
|
| For example, there was never a period when movies were made
| by creating frames as oil paintings and photographing them.
| A couple of movies were made like that, but that was never
| the norm or a necessity or the intended process.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read?
|
| Like, I'm totally on board with rejecting slop, but not all
| content that AI was involved in is slop, and it's kind of
| frustrating so many people see things so black and white.
| latexr wrote:
| > Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to
| read?
|
| It's not a literal suggestion. "Might as well" is a well
| known idiom in the English language.
|
| The point is that if you're not going to give the reader
| the result of your research and opinions and instead will
| just post whatever the LLM spits out, you're not providing
| any value. If you gave the reader the prompt, they could
| pass it through an LLM themselves and get the same result
| (or probably not, because LLMs have no issue with making up
| different crap for the same prompt, but that just
| underscores the pointlessness of posting what the LLM
| regurgitated in the first place).
| jancsika wrote:
| > If you're using an LLM to spit out text for you, they're
| not your thoughts, you're not the one writing, and you're not
| doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give
| people your prompt.
|
| It's like listening to Bach's Prelude in C from WTCI where he
| just came up with a humdrum chord progression and uses the
| _exact same_ melodic pattern for each chord, _for the entire
| piece_. Thanks, but I can write a trivial for loop in C if I
| ever want that. What a loser!
|
| Edit: Lest HN thinks I'm cherry picking-- look at how many
| times Bach repeats the exact same harmony/melody, just
| shifting up or down by a step. A significant chunk of his
| output is copypasta. So if you like burritos filled with
| lettuce and LLM-generated blogs, by all means downvote me to
| oblivion while you jam out to "Robo-Bach"
| pasteldream wrote:
| Sometimes repetition serves a purpose, and sometimes it
| doesn't.
| DontForgetMe wrote:
| "My LLM generated code is structurally the same as Bach'
| Preludes and therefore anyone who criticises my work but
| not Bach's is a hypocrite' is a wild take.
|
| And unless I'm misunderstanding, it's literally the exact
| point you made, with no exaggeration or added comparisons.
| cerved wrote:
| > If it's on the web, it's digital, there was never a period
| when blogs were hand written.
|
| This is just pedantic nonsense
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| > If you're using an LLM to spit out text for you, they're
| not your thoughts
|
| The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the
| sentences or _language_ they're written in. Not completely
| independent, but to claim thoughts are completely dependent
| on text (thus also the language) is nonsense.
|
| > Might as well just give people your prompt.
|
| What would be the value of seeing a dozen diffs? By the same
| logic, should we also include every draft?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of
| the sentences or _language_ they're written in.
|
| Not even true! Turning your thoughts into words is _a very
| important and human_ part of writing. That 's where you
| choose what ambiguities to leave, which to remove, what
| sort of implicit shared context is assumed, such important
| things as _tone_ , and all sorts of other unconscious
| things that are important in writing.
|
| If you can't even make those choices, why would I read you?
| If you think making those choices is _unimportant_ , why
| would I think you have something important to say?
|
| Uneducated or unsophisticated people seem to vastly
| underestimate _what expertise even is_ , or _just how much
| they don 't know_, which is why for example LLMs can write
| better than most fanfic writers, but that bar is _on the
| damn floor_ and most people don 't want to consume fanfic
| level writing for things that they are not _fanatical_
| about.
|
| There's this weird and fundamental misconception in pro-ai
| realms that context free "information" is somehow possible,
| as if you can extract "knowledge" from text, like you can
| "distill" a document and reduce meaning to some simple
| sentences. Like, there's this insane belief that you can
| meaningfully reduce text and maintain info.
|
| If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like
| "children shouldn't run a community", you've lost immense
| amounts of info. That is not a good thing. You are missing
| so much nuance and context and meaning, as well as more
| superficial (but not less important!) things like the very
| experience of reading that text.
|
| Like, consider that SOTA text compression algorithms can
| reduce text to 1/10th of it's original size. If you are
| reducing a text by more than that to "summarize" or "reduce
| to it's main points" a text, do you really think you are
| not losing massive amounts of information, context, or
| meaning?
| the_af wrote:
| > _If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like
| "children shouldn't run a community"_
|
| To be honest, and I hate to say this because it's
| condescending, it's a matter of literacy.
|
| Some people don't see the value in literature. They are
| the same kind of people who will say "what's the point of
| book X or movie Y? All that happens is <sequence of
| events>", or the dreaded "it's boring, nothing happens!".
| To these people, there's no journey, no pleasure with
| words, the "plot" is all that matters and the plot can be
| reduced to a sequence of A->B->C. I suspect they treat
| their fiction like junk food, a quick fix and then move
| on. At that point, it makes logical sense to have an LLM
| write it.
|
| It's very hard to explain the joy of words to people with
| that mentality.
| dingocat wrote:
| > "Blog" stands for "web log". If it's on the web, it's
| digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand
| written.
|
| Did you use AI to write this...? Because it does not follow
| from the post you're replying to.
| latexr wrote:
| Read it again. I explicitly quoted the relevant bit. It's
| the first sentence in their last paragraph.
| k__ wrote:
| This.
|
| It's about to find the sweet spot.
|
| Vibe coding is crap, but I love the smarter autocomplete I get
| from AI.
|
| Generating whole blog posts from thin air is crap, but I love
| smart grammar, spelling, and diction fixes I get from AI.
| throw35546 wrote:
| The best yarn is spun from mouth to ear over an open flame.
| What is this handwriting?
| falcor84 wrote:
| It's what is used to feed the flames.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things
|
| Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you
| surely must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.
| alyxya wrote:
| I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It
| isn't guaranteed that content written by humans is
| necessarily correct either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is
| that I can ask for sources, and sometimes I can rely on that
| source to fact check.
| latexr wrote:
| > The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for
| sources
|
| And it will make them up just like it does everything else.
| You can't trust those either.
|
| In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI
| slop is by checking the sources posted at the end and
| seeing they don't exist.
|
| Asking for sources isn't a magical incantation that
| suddenly makes things true.
|
| > It isn't guaranteed that content written by humans is
| necessarily correct either.
|
| This is a poor argument. The overwhelming difference with
| humans is that you learn who you can trust about what. With
| LLMs, you can never reach that level.
| the_af wrote:
| > _And it will make them up just like it does everything
| else. You can't trust those either._
|
| In tech-related matters such as coding, I've come to
| expect every link ChatGPT provides as
| reference/documentation is simply wrong or nonexistent. I
| can count with fingers from a single hand the times I
| clicked on a link to a doc from ChatGPT that didn't
| result in a 404.
|
| I've had better luck with links to products from Amazon
| or eBay (or my local equivalent e-shop). But for tech
| documentation _which is freely available online_? ChatGPT
| just makes shit up.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Sure, but a chatbot will compound the inaccuracy.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Chatbots are more reliable than 95% of people you can ask, on
| a wide variety of researched topics.
| soiltype wrote:
| Yeah... you're supposed to ask the 5%.
|
| If you have a habit of asking random lay persons for
| technical advice, I can see why an idiot chatbot would seem
| like an upgrade.
