[HN Gopher] We're losing our voice to LLMs
___________________________________________________________________
We're losing our voice to LLMs
Author : TonyAlicea10
Score : 323 points
Date : 2025-11-27 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tonyalicea.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (tonyalicea.dev)
| adamzwasserman wrote:
| It is not a zero sum game.
|
| I have always had a very idiosyncratic way of expressing myself,
| one that many people do not understand. Just as having a
| smartphone has changed my relationship to appointments - turning
| me into a prompt and reliable "cyborg" - LLMs have made it
| possible for me to communicate with a broader cross section of
| people.
|
| I write what I have to say, I ask LLMs for editing and
| suggestions for improvement, and then I send that. So here is the
| challenge for you: did I follow that process this time?
|
| I promise to tell the truth.
| TonyAlicea10 wrote:
| I think there's a difference between using an LLM as an editor
| and asking the LLM to write something for you. The output in
| the former I find to still have a far clearer tonal fingerprint
| than the latter.
|
| And whose to say your idiosyncratic expressions wouldn't find
| an audience as it changes over time? Just you saying that makes
| me curious to read something you wrote.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Not the GP, but I'm a millennial who leans on cultural
| references and has a bit of verbal flourish that I think
| comes from a diet of ironic, quirky, dialogue-heavy media in
| the early 2000s, stuff like Firefly, Veronica Mars, and
| Pushing Daisies, not to mention 90s Tarantino, John Cusack
| films, and so on.
|
| I've never given it too much thought, it's just... the way I
| communicate, and most people in my life don't give much
| thought to it either. But I recently switched jobs, and a few
| people there remarked on it, and I've also recently been
| corresponding with someone overseas who is an intermediate-
| level English speaker and says I sometimes hurt their brain.
|
| Not making a value judgment either way on whether it's
| "sophisticated" or whatever, but it is I think part of my
| personality, and if I used LLM editing/translation I would
| want it to be only in the short term, and certainly not as
| something
| wand3r wrote:
| If you didn't intentionally try and trick us, then yes, you
| used an LLM.
| pants2 wrote:
| I don't see signs of LLM writing in your comment so I'll have
| to guess no.
| nasmorn wrote:
| I should probably do that too. I once wrote an email that to me
| was just filled with impersonal information. The receiver was
| somebody I did not personally know. I later learned I made that
| person cry. Which I obviously did not intend. I did not swear
| or call anyone names. I basically described what I believe they
| did, what is wrong about that and what they should do instead.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If someone cries about an email you sent, the problem isn't
| with you.
| afandian wrote:
| Please share what you told the LLM! I can't be the only curious
| one.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Transformation seems reasonable for that purpose. And if we
| were friends, I'd rather read your idiosyncratic raw output.
|
| At some point, generation breaks a social contract that I'm
| using my energy and attention consuming something that another
| human spent their energy and attention creating.
|
| In that case I'd rather read the prompt the human brain wrote,
| or if I have to consume it, have an LLM consolidate it for me.
| AstroBen wrote:
| LLMs have now robbed you of the opportunity to make your
| communication clearer
| steveylang wrote:
| Here's my guess- your post reflects your honest opinion on the
| matter, with some LLM help. It elaborated on your smartphone
| analogy, and may have tightened up the text overall.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I would be interested to see an example of a before and after
| on this. I do think LLMs as editors and rewriters can be useful
| sometimes, but I usually only ever see them used as a means to
| puff out an idea into longer prose which is really mostly
| counterproductive.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think it can be useful as a tone-check sometimes, like show
| me how a frustrated or adversarial reader is going to
| interpret this thing I'm about to send/post.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| You didn't, but you've learned.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| << Write in your voice.
|
| I don't disagree, but LLMs happened to help with standardizing
| some interesting concepts that were previously more spread out as
| concepts ( drift, scaffolding, and so on ). It helps that chatgpt
| has access to such a wide audience to allow that level of
| language penetration. I am not saying don't have voice. I am
| saying: take what works.
| blenderob wrote:
| > I don't disagree, but LLMs happened to help with
| standardizing some interesting concepts that were previously
| more spread out as concepts ( drift, scaffolding, and so on ).