| strbean wrote:
| Surely if you have access to a technical expert with the
| time to answer your question, you aren't asking an AI
| instead.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| Books exist
| jacquesm wrote:
| If I want to know about the law, I'll ask a lawyer (ok, not
| any lawyer, but it's a useful first pass filter). If I want
| to know about plumbing I'll ask a plumber. If I want to ask
| questions or learn about writing I will ask one or more
| writers. And so on. Experts in the field are _way_ better
| at their field than 95% of the population, which you _can_
| ask but probably shouldn 't.
|
| There are many 100's of professions, and most of them take
| a significant fraction of a lifetime to master, and even
| then there usually is a daily stream of new insights. You
| can't just toss all of that information into a bucket and
| expect that to outperform the < 1% of the people that have
| studied the subject extensively.
|
| When Idiocracy came out I thought it was a hilarious movie.
| I'm no longer laughing, we're really putting the idiots in
| charge now and somehow we think that quantity of output
| trumps quality of output. I wonder how many scientific
| papers published this year will contain AI generated slop
| complete with mistakes. I'll bet that number is >> 0.
| cm2012 wrote:
| In some evaluations, it is already outperforming doctors
| on text medical questions and lawyers on legal questions.
| I'd rather trust ChatGPT than a doctor who is barely
| listening, and the data seems to back this up.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The problem is that you don't know on _what_ evaluations
| and you are not qualified yourself. By the time you are
| that qualified you no longer need AI.
|
| Try asking ChatGPT or whatever is your favorite AI
| supplier about a subject that you are an expert about
| something that is difficult, on par with the kind of
| evaluations you'd expect a qualified doctor or legal
| professional to do. And then check the answer given, then
| extrapolate to fields that you are clueless about.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Sure, so long as the question is rather shallow. But how is
| this any better than search?
| strbean wrote:
| That's the funny thing to me about these criticisms.
| Obviously it is an important caveat that many clueless
| people need to be made aware of, but still funny.
|
| AI will just make stuff up instead of saying it doesn't
| know, huh? Have you talked to _real people_ recently? They
| do the same thing.
| B56b wrote:
| Even if someone COULD write a great post with AI, I think the
| author is right in assuming that it's less likely than a
| handwritten one. People seem to use AI to avoid thinking hard
| about a topic. Otherwise, the actual writing part wouldn't be
| so difficult.
|
| This is similar to the common objection for AI-coding that the
| hard part is done before the actual writing. Code generation
| was never a significant bottleneck in most cases.
| signorovitch wrote:
| I tend to agree, though not in all cases. If I'm reading
| because I want to learn something, I don't care how the
| material was generated. As long as it's correct and intuitive,
| and LLMs have gotten pretty good at that, it's valuable to me.
| It's always fun when a human takes the time to make something
| educational and creative, or has a pleasant style, or a sense
| of humor; but I'm not reading the blog post for that.
|
| What does bother me is when clearly AI-generated blog posts
| (perhaps unintentionally) attempt to mask their artificial
| nature through superfluous jokes or unnaturally lighthearted
| tone. It often obscures content and makes the reading
| experience inefficient, without the grace of a human writer
| that could make it worth it.
|
| However, if I'm reading a non-technical blog, I am reading
| because I want something human. I want to enjoy a work a real
| person sank their time and labor into. The less touched by
| machines, the better.
|
| > It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.
|
| And I would totally ready handwritten blog posts!
| paulpauper wrote:
| AI- assisted or generated content tends to have an annoying
| wordiness or bloat to it, but only astute readers will pick
| up on it.
|
| But it can make for tiresome reading. Like, a 2000 word post
| can be compressed to 700 or something had a human editor
| pruned it.
| apsurd wrote:
| Human as in unique kind of experiential learning. We are the
| sum of our mistakes. So offloading your mistakes, becomes less
| human, less leaning into the human experience.
|
| _Maybe humans aren 't so unique after all, but that's its own
| topic._
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Content can be useful. The AI tone/prose is almost always
| annoying. You learn to identify it after a while, especially if
| you use AI yourself.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| Even letting the LLM "clean it up" puts its voice on your text.
| In general, you don't want its voice. The associations are
| LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles.
| It's the modern equivalent of "talking like a used car
| salesman". Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.
| ryanmerket wrote:
| It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially
| if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.
| px43 wrote:
| Exactly. It's so wild to me when people hate on generated
| text because it sounds like something they don't like, when
| they could easily tell it to set the tone to any other tone
| that has ever appeared in text.
| zarmin wrote:
| respectfully, read more.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| You can _say_ anything to an LLM, but it's not going to
| actually write in your voice. When I was writing a very
| long blog post about "creative writing" from AIs, I
| researched Sudowrite briefly, which purports to be able to
| do exactly this; not only could it not write convincingly
| in my voice (and the novel I gave it has a pretty strong
| narrative voice), _following Sudowrite's own tutorial_ in
| which they have you get their app to write a few paragraphs
| in Dan Brown's voice demonstrated it could not convincingly
| do that.
|
| I don't think having a ML-backed proofreading system is an
| intrinsically bad idea; the oft-maligned "Apple
| Intelligence" suite has a proofreading function which is
| actually pretty good (although it has a UI so abysmal it's
| virtually useless in most circumstances). But unless you
| truly, deeply believe your own writing isn't as good as a
| precocious eighth-grader trying to impress their teacher
| with a book report, don't ask an LLM to rewrite your stuff.
| rustystump wrote:
| I have tried this. It doesnt work. Why? A human's unique
| style when executed has a pattern but in each work there
| are "experiments" that deviate from the pattern. These
| deviations are how we evolve stylistically. AI cannot
| emulate this, it only picks up on a tiny bit of the pattern
| so while it may repeat a few beats of the song, it falls
| far short of the whole.
|
| This is why heavily assisted ai writing is still slop. That
| fundamental learning that is baked in is gone. It is the
| same reason why corporate speak is so hated. It is
| basically intentional slop.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| I think no, categorically. The computer can detect your
| typos and accidents. But if you made a decision to word
| something a certain way, that _is_ your voice. If a second
| party overrides this decision, it's now deviating from your
| voice. The LLM therefore can either deviate from your
| voice, or do nothing.
|
| That's no crime, so far. It's very normal to have writers
| and editors.
|
| But it's highly abnormal for everyone to have the _same_
| editor, famous for the writing exactly the text that
| everybody hates.
|
| It's like inviting Uwe Boll to edit your film.
|
| If there's a good reason to send outgoing slop, OK. But if
| your audience is more verbally adept, and more familiar
| with its style, you do risk making yourself look bad.
| merelysounds wrote:
| Best case scenario, this means writing new blog posts in
| your old voice, as reconstructed by AI; some might argue
| this gives your voice less opportunity to grow or evolve.
| zarmin wrote:
| No man. This is the whole problem. Don't sell yourself
| short like that.
|
| What is a writing "voice"? It's more than just patterns and
| methods of phrasing. ChatGPT would say "rhythm and diction
| and tone" and word choice. But that's just the paint. A
| voice is the expression of your conscious experience trying
| to convey an idea in a way that reflects your experience.
| If it were just those semi-concrete elements, we would have
| unlimited Dickens; the concept could translate to music, we
| could have unlimited Mozart. Instead--and I hope you agree
| --we have crude approximations of all these things.
|
| Writing, even technical writing, is an art. Art comes from
| experience. Silicon can not experience. And experiencers
| (ie, people with consciousness) can detect soullessness. To
| think otherwise is to be tricked; listen to anything on
| suno, for example. It's amazing at first, and then you see
| through the trick. You start to hear it the way most people
| now perceive generated images as too "shiny". Have you ever
| generated an image and felt a feeling other than "neat"?
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't like ChatGPT's voice any more than you do, but it is
| definitely _not_ HR-voice. LLM writing tends to be in active
| voice with clear topic sentences, which is already 10x better
| writing than corporate-speak.
| kibwen wrote:
| Yep, it's like Coke Zero vs Diet Coke: 10x the flavor and
| 10x the calories.
| tptacek wrote:
| Coke Zero and Diet Coke are both noncaloric.
| amitav1 wrote:
| 0 x 10 = 0
| singleshot_ wrote:
| If you're playing the same games they play on the label,
| sure. There is less than one calorie per serving.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I have human-written blog posts, and I can rest assured no one
| reads those either.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| Yeah, same here. I've got to the stage where what I write is
| mostly just for myself as a reminder, or to share one-to-one
| with people I work with. It's usually easier to put it in a
| blog post than spend an hour explaining it in a meeting
| anyway. Given the state of the internet these days, that's
| probably all you can really expect from blogging.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I have those too and I don't actually care who reads them.
| When I write it is mostly to organize my thoughts or to vent
| my frustration about something. Afterwards I feel better ;)
| korse wrote:
| :Edit, not anymore kek
|
| Somehow this is currently the top comment. Why?
|
| Most non-quantitative content has value due to a foundation of
| distinct lived experience. Averages of the lived experience of
| billions just don't hit the same, and are less likely to be
| meaningful to me (a distinct human). Thus, I want to hear your
| personal thoughts, sans direct algorithmic intermediary.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| If you want this, why would you want the LLM output and not
| just the prompts? The prompts are faster to read and as models
| evolve you can get "better" blog posts out of them.
|
| It's like being okay with reading the entirety of generated ASM
| after someone compiles C++.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I
| don't see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help
| with writing and communication should make it easier to convey
| your thoughts, and that itself is valuable.
|
| Whether I hand write a blog post or type it into a computer,
| I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you
| to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, far,
| far more important distinction than whatever differences we
| might imagine arise from hand writing vs. typing.
|
| > your thoughts
|
| No, they aren't! Not if you had AI write the post for you.
| That's the problem!
| zanellato19 wrote:
| The idea that an AI can keep the authors voice just means it
| is so unoriginal that it doesn't make a difference.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| >I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for
| you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a
| far, far, far more important distinction than whatever
| differences we might imagine
|
| That apparently is not the case for a lot of people.
| caconym_ wrote:
| s/important/significant/, then, if that helps make the
| point clearer.
|
| I cannot tell you that it _objectively matters_ whether or
| not an article was written by a human or an LLM, but it
| should be clear to anybody that it is at least a
| significant difference in kind vs. the analogy case of
| handwriting vs. typing. I think somebody who won 't
| acknowledge that is either being intellectually dishonest,
| or has already had their higher cognitive functions rotted
| away by excessive reliance on LLMs to do their thinking for
| them. The difference in kind is that of using power tools
| instead of hand tools to build a chair, vs. going out to a
| store and buying one.
| alyxya wrote:
| I think of technology as offering a sliding scale for how
| much assistance it can provide. Your words could be literally
| the keys you press, or you could use some tool that fixes
| punctuation and spelling, or something that fixes the grammar
| in your sentence, or rewrites sentences to be more concise
| and flow more smoothly, etc. If I used AI to rewrite a
| paragraph to better express my idea, I still consider it
| fundamentally my thoughts. I agree that it can get to the
| point where using AI doesn't constitute my thoughts, but it's
| very much a gray area.
| aakkaakk wrote:
| As long as you're not using an autopen, because that is
| definitely not you!
|
| https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
| rustystump wrote:
| I agree with you to a point. Ai will often suggest edits which
| destroy the authentic voice of a person. If you as a writer do
| not see these suggestions for what they are, you will take them
| and destroy the best part of your work.
|
| I write pretty long blog posts that some enjoy and dump them
| into various llms for review. I am pretty opinionated on taste
| so I usually only update grammar but it can be dangerous for
| some.
|
| To be more concrete, often ai tells me to be more
| "professional" and less "irreverent" which i think is bullshit.
| The suggestions it gives are pure slop. But if english isnt
| first language or you dont have confidence, you may just accept
| the slop.
| k_r_z wrote:
| Couldn't agree more with this. AI is a tool like everything
| else. I mean if You are not a native it could be handy just to
| suggest You the polishing the style and all the language quirks
| to some degree. Why when You use autocorrect You are the boss
| but when You use AI You turn to half brain with ChatGPT?
| strbean wrote:
| I just despise the trend of commenting "I asked ChatGPT about
| this and this is what it said:".
|
| It's like getting an unsolicited text with a "Let Me Google
| That For You" link. Yes, we can all ask ChatGPT about the
| thing. We don't need you to do it for us.
| beej71 wrote:
| Do you care if a scifi book was written by an AI or human, out
| of curiosity?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is sort of fun to bounce little ideas off ChatGPT, but I
| can't imagine wanting to read somebody else's ChatGPT
| responses.
|
| IMO a lot of the dumb and bad behavior around LLMs could be
| solved by a "just share the prompts" strategy. If somebody
| wants to generate an email from bullet points and send it to
| me: just send the bullet points, and I can pass them into an
| LLM if I want.
|
| Blog post based on interesting prompts? Share the prompt. It's
| just text completion anyway, so if a reader knows more about
| the topic than the prompt-author, they can even tweak the
| prompt (throw in some lingo to get the LLM to a better spot in
| the latent space or whatever).
|
| The only good reason not to do that is to save some energy in
| generation, but inference is pretty cheap compared to training,
| right? And the planet is probably doomed anyway at this point
| so we as well enjoy the ride.
| alyxya wrote:
| AI assisted blog posts could have an interleaved mix of AI
| and human written words where a person could edit the LLM's
| output. If the whole blog post were simply a few prompts on
| ChatGPT with no human directly touching the output, then sure
| it makes sense to share the prompt.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The only thing that matters to me is the content._
|
| The content itself does have value, yes.
|
| But some people also read to connect with other humans and find
| that connection meaningful and important too.
|
| I believe the best writing has both useful content and
| meaningful connection.
| subsection1h wrote:
| > _I personally don't think I care if a blog post is AI
| generated or not._
|
| 0% of your HN comments include URLs for sources that support
| the positions and arguments you've expressed at HN.[1] Do you
| generally not care about the sources of ideas? For example,
| when you study public policy issues, do you not differentiate
| between research papers published in the most prestigious
| journals and 500-word news articles written at the 8th-grade
| level by nonspecialist nobodies?