|
| What do you mean? The concepts of "drift" and "scaffolding"
| were uncommon before LLMs?
|
| Not trying to challenge you. Honestly trying to understand what
| you mean. I don't think I have heard this ever before. I'd
| expect concepts like "drift" and "scaffolding" to be already
| very popular before LLMs existed. And how did you pick those
| two concepts of aaallll... the concepts in this world?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Apologies, upon re-reading it does seem I did not phrase
| those as clearly as I originally intended. You are right in
| the sense that the concepts existed beforehand and the words
| were there to capture it. What did not exist, however, was a
| sudden resurgence of those words due to them appearing in
| llms more often than note. This is what I mean by a level of
| language penetration ( people using words and concepts,
| because llms largely introduced them to those concepts ---
| kinda like.. genetics or pop psych, before situational
| comedy, projection was not a well known concept ).
|
| Does it make more sense?
| WD-42 wrote:
| Where are these places where everything is written by a LLM? I
| guess just don't go there. Most of the comments on HN still seem
| human.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I continually resist the urge to deploy my various personas
| onto hn, because I want to maintain my original hn persona. I
| am not convinced other people do the same. It is not that
| difficult to write in a way that avoids some tell tale signs.
| tensegrist wrote:
| i think the frontpage of hn has had at least one llm-generated
| blog post or large github readme on it almost every day for
| several months now
| vladms wrote:
| Tbh I prefer to read/skim the comments first and only
| occasionally read the original articles if comments make me
| curious enough. For now I never ended checking something that
| would seem AI generated.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Ironically this post is written in a pretty bland, 'blogging
| 101' style that isn't enjoyable to read and serves just to
| preach a simple, consensus idea to the choir.
|
| These kinds of posts regularly hit the top 10 on HN, and every
| time I see one I wonder: "Ok, will this one be just another
| staid reiteration of an obvious point?"
| exasperaited wrote:
| True, but one of the least-explored problems with AI is that
| because it can regurgitate basic writing, basic art, basic
| music with ease, there is this question:
|
| Why do it at all if I won't do better than the AI?
|
| The worst risk with AI is not that it replaces working
| artists, but that it dulls human creativity by killing the
| urge to _start_.
|
| I am not sure who said it first, but every photographer has
| ten thousand bad photos in them and it's easier if they take
| them at the beginning. For photographers, the "bad" is not
| the technical inadequacy of those photos; you can get past
| that in the first one hundred. The "bad" is the generic,
| uninteresting, uninspiring, underexplored, duplicative nature
| of them. But you have to work through that to understand what
| "good" is. You can't easily skip these ten thousand photos,
| even if your analysis and critique skills are strong.
|
| There's a lot to be lost if people either don't even start or
| get discouraged.
|
| But for writing, most of the early stuff is going to read
| much like this sort of blog post (simply because most
| bloggers are stuck in the blogging equivalent of the ten
| thousand photos; the most popular bloggers are not those
| elevating writing).
|
| "But it looks like AI" is the worst, most reflexive thing
| about this, because _it always will_ , since AI is constantly
| stealing new things. You cannot get ahead of the tireless
| thief.
|
| The damage generative AI will do to our humanity has only
| just started. People who carry on building these tools
| knowing what they are doing to our culture are beneath our
| contempt. Rampantly overcompensated, though, so they'll be
| fine.
| the_af wrote:
| I've seen AI generated comments on HN recently, though not
| many. Users who post them usually only revert back to human
| when challenged (to reply angrily), which hilariously makes the
| change in style very obvious.
|
| Of course, there might be hundreds of AI comments that pass my
| scrutiny because they are convincing enough.
| heltale wrote:
| It's pretty much all you see nowadays on LinkedIn. Instagram is
| infected by AI videos that Sora generates while X has extremist
| views pushed up on a pedestal.
| bakugo wrote:
| There are already many AI-generated submissions on HN every
| day. Comments maybe less so, but I've already seen some, and
| the amount is only going to increase with time.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Every time I see AI videos in my YouTube recommendations I
| say "don't recommend this channel" but the algorithm doesn't
| seem to get the hint. Why don't they make a preference option
| of "don't show me AI content"
| grey-area wrote:
| Because they have a financial incentive not to.