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+htt...
| giltho wrote:
| Hey chatGPT, summarise this post for me
| ericol wrote:
| > read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo
| machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.
|
| Ha! That's a very clever spot on insult. Most LLMs would probably
| be seriously offended by this would thy be rational beings.
|
| > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or
| for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the
| mistake.
|
| OK, you are pushing it buddy. My mandarin is not that good; as a
| matter of fact, I can handle no mandarin at all. Or french to
| that matter. But I'm certain a decent LLM can do that without me
| having to resort to reach out to another person, that might not
| be available or have enough time to deal with my shenanigans.
|
| I agree that there are way too much AI slop being created and
| made public, but yet there are way too many cases where the use
| is fair and used for improving whatever the person is doing.
|
| Yes, AI is being abused. No, I don't agree we should all go
| taliban against even fair use cases.
| ericol wrote:
| As a side note, i hate posts where they go on and on and use 3
| pages to go to the point.
|
| You know what I'm doing? I'm using AI to chase to the point and
| extract the relevant (For me) info.
| portaouflop wrote:
| It's a clever post but people that use so to write personal
| blogposts ain't gonna read this and change their mind. Only
| people who already hate using llms are gonna cheer you on.
|
| But this kind of content is great for engagement farming on HN.
|
| Just write "something something clankers bad"
|
| While I agree with the author it's a very moot and uninspired
| point
| maxdo wrote:
| Typical black and white article to capitalize on I hate AI hype.
|
| Super top articles with millions of readers are done with AI.
| It's not an ai problem it's the content. If it's watery and no
| style tuned it's bad. Same as human author
| rcarmo wrote:
| I don't get all this complaining, TBH. I have been blogging for
| over 25 years (20+ on the same site), been using em dashes ever
| since I switched to a Mac (and because the Markdown parser I use
| converts double dashes to it, which I quite like when I'm banging
| out text in vim), and have made it a point of running long-form
| posts through an LLM asking it to critique my text for
| readability because I have a tendency for very long
| sentences/passages.
|
| AI is a tool to help you _finish_ stuff, like a wood sander. It's
| not something you should use as a hacksaw, or as a hammer. As
| long as you are writing with your own voice, it's just better
| autocorrect.
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| 100% agree. Using it to polish your sentences or fix small
| grammar/syntax issues is a great use case in my opinion. I
| specifically ask it not to completely rewrite or change my
| voice.
|
| It can also double as a peer reviewer and point out potential
| counterarguments, so you can address them upfront.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| The problem is that a lot of people use it for a whole lot more
| than just polish. The LLM voice in a text get quite jarring
| very quickly.
| carimura wrote:
| I feel like sometimes I write like an LLM, complete with [bad]
| self-deprecating humor, overly-explained points because I like
| first principals, random soliloquies, etc. Makes me worry that
| I'll try and change my style.
|
| That said, when I do try to get LLMs to write something, I can't
| stand it, and feel like the OP here.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| I don't like binary takes on this. I think the best question to
| ask is whether you _own_ the output of your editing process. Why
| does this article exist? Does it represent your unique
| perspective? Is this you at your best, trying to share your
| insights with the world?
|
| If yes, there's probably value in putting it out. I don't care if
| you used paper and ink, a text editor, a spell checker, or asked
| an LLM for help.
|
| On the flip side, if anyone could've asked an LLM for the exact
| same text, and if you're outsourcing a critical thinking to the
| reader - then yeah, I think you deserve scorn. It's no different
| from content-farmed SEO spam.
|
| Mind you, I'm what you'd call an old-school content creator. It
| would be an understatement to say I'm conflicted about gen AI.
| But I also feel that this is the most principled way to make
| demands of others: I have no problem getting angry at people for
| wasting my time or polluting the internet, but I don't think I
| can get angry at them for producing useful content the wrong way.
| buu700 wrote:
| Exactly. If it's substantially the writer's own thoughts and/or
| words, who cares if they collaborated with an LLM, or
| autocomplete, or a spelling/grammar-checker, or a friend, or a
| coworker, or someone from Fiverr? This is just looking for
| arbitrary reasons to be upset.
|
| If it's _not_ substantially their own writing or ideas, then
| sure, they shouldn 't pass it off as such and claim individual
| authorship. That's a different issue entirely. However, if
| someone just wanted to share, "I'm 50 prompts deep exploring
| this niche topic with GPT-5 and learned something interesting;
| quoted below is a response with sources that I've fact-checked
| against" or "I posted on /r/AskHistorians and received this
| fascinating response from /u/jerryseinfeld", I could respect
| that.
|
| In any case, if someone is posting low-quality content, blame
| the author, not the tools they happened to use. OOP may as well
| say they only want to read blog posts written with vim and
| emacs users should stay off the internet.
|
| I just don't see the point in gatekeeping. If someone has
| something valuable to share, they should feel free to use
| whatever resources they have available to maximize the value
| provided. If using AI makes the difference between a rambling
| draft riddled with grammatical and factual errors, and a more
| readable and information-dense post at half the length with
| fewer inaccuracies, use AI.
| jzb wrote:
| "but I don't think I can get angry at them for producing useful
| content the wrong way"
|
| What about plagiarism? If a person hacks together a blog post
| that is arguably useful but they plagiarized half of it from
| another person, is that acceptable to you? Is it only
| acceptable if it's mechanized?
|
| One of the arguments against GenAI is that the output is
| basically plagiarized from other sources -- that is, of course,
| oversimplified in the case of GenAI, but hoovering up other
| people's content and then producing other content based on what
| was "learned" from that (at scale) is what it does.
|
| The ecological impact of GenAI tools and the practices of GenAI
| companies (as well as the motives behind those companies)
| remain the same whether one uses them a lot or a little. If a
| person has an objection to the ethics of GenAI then they're
| going to wind up with a "binary take" on it. A deal with the
| devil is a deal with the devil: "I just dabbled with Satan _a
| little bit_ " isn't really a consolation for those who are
| dead-set against GenAI in its current forms.
|
| My take on GenAI is a bit more nuanced than "deal with the
| devil", but not _a lot_ more. But I also respect that there are
| folks even more against it than I am, and I 'd agree from their
| perspective that _any_ use is too much.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| My personal thoughts on gen AI are complicated. A lot of my
| public work was vacuumed up for gen AI, and I'm not
| benefitting from it in any real way. But for text, I think we
| already lost that argument. To the average person, LLMs are
| too useful to reject them on some ultimately muddied
| arguments along the lines of "it's OK for humans to train on
| books, but it's not OK for robots". Mind you, it pains me to
| write this. I just think that ship has sailed.
|
| I think we have a better shot at making that argument for
| music, visual art, etc. Most of it is utilitarian and most
| people don't care where it comes from, but we have a cultural
| heritage of recognizing handmade items as more valuable than
| the mass-produced stuff.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I just think that ship has sailed.
|
| Sadly, I agree. That's why I removed my works from the open
| web entirely: there is no effective way for people to
| protect their works from this abuse on the internet.
| DEADMEAT wrote:
| > To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them
|
| The way LLMss are now, outside of the tech bubble the
| average person has no use for them.
|
| > on some ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of
| "it's OK for humans to train on books, but it's not OK for
| robots"
|
| This is a bizarre argument. Humans don't "train" on books,
| they read them. This could be for many reasons, like to
| learn something new or to feel an emotion. The LLM trains
| on the book to be able to imitate it without attribution.
| These activities are not comparable.
| jayers wrote:
| I think it is important to make the distinction between "blog
| post" and other kinds of published writing. It literally does not
| matter if your blog post has perfectly correct grammar or
| misspellings (though you should do a one-pass revision for
| clarity of thought). Blog posts are best for articulating
| unfinished thoughts. To that end, you are cheating yourself, the
| writer, if you use AI to help you write a blog post. It is
| through the act of writing it that you begin to grok with the
| idea.
|
| But you bet that I'm going to use AI to correct my grammar and
| spelling for the important proposal I'm about to send. No sense
| in losing credibility over something that can be corrected
| algorithmically.
| futurecat wrote:
| slop excepted, writing is a very difficult activity that has
| always been outsourced to some extent, either to an individual, a
| team, or to some software (spell checker, etc). Of course people
| will use AI if they think it makes them a better writer. Taste is
| the only issue here.
| iamwil wrote:
| Lately, I've been writing more on my blog, and it's been helpful
| to change the way that I do it.
|
| Now, I take a cue from school, and write the outline first. With
| an outline, I can use a prompt for the LLM to play the role of a
| development editor to help me critique the throughline. This is
| helpful because I tend to meander, if I'm thinking at the level
| of words and sentences, rather than at the level of an outline.
|
| Once I've edited the outline for a compelling throughline, I can
| then type out the full essay in my own voice. I've found it much
| easier to separate the process into these two stages.
|
| Before outline critiquing:
| https://interjectedfuture.com/destroyed-at-the-boundary/
|
| After outline critiquing: https://interjectedfuture.com/the-best-
| way-to-learn-might-be...
|
| I'm still tweaking the developement editor. I find that it can be
| too much of a stickler on the form of the throughline.
| whshdjsk wrote:
| And yet, Will, with all due respect, I can't hear your voice in
| any of the 10 articles I skimmed. It's the same rhetorical
| structure found in every other LLM blog.
|
| I suppose if to make you feel like it's better (even if it
| isn't), and you enjoy it, go ahead. But know this: we can tell.
| amrocha wrote:
| Tangential, but when I heard the Zoom CEO say that in the future
| you'll just send your AI double to a meeting for you I couldn't
| comprehend how a real human being could ever think that that
| would be an ok thing to suggest.
|
| The absolute bare minimum respect you can have for someone who's
| making time for you is to make time for them. Offloading that to
| AI is the equivalent of shitting on someone's plate and telling
| them to eat it.
|
| I struggle everyday with the thought that the richest most
| powerful people in the world will sell their souls to get a bit
| richer.
| Charmizard wrote:
| Idk how I feel about this take, tbh. _Do things the old way
| because I like them that way_ seems like poor reasoning.
|
| If folks figure out a way to produce content that is human,
| contextual and useful... by all means.
| jdnordy wrote:
| Anyone else suspicious this might be satire ironically written by
| an LLM?
| iMax00 wrote:
| I read anything as long as there is new and useful information
| keepamovin wrote:
| So don't read it.
| Frotag wrote:
| The way I view it is that the author is trying to explain their
| mental model, but there's only so much you can fit into prose.
| It's my responsibility to fill in the missing assumptions /
| understand why X implies Y. And all the little things like
| consistent word choice, tone, and even the mistakes helps with
| this. But mix in LLMs and now there's another layer / slightly
| different mental model I have to isolate, digest, and merge with
| the author's.
| throwaway-0001 wrote:
| For me it's insulting not to use an AI to reply back. I'd say 90%
| of people would answer better with an AI assist in most business
| environments. Maybe even personal.
|
| It's really funny how many business deals would be better if
| people would put the requests in an AI to explain what exactly is
| requested. Most people are not able to answer and if they'd use
| an AI they could respond in a proper way without wasting
| everyone's time. But at least not using an AI shows the
| competency (or better - incompetence) level.
|
| It's also sad that I need to tell people to put my message in an
| AI to don't ask me useless questions. And AI can fill most of the
| gaps people don't get it. You might say my requests are not
| proper, but then how an AI can figure out what I want to say? I
| also put my requests in an AI when I can and can create eli5
| explanations of the requests "for dummies"
| snorbleck wrote:
| this is great.
| neilv wrote:
| I suspect that the majority of people who are shoveling BS in
| their blogs _aren 't_ doing it because they actually want to
| think and write and share and learn and be human; but rather, the
| sole purpose of the blog is for SEO, or to promote the personal
| brand of someone who doesn't want anything else.
|
| Perhaps the author is speaking to the people who are only
| temporarily led astray by the pervasive BS online and by the
| recent wildly popular "cheating on your homework" culture?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Well Firefox just got an AI summarizing feature, so thankfully I
| don't have to...
| bhouston wrote:
| I am not totally sure about this. I think that AI writing is just
| a progression of current trends. Many things have made writing
| easier and lower cost - printing press, typewriters, word
| processors, grammer/spell checkers, electronic distribution.
|
| This is just a continuation. It does tend to mean there is less
| effort to produce the output and thus there is a value
| degradation, but this has been true all along this technology
| trend.
|
| I don't think we should be a purist as to how writing is
| produced.
| causal wrote:
| LinkedIn marketing was bad before AI, now half the content is
| just generated emoji-ridden listicles
| hiergiltdiestfu wrote:
| Thank you! Heartfelt thank you!
| nickdothutton wrote:
| If you are going to use AI to make a post, then please instruct
| it to make that post as short and information-dense as possible.
| It's one thing to read an AI summary but quite another to have to
| wade through paragraphs of faux "personality" and "conversational
| writing" of the sort that slop AIs regularly trowel out.
| frstrtd_engnr wrote:
| These days, my work routine looks something like this - a
| colleague sends me a long, AI-generated PRD full of changes. When
| I ask him for clarification, he stumbles through the explanation.
| Does he care at all? I have no idea.
|
| Frustrated, I just throw that mess straight at claude-code and
| tell it to fix whatever nonsense it finds and do its best. It
| probably implements 80-90% of what the doc says -- and invents
| the rest. Not that I'd know, since I never actually read the
| original AI-generated PRD myself.
|
| In the end, no one's happy. The whole creative and development
| process has lost that feeling of achievement, and nobody seems to
| care about code quality anymore.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I've always been bad at grammar, and wrote a lot of newsletters &
| blogs for my first startups which always got great feedback, but
| also lots of grammar complaints. Really happy GPT is so great at
| catching those nowadays, saves me a lot of Grammar supports
| requests ;)
| whshdjsk wrote:
| Or just get better?
|
| I don't know how someone can be nerdy enough to be on
| Hackernews, but simultaneously not nerdy enough to pickup and
| intuit the rules of English language from sheer osmosis.
| holdenc137 wrote:
| I assume this is a double-bluff and the blog post WAS written by
| an AI o_O ?
| braza wrote:
| > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or
| for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the
| mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's
| what makes us human!
|
| For essays, honestly, I do not feel so bad, because I can see
| that other than some spaces like HN the quality of the average
| online writer has dropped so much that I prefer to have some
| machine-assisted text that can deliver the content.