| muldvarp wrote:
| You assume that detecting AI content is trivial. It isn't.
| intended wrote:
| I see them regularly on several subreddits, I frequent.
| codeflo wrote:
| The HN moderation system seems to hold, at least mostly. But I
| have seen high-ranking HN submissions with all the subtler
| signs of LLM authorship that have managed to get lots of
| engagement. Granted, it's mostly people pointing out the subtle
| technical flaws or criticizing the meandering writing style,
| but that works to get the clicks and attention.
|
| Frankly, it only takes someone a few times to "fall" for an LLM
| article -- that is, to spend time engaging with an author in
| good faith and try to help improve their understanding, only to
| then find out that they shat out a piece of engagement bait for
| a technology they can barely spell -- to sour the whole
| experience of using a site. If it's bad on HN, I can only
| imagine how much worse things must be on Facebook. LLMs might
| just simply kill social media of any kind.
| grey-area wrote:
| Many instagram and facebook posts are now llm generated to farm
| engagement. The verbosity and breathless excitement tends to
| give it away.
| jmkni wrote:
| LinkedIn
| O_H_E wrote:
| There was recently this link talking about AI slop articles on
| medium
|
| https://rmoff.net/2025/11/25/ai-smells-on-medium/
|
| He doesn't link many examples, but at the end he gives the
| example of an author pumping out +8 articles in a week across a
| variety of topics. https://medium.com/@ArkProtocol1
|
| I don't spend time on medium so I don't personally know.
| muldvarp wrote:
| > I guess just don't go there.
|
| How do you know? A lot of the stuff I see online could very
| much be produced by LLMs without me ever knowing. And given the
| economics I suspect that some of it already is.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my
| Twitter one yesterday.
|
| It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement.
| i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets
| rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it
| just seems to accentuate the problem.
|
| There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals
| preferences.
|
| Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect
| to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and
| unproductive.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| > it's how the algorithms promote engagement.
|
| They are destroying our democratic societies and should be
| heavily regulated. The same will become true for AI.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I agree, but focusing on "the algorithm" makes it seems to
| the outsider like it must be a complicated thing. Really it
| just comes down to whether we tolerate platforms that let
| somebody pay to have a louder voice than anyone else (i.e. ad
| supported ones). Without that, the incentive to abuse
| people's attention goes away.
| IMTDb wrote:
| > should be heavily regulated.
|
| By who, exactly? It's easy to call for regulation when you
| assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview.
| Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone
| whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think
| regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation
| is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences.
|
| But if picturing that guy running the show feels like a
| disaster, then let's be honest: the issue isn't the absence
| of regulation, it's the desire to force the world into your
| preferred shape. Calling it "regulation" is just a polite
| veneer over wanting control.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I'm surprised at how much regulation has become viewed as a
| silver bullet in HN comments.
|
| Like you said, the implicit assumption in every call for
| regulation is that the regulation will hurt companies they
| dislike but leave the sites they enjoy untouched.
|
| Whenever I ask what regulations would help, the only
| responses are extremes like "banning algorithms" or
| something. Most commenters haven't stopped to realize that
| Hacker News is an algorithmic social media site (are we not
| here socializing with the order of posts and comments
| determined by black box algorithm?).
| chasing0entropy wrote:
| HN let's you choose what order (active, new, top[actual
| algorithm])
|
| That's not true of Facebook, new does not show you true
| posts in order of recency.
|
| Reddit still does, bit also injects ads that look like
| recent posts and actually aren't which is misleading.
| macintux wrote:
| And HN doesn't choose to show you targeted, inflammatory
| content based on your history. That's a _huge_ difference
| from Facebook.
| krapp wrote:
| Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media
| don't only want to prevent those platforms from showing
| targeted inflammatory content, they want to make _all
| algorithmic feeds_ other than strictly chronological
| illegal, as well as moderation of any legal content.
|
| From that point of view, Hacker News is little different
| than Facebook. One could even argue that HN's karma
| system is a dark pattern designed to breed addiction and
| influence conversation in much the same way as other
| social media platforms, albeit not to the same degree.