|
| However, my problem is with AI-generated code.
|
| In most of the cases to create trivial apps, I think AI-generated
| code will be OK to good; however, the issue that I'm seeing as a
| code reviewer is that folks that _you know their code design
| style_ are so heavily reliant on AI-generated code that you are
| sure that they did not write and do not understand the code.
|
| One example: Working with some data scientists and researchers,
| most of them used to write things on Pandas, some trivial for
| loops, and some primitive imperative programming. Now, especially
| after Claude Code, most of the things are vectorized, with some
| sort of variable naming with way-compressed naming. Sometimes
| folks use Cython in some data pipeline tasks or even using
| functional programming to an extreme.
|
| Good performance is great, and leveling up the quality of the
| codebase it's a net positive; however, I wonder in some scenario
| when things go south _and /or_ Claude code is not available if
| those folks will be able to fix it.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| This is how I feel about some LinkedIn folks that are going all
| in w/ AI.
| parliament32 wrote:
| I'm looking forward to the (inevitable) AI detection browser
| plugin that will mark the slop for me, at least that way I don't
| need to spend the effort figuring out if it's AI content or not.
| namirez wrote:
| _No, don 't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or
| for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the
| mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's
| what makes us human!_
|
| I do understand the reasoning behind being original, but why make
| mistakes when we have tools to avoid them? That sounds like a
| strange recommendation.
| luisml77 wrote:
| Who cares about your feelings, it's a blog post.
|
| If the goal is to get the job done, then use AI.
|
| Do you really want to waste precious time for so little return?
| nhod wrote:
| "I'm choosing to be 'insulted' by the existence of an arbitrary
| thing in the universe and then upset by the insult I chose to
| ascribe to it."
| z7 wrote:
| Hypothetically, what if the AI-generated blog post were better
| than what the human author of the blog would have written?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I like the author's idea that people should publish the prompts
| they use to generate LLM output, not the output itself.
| vzaliva wrote:
| It is similarly unsulting to read an ungrammatical blog post full
| of misspelings. So I do not subscribe to the part of your
| argument "No, don't use it to fix your grammar". Using AI to fix
| your grammar, if done right, is the part of the learning process.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| A critical piece of this is to ensure it is _just_ fixing the
| grammar and not rewriting it in its own AI voice is key. This
| is why I think tools like grammarly or similar still have a
| useful edge over just directly using an LLM as the UX let 's
| you pick and choose which suggestions to adopt. And they also
| provide context on why they are making a given suggestion. It
| still often kills your "personal voice", so you need to be
| judicious with its use.
| jexe wrote:
| Reading an AI blog post (or reddit post, etc) just signals that
| the author actually just doesn't care that much about the
| subject.. which makes me care less too.
| mucio wrote:
| it's insulting to read text on a computer screen. I don't care if
| you write like a 5 years old or if your message will need days or
| weeks to reach me. Use a pen, a pencil and some paper.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| I sometimes share interesting AI conversations with my friends
| using the "share" button on the AI websites. Often the back-and-
| forth is more interesting than the final output anyway.
|
| I think some people turn AI conversations into blog posts that
| they pass off as their own because of SEO considerations. If
| Twitter didn't discourage people sharing links, perhaps we would
| see a lot more tweet threads that start with
| https://chatgpt.com/share/... and https://claude.ai/share/...
| instead of people trying to pass off AI generated content as
| their own.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I think the problem is _lazy_ AI generated content.
|
| The problem is that the current generation of tools "looks like
| something" even with minimal effort. This makes people lazy.
| Actually put in the effort and see what you get, with or
| without AI assist.
| saltysalt wrote:
| I'm pretty certain that the only thing reading my blog these days
| is AI.
| mirzap wrote:
| This post could easily be generated by AI, no way to tell for
| sure. I'm more insulted if the title or blog thumbnail is
| misleading, or if the post is full of obvious nonsense, etc.
|
| If a post contains valuable information that I learn from it, I
| don't really care if AI wrote it or not. AI is just a tool, like
| any other tool humans invented.
|
| I'm pretty sure people had the same reaction 50 years ago, when
| the first PCs started appearing: "It's insulting to see your
| calculations made by personal electronic devices."
| latchkey wrote:
| As a test, I used AI to rewrite their blog post, keeping the same
| tone and context but fewer words. It got the point across, and I
| enjoyed it more because I didn't have to read as much. I did edit
| it slightly to make it a bit less obviously AI'ish...
|
| ---
|
| Honestly, it feels rude to hand me something churned out by a
| lexical bingo machine when you could've written it yourself. I'm
| a person with thoughts, humor, contradictions, and experience not
| a content bin.
|
| Don't you like the pride of making something that's yours? You
| should.
|
| Don't use AI to patch grammar or dodge effort. Make the mistake.
| Feel awkward. Learn. That's being human.
|
| People are kinder than you think. By letting a bot speak for you,
| you cut off the chance for connection.
|
| Here's the secret: most people want to help you. You just don't
| ask. You think smart people never need help. Wrong. The smartest
| ones know when to ask and when to give.
|
| So, human to human, save the AI for the boring stuff. Lead with
| your own thoughts. The best ideas are the ones you've actually
| felt.
| cyrialize wrote:
| I'm reading a blog because I'm interested in the voice a writer
| has.
|
| If I'm finding that voice boring, I'll stop reading - whether or
| not AI was used.
|
| The generic AI voice, and by that I mean very little prompting to
| add any "flavor", is boring.
|
| Of course I've used AI to summarize things and give me
| information, like when I'm looking for a specific answer.
|
| In the case of blogs though, I'm not always trying to find an
| "answer", I'm just interested in what you have to say and I'm
| reading for pleasure.
| jquaint wrote:
| > Do you not enjoy the pride that comes with attaching your name
| to something you made on your own? It's great!
|
| This is like saying a photographer shouldn't find the sunset they
| photographed pretty or be proud of the work, because they didn't
| personally labor to paint the image of it.
|
| A lot more goes into a blog post than the actual act of typing
| the context out.
|
| Lazy work is always lazy work, but its possible to make work you
| are proud of with AI, in the same way you can create work you are
| proud of with a camera
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I already found it insulting to read seo spam blog posts. The ai
| involved is beside the point.
| adverbly wrote:
| As someone who briefly wrote a bunch of AI generated blog posts,
| I kind of agree... The voicing is terrible, and the only thing it
| it does particularly well is replace the existing slop.
|
| I'm starting to pivot and realize that quality is actually way
| more important than I thought, especially in a world where it is
| very easy to create things of low quality using AI.
|
| Another place I've noticed it is in hiring. There are so many low
| quality applications its insane. One application with a full
| GitHub and profile and cover letter and or video which actually
| demonstrates that you understand where you are applying is worth
| more than 100 low quality ones.