| iwontberude wrote:
| At least HN karma is incremental and based on something
| approximating merit as opposed to being a slot machine
| where you never know which comment will earn Karma. More
| effort or rare insight, generally yields more karma.
| krapp wrote:
| That doesn't make it any less addictive or manipulative.
| fragmede wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience. How much karma you get is
| heavily dependant on how many people see the comment. The
| most insightful effort-filled comment at the bottom of a
| 4 day old thread isn't going to get you nearly as much,
| if anything, compared to a joke with just the right
| amount of snark at the top of a post currently at the top
| of the front page.
| macintux wrote:
| I would be astonished if a majority of people opposed to
| social media algorithms consider HN's approach to be
| sufficiently objectionable to be regulated or in any way
| similar to Facebook.
| krapp wrote:
| Hacker News doesn't use a strictly chronological feed.
| Hacker News manipulates the feed to promote certain items
| over others. Hacker News moderates legal content. Those
| are all features of social media algorithms that people
| are opposed to. It just isn't "objectionable" when HN
| does it.
|
| And regulations of this kind always creep out of scope.
| We've seen it happen countless times. But people hate
| social media so much around here that they simply don't
| think it through, or else don't care.
| macintux wrote:
| You're moving the goalposts.
|
| You said:
|
| > Most people on HN who advocate regulating social
| media...want to make all algorithmic feeds other than
| strictly chronological illegal
|
| I don't buy that, at all. I think they _want_ a
| chronological feed to follow, and they want the end of
| targeted outrage machines that are poisoning civil
| discourse and breeding the type of destructive politics
| that has led to our sitting U.S. president to call for
| critics to be hanged.
|
| Comparing what Facebook has done to the U.S. with HN's
| algorithm is slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, and
| even if HN's front page algorithm against all odds was
| outlawed due to a political overreaction to the
| destruction Facebook has wrought, I'd call it a fair
| trade.
| krapp wrote:
| >Comparing what Facebook has done to the U.S. with HN's
| algorithm is slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, and
| even if HN's front page algorithm against all odds was
| outlawed due to a political overreaction to the
| destruction Facebook has wrought, I'd call it a fair
| trade.
|
| You're trying to discredit my comment but it seems as if
| your anger just led you around to proving me right.
| macintux wrote:
| You're failing to differentiate between "want" and
| "willing to settle for if the slippery slope is much
| worse than I think is realistically possible".
| mentalgear wrote:
| It's really not that complicated:
|
| - Ban algorithmic optimization that feeds on and
| proliferates polarisation.
|
| - To heal society: Implement discussion (commenting)
| features that allow (atomic) structured discussions to
| build bridges across cohorts and help find consensus (vs
| 1000s of comments screaming the same none-sense).
|
| - Force the SM Companies to make their analytics truly
| transparent and open to the public and researchers for
| verification.
|
| All of this could be done tomorrow, no new tech required.
| But it would lose the SM platforms billions of dollars.
|
| Why? Because billions of people posting emotionally and
| commenting with rage, yelling at each other, repeating the
| same superficial arguments/comments/content over and over
| without ever finding common ground - traps a multitude more
| users in the engagement loop of the SM companies than
| people have civilised discussions, finding common ground,
| and moving on with a topic.
|
| One system of social media that would unlock a great
| consensus-based society for the many, the other one endless
| dystopic screaming battles but riches for a few while
| spiralling the world further into a global theatre of
| cultural and actual (civil) war thanks to the Zuckerbergs &
| Thiels.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| It's always a question of who decides. Apparently, it's
| this guy.
| chasing0entropy wrote:
| > it's really not that complicated...
|
| Then lists at least four priorities which would require
| one multi page bill or more than likely several bills
| make their way through house, senate, and presidents desk
| while under fire from every lobbyist in Washington?
| DontForgetMe wrote:
| I believe the world may contain legal and regulatory
| authorities that are not part of the United States.
| Dozens of them, so I've heard.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| That only treats the symptoms, not the cause. The purpose
| of algorithmic optimization farming engagement is to
| increase ad impressions for money. It is advertising that
| has to be regulated in such a way that maximizing ad
| impressions is not profitable or you will find that
| social media companies will still have every incentive to
| find other ways to do it that will probably be just as
| harmful.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| By a not-for-profit community organization that has 0
| connect/interest in any for-profit enterprising that
| represents the stable wellbeing of society with a specific
| mandate to do so.
|
| Just like the community organizations we had that watched
| over government agencies that we allowed to be destroyed
| because of profit. It's not rocket science.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > By a not-for-profit community organization that has 0
| connect/interest in any for-profit enterprising that
| represents the stable wellbeing of society with a
| specific mandate to do so.
|
| Then you get situations like the school board stacked
| with creationists who believe removing the science
| textbooks is important for the stable wellbeing of
| society.
|
| Or organizations like MADD that are hell bent on stamping
| out alcohol one incremental step at a time because
| "stable wellbeing of society" is their mandate.
|
| Or the conservative action groups in my area that protest
| everything they find indecent, including plays and
| movies, because they believe they're pushing for the
| stable wellbeing of society.
|
| There is no such thing as a neutral group pushing for a
| platonic ideal stable wellbeing of society. If you give a
| group of people power to control what others see, it will
| be immediately co-opted by special interests and
| politics.
|
| Singling out non-profit as being virtuous and good is
| utopian fallacy. If you give any group power over what
| others are allowed to show, it will be extremely
| political and abused by every group with an agenda to
| push.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Control is the whole point. One person being in charge,
| enacting their little whims, is what you get in an
| uncontrolled situation and what we have now. The assumption
| is that you live in a democratic society and "the
| regulator" is effectively the populace. (We have to keep
| believing democracy is possible or we're cooked.)
| Frieren wrote:
| > But if picturing that guy running the show feels like a
| disaster, then let's be honest: the issue isn't the absence
| of regulation, it's the desire to force the world into your
| preferred shape.
|
| For example, we can forbid corporations usage of algorithms
| beyond sorting by date of the post. Regulation could forbid
| gathering data about users, no gender, no age, no all the
| rest of things.
|
| > Calling it "regulation" is just a polite veneer over
| wanting control.
|
| It is you that may have misinterpreted what regulations
| are.
| IMTDb wrote:
| > or example, we can forbid corporations usage of
| algorithms beyond sorting by date of the post
|
| Hacker News sorted by "new" is far less valuable to me
| than the default homepage which has a sorting algorithm
| that has a good balance between freshness and impact.
| Please don't break it.
|
| > It is you that may have misinterpreted what regulations
| are.
|
| The definition of regulation is literally: "a rule or
| directive made and maintained by an authority." I am just
| scared about who the authority is going to be.
| afavour wrote:
| I'd favour regulation towards transparency if nothing else.
| Show what factors influence appearance in a feed.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Recasting regulation as a desire for control is too
| reductive. The other point of regulation is compromise. No
| compromise at all is just a wasted opportunity.
| vladms wrote:
| My view is that they are just exposing issues with the people
| in the said societies and now is harder to ignore them. Much
| of the hate and the fear and the envy that I see on social
| networks have other reasons, but people are having
| difficulties to address those.
|
| With or without social networks this anger will go somewhere,
| don't think regulation alone can fix that. Let's hope it will
| be something transformative not in the world ending direction
| but in the constructive direction.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| They seem to artificially create filter bubbles, echo
| chambers and rage. They do that just for the money. They
| divide societies.
|
| For example:
|
| (Trap of Social Media Algorithms: A Systematic Review of
| Research on Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Their Impact
| on Youth)
|
| > First, there is a consistent observation across
| computational audits and simulation studies that platform
| curation systems amplify ideologically homogeneous content,
| reinforcing confirmation bias and limiting incidental
| exposure to diverse viewpoints [1,4,37]. These structural
| dynamics provide the "default" informational environment in
| which youth engagement unfolds. Simulation models highlight
| how small initial biases are magnified by recommender
| systems, producing polarization cascades at the network
| level [2,10,38]. Evidence from YouTube demonstrates how
| personalization drifts toward sensationalist and radical
| material [14,41,49]. Such findings underscore that
| algorithmic bias is not a marginal technical quirk but a
| structural driver shaping everyday media diets. For youth,
| this environment is especially influential: platforms such
| as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are central not only for
| entertainment but also for identity work and civic
| socialization [17]. The narrowing of exposure may thus have
| longer-term consequences for political learning and civic
| participation.