|
| It's gone from a charming gimmick to quickly becoming an ick.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here yet, and I don't
| want to be pedantic, but for centuries famous artists, musicians,
| writers, etc. have used assistants to do their work for them. The
| list includes (but in no way is this complete): DaVinci,
| Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Warhol, Koons, O'Keefe,
| Hepworth, Hockney, Stephen King, Clancy, Dumas, Patterson, Elvis,
| Elton John, etc. etc. Further, most scientific, engineering and
| artistic innovations are made "on the shoulders of giants." As
| the saying goes: there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing. I
| suggest that the use of an LLM for writing is just another tool
| of human creativity to be used freely and often to produce even
| more interesting and valuable content.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| No that's complete rubbish, it's a bad analogy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Counterpoint: It's a fine thought, and an excellent analogy.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree with the author. If I detect that the article is written
| by an AI, I bounce off.
|
| I similarly dislike other trickery as well, like ghostwriters, PR
| articles in journalism, lip-syncing at concerts, and so on. Fuck
| off, be genuine.
|
| The thing why people are upset about AI is because AI can be used
| to easily generate a lot of text, but its usage is rarely
| disclosed. So then when someone discovers AI usage, there is no
| telling for the reader of how much of the article is signal, and
| how much is noise. Without AI, it would hinge on the expertise or
| experience of the author, but now with AI involved, the bets are
| off.
|
| The other thing is that reading someone's text involves a little
| bit of forming a connection with them. But then discovering that
| AI (or someone else) have written the text, it feels like they
| betrayed that connection.
| masly wrote:
| In a related problem:
|
| I recently interviewed a person for a role as senior platform
| architect. The person was already working for a semi reputable
| company. In the first interview, the conversation was okay but my
| gut just told me something was strange about this person.
|
| We have the candidate a case to solve with a few diagrams, and to
| prepare a couple slides to discuss the architecture.
|
| The person came back with 12 diagrams, all AI generated, littered
| with obvious AI "spelling"/generation mistakes.
|
| And when we questioned the person about why they think we would
| gain trust and confidence in them with this obvious AI generated
| content, they became even aggressive.
|
| Needless to say it didn't end well.
|
| The core problem is really how much time is now being wasted in
| recruiting with people who "cheat" or outright cheat.
|
| We have had to design questions to counter AI cheating, and
| strategies to avoid wasting time.
| wenbin wrote:
| It's similarly insulting to listen to your AI-generated fake
| podcasts[0]. Ten minutes spent on them is ten minutes wasted.
|
| [0] AI-generated fake podcasts (mostly via NotebookLM)
| https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
| jackdoe wrote:
| I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people
| visiting your content, and there is close to zero cost to make
| it. It is the same problem with music, in fact I search youtube
| music only with before:2022.
|
| I recently wrote about the dead internet
| https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration.
|
| I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of
| humanity", or create rings of trust for humans, but now I think
| the ship has sailed.
|
| Today a colleague was sharing their screen on google docs and a
| big "USE GEMINI AI TO WRITE THE DOCUMENT" button was front and
| center. I am fairly certain that by end of year most words you
| read will be tokens.
|
| I am working towards moving my pi-hole from blacklist to
| whitelist, and after that just using local indexes with some
| datahorading. (squid, wikipedia, SO, rfcs, libc, kernel.git etc)
|
| Maybe in the future we just exchange local copies of our local
| "internet" via sdcards, like in Cuba's Sneakernet[1] El Paquete
| Semenal[2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
| gosub100 wrote:
| > thought we should do "proof of humanity"
|
| I thought about this in another context and then I realized:
| what system is going to declare you're human or not? _AI_ of
| course
| tasuki wrote:
| Uhh, that's a lot of links:
| https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/
|
| Where are the explanations what all of them mean? What is
| (nothing) vs `maxi` vs `mini` vs `nopic`? What is `100` vs
| `all` vs `top1m` vs `top` vs `wp1-0.8`?
| somat wrote:
| It is the duality of generated content.
|
| It feels great to use. But it also feels incredibly shitty to
| have it used on you.
|
| My recommendation. Just give the prompt. If if your readers want
| to expand it they can do so. don't pollute others experience by
| passing the expanded form around. Nobody enjoys that.
| marstall wrote:
| also: mind-numbing.
| rootedbox wrote:
| I fixed it.
|
| It appears inconsiderate--perhaps even dismissive--to present me,
| a human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions, and
| experiences, with content that reads as though it were assembled
| by a lexical randomizer. When you rely on automation instead of
| your own creativity, you deny both of us the richness of genuine
| human expression.
|
| Isn't there pride in creating something that is authentically
| yours? In writing, even imperfectly, and knowing the result
| carries your voice? That pride is irreplaceable.
|
| Please, do not use artificial systems merely to correct your
| grammar, translate your ideas, or "improve" what you believe you
| cannot. Make errors. Feel discomfort. Learn from those
| experiences. That is, in essence, the human condition. Human
| beings are inherently empathetic. We want to help one another.
| But when you interpose a sterile, mechanized intermediary between
| yourself and your readers, you block that natural empathy.
|
| Here's something to remember: most people genuinely want you to
| succeed. Fear often stops you from seeking help, convincing you
| that competence means solitude. It doesn't. Intelligent people
| know when to ask, when to listen, and when to contribute. They
| build meaningful, reciprocal relationships. So, from one human to
| another--from one consciousness of love, fear, humor, and
| curiosity to another--I ask: if you must use AI, keep it to the
| quantitative, to the mundane. Let your thoughts meet the world
| unfiltered. Let them be challenged, shaped, and strengthened by
| experience.
|
| After all, the truest ideas are not the ones perfectly written.
| They're the ones that have been felt.
| tasuki wrote:
| Heh, nice. I suppose that was AI-generated? Your beginning:
|
| > It appears inconsiderate--perhaps even dismissive--to present
| me, a human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions,
| and experiences, with content that reads as though it were
| assembled by a lexical randomizer.
|
| I like that beginning than the original:
|
| > It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with
| thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to
| read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo
| machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.
|
| No one's making anyone read anything (I hope). And yes, it
| might be inconsiderate or perhaps even dismissive to present a
| human with something written by AI. The AI was able to phrase
| this much better than the human! Thank you for presenting me
| with that, I guess?
| wltr wrote:
| It's a cherry on top to see these silly AI-generated posts to be
| seriously discussed in here.
| dcow wrote:
| It's not that people don't value creativity and expression. It's
| that for 90% of the communication AI is being used for, the
| slightly worse AI gen version that took 30 min to produce isn't
| worse enough to justify spending 4 hours on the hand rolled
| version. That's the reality we're living through right now.
| People are eating up the productivity boosts like candy.
| nazgu1 wrote:
| I agree, but if I would have to type one most insulting things
| with AI is scraping data without consent to train models, so
| people no longer enjoy blog posting :(
| deadbabe wrote:
| If you're going to AI generate your blog, the least you could do
| is use a fine tuned LLM that matches your style. Most people just
| toss a prompt into GPT 5 and call it a day.
| RIMR wrote:
| >No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations
|
| Okay, I can understand even drawing the line at grammar
| correction, in that not all "correct" grammar is desirable or
| personal enough to convey certain ideas.
|
| But not for translation? AI translation, in my experience, has
| proven to be more reliable than other forms of machine
| translation, and personally learning a new language every time I
| need to read something non-native to me isn't reasonable.
| KindDragon wrote:
| > Everyone wants to help each other. And people are far kinder
| than you may think.