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/11/301
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Is hate, fear, or envy by themselves wrong, or only wrong
| when misdirected?
|
| What if social media and the internet at large is now
| exposing people to things which before ha been kept hidden
| from them, or distorted? Are people wrong to feel hate?
|
| I know the time before the internet, when a very select few
| decided what the public should know and not know, what they
| should feel, what they should do and how they should
| behave. The internet is not the first mass communications,
| neither are social media or LLMs. The public has been
| manipulated and mind primed by mass media for over a
| century now.
|
| The largest bloodshed events World War I and II were
| orchestrated by lunatics screaming in the radio or
| screaming behind a pulpit, and the public eagerly being
| herded by them to the bloodshed.
|
| This comment isn't in opposition to yours, it's just
| riffing on what you said.
| vladms wrote:
| > Is hate, fear, or envy by themselves wrong, or only
| wrong when misdirected?
|
| I think they are natural feelings that appear due to
| various reason. People struggle for centuries to control
| their impulses and this was used for millennia in the
| advantage of whom could manipulate them.
|
| The second world war did not appear in a "happy world".
| It might even have started due to the great depression.
| For other conflicts, similarly - I don't think situation
| was great before them for most people.
|
| I am afraid that social networks just expose better what
| happens in people's heads (which would be worrying as it
| could predict larger scale conflicts) rather than making
| normal people angry (which would be solved by just
| reducing social media). Things are never black and white,
| so probably is something in between. Time will tell if
| closer to first or second.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Much of the hate and the fear and the envy that I see on
| social networks have other reasons
|
| Maybe so, but do you really think actively amplifying or
| even rewarding them has no effect on people whatsoever?
| vladms wrote:
| During history, people did lots of horrible things and/or
| felt miserable without social networks. Yes, amplifying
| or rewarding does not have a positive effect, but I would
| like to see further analysis over the magnitude.
|
| Think of slavery or burning of witches or genocides -
| those were considered perfectly normal not that long ago
| (on historical scale). I feel that focusing on social
| networks prevents some people to think "is that the root
| cause?". I personally think there other reasons of this
| generic "anger" that have a larger impact and that have
| different solutions than "less AI/less social networks",
| but that would be too off-topic.
| area51org wrote:
| We've seen what happens when we pretend the market will
| somehow regulate itself.
| nradov wrote:
| Just because the free market isn't producing results you
| like doesn't mean that more regulation would make it
| better.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| I know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in
| particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this.
| There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter,
| who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter,
| which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-
| world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is
| in there, if we want it. I've created my own feeds that allow
| topics I'm interested in and blacklist those I'm not -- I'm in
| complete control. For what it's worth, I've also had similarly
| pleasant experiences using Mastodon, although I don't have the
| same tools that I do on Bluesky.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| I tried Bluesky and wanted to like it. My account got flagged
| as spam, still no idea why. Ironically it could be another
| way of loosing ones voice to an LLM :)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why.
|
| This happened to me too, 3 weeks ago. The email said why I
| got flagged as spam, I replied to the email explaining I
| actually was a human, and after some minutes they unflagged
| my account. Did you not receive an email saying why?
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Well that's the thing -- you might be flagged as spam in
| the Bluesky PDS, but there are other PDS's, with their own
| feeds and algorithms, and in fact you can make your own if
| you so choose. That's a lot of work, and Twitter is
| definitely easier, but atproto means that an LLM cannot
| steal your voice.
| fortran77 wrote:
| If you follow certain people, various communities will, en
| mass, block you and report you automatically with software
| "block lists". This can lead to getting flagged as spam.
| alt227 wrote:
| I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media
| which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing.
| Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps
| us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as
| people. To me, only seeing things you know you are already
| interested in is no better than another company curating it
| for me.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| I think it's less about content topic and more meta content
| topic. EG