|
| I want to believe that. When I was a student, I built a simple
| HTML page with a feedback form that emailed me submissions. I
| received exactly one message. It arrived encoded; I eagerly
| decoded it and found a profanity-filled rant about how terrible
| my site was. That taught me that kindness online isn't the
| default - it's a choice. I still aim for it, but I don't assume
| it.
| netule wrote:
| I've found that the kinds of people who leave comments or send
| emails tend to fall into two categories:
|
| 1. They're assholes.
|
| 2. They care enough to speak up, but only when the thing stops
| working as expected.
|
| I think the vast majority of users/readers are good people who
| just don't feel like engaging. The minority are vocal assholes.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I mean, if you used an AI to generated it, you shouldn't mind if
| my AI reads it, rather than me.
| akshatjiwan wrote:
| I don't know. Content matters more to me. Many of the articles
| that I read have so little information density that I find it
| hard to justify spending time on them.I often use AI to summarise
| text for me and then lookup particular topics in detail if I
| like.
|
| Skimming was pretty common before AI too. People used to read and
| share notes instead of entire texts. AI has just made it easier.
|
| Reading long texts is not a problem for me if its engaging. But
| often I find they just go on and on without getting to the point.
| Especially news articles.They are the worst.
| voidhorse wrote:
| If you struggle with communication, using AI is fine. What
| matters is _caring_ about the result. You cannot just throw it
| over the fence.
|
| AI content in itself isn't insulting, but as TFA hits upon,
| pushing sloppy work you didn't bother to read or check at all
| yourself _is_ incredibly insulting and just communicates to
| others that you don 't think their time is valuable. This holds
| for non-AI generated work as well, but the bar is higher by
| default since you at least had to generate that content yourself
| and thus at least engage with it on a basic level. AI content is
| also needlessly verbose, employs trite and stupid analogies
| constantly, and in general has the nauseating, bland, soulless
| corporate professional communication style that anyone with even
| a mote of decent literary taste detests.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| ai;dr
| johanam wrote:
| AI generated text like a plume of pollution spreading through the
| web. Little we can do to keep it at bay. Perhaps transparency is
| the answer?
| tasuki wrote:
| > It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with
| thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to
| read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo
| machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.
|
| Agreed fully. In fact it'd be quite rude to force you to even
| read something written by another human being!
|
| I'm all for your right to decide what is and isn't worth reading,
| be it ai or human generated.
| hereme888 wrote:
| You are absolutely right!
|
| Jokes aside, good article.
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| I should never spend more effort reading something than the
| author spent writing it. With AI-generated texts the author
| effort approaches zero.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| Is it just me, or is OP posting a bunch of links on HN for karma
| farming? Some of seem to be AI-generated, like this one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45724022
| OptionOfT wrote:
| What am I even reading if it is AI generated?
|
| The reason AI is so hyped up at the moment is that you give it
| little, it gives you back more.
|
| But then whose blog-post am I reading? What really is the point?
| corporat wrote:
| The most thoughtful critique of this post isn't that AI is
| inherently bad--but that its use shouldn't be conflated with
| laziness or cowardice.
|
| Fact: Professional writers have used grammar tools, style guides,
| and even assistants for decades. AI simply automates some of
| these functions faster. Would we say Hemingway was lazy for using
| a typewriter? No--we'd say he leveraged tools.
|
| AI doesn't create thoughts; it drafts ideas. The writer still
| curates, edits, and imbues meaning--just like a journalist
| editing a reporter's notes or a designer refining Photoshop
| output. Tools don't diminish creativity--they democratize access
| to it.
|
| That said: if you're outsourcing your _thinking_ to AI (e.g.,
| asking an LLM to write your thesis without engaging), then yes,
| you've lost something. But complaining about AI itself
| misunderstands the problem.
|
| TL;DR: Typewriters spit out prose too--but no one blames writers
| for using them.
| rideontime wrote:
| For transparency, what role did AI serve in drafting this
| comment?
| corporat wrote:
| AI was used to analyze logical fallacies in the original blog
| post. I didn't use it to draft content--just to spot the
| straw man, false dilemma, and appeal-to-emotion tactics in
| real time.
|
| Ironically, this exact request would've fit the blog's own
| arguments: "AI is lazy" / "AI undermines thought." But since
| I was using AI as a diagnostic tool (not a creative one), it
| doesn't count.
|
| Self-referential irony? Maybe. But at least I'm being
| transparent. :)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Anyone can make AI generated content. It requires no effort at
| all.
|
| Therefore, if I or anyone else wanted to see it, I would simply
| do it myself.
|
| I don't know why so many people can't grasp that.
| pasteldream wrote:
| > people are far kinder than you may think
|
| Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People are
| harsh, and how much grace they give you has more to do with who
| you are than what you say.
|
| That aside, the worst problem with LLM-generated text isn't that
| it's less human, it's that (by default) it's full of filler,
| including excessive repetition and contrived analogies.
| zenel wrote:
| > Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People
| are harsh, and how much grace they give you has more to do with
| who you are than what you say.
|
| You okay friend?
| foxfired wrote:
| Earlier this year, I used AI to help me improve some of my
| writing on my blog. It just has a better way of phrasing ideas
| than me. But when I came back to read those same blog posts a
| couple months later, you know after I've encountered a lot more
| blog posts that I didn't know were AI generated at the time, I
| saw the pattern. It sounds like the exact same author, +- some
| degree of obligatory humor, writing all over the web with the
| same voice.
|
| I've found a better approach to using AI for writing. First, if I
| don't bother writing it, why should you bother reading it? LLMs
| can be great soundboards. Treat them as teachers, not assistants.
| Your teacher is not gonna write your essay for you, but he will
| teach you how to write, and spot the parts that need
| clarification. I will share my process in the coming days,
| hopefully it will get some traction.
| tdiff wrote:
| > Here is a secret: most people want to help you succeed.
|
| Most people dont care.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I agree with everything except this part:
|
| > No, don't use it to fix your grammar
|
| How is this substantially different from using spellcheck? I
| don't see any problem with asking an LLM to check for and fix
| grammatical errors.
| vesterthacker wrote:
| When you criticize, it helps to understand the other's
| perspective.
|
| I suppose I am writing to you because I can no longer speak to
| anyone. As people turn to technology for their every word, the
| space between them widens, and I am no exception. Everyone
| speaks, yet no one listens. The noise fills the room, and still
| it feels empty.
|
| Parents grow indifferent, and their children learn it before they
| can name it. A sickness spreads, quiet and unseen, softening
| every heart it touches. I once believed I was different. I told
| myself I still remembered love, that I still felt warmth
| somewhere inside. But perhaps I only remember the idea of it.
| Perhaps feeling itself has gone.
|
| I used to judge the new writers for chasing meaning in words. I
| thought they wrote out of vanity. Now I see they are only trying
| to feel something, anything at all. I watch them, and sometimes I
| envy them, though I pretend not to. They are lost, yes, but they
| still search. I no longer do.
|
| The world is cold, and I have grown used to it. I write to
| remember, but the words answer nothing. They fall silent, as if
| ashamed. Maybe you understand. Maybe it is the same with you.
|
| Maybe writing coldly is simply compassion, a way of not letting
| others feel your pain.
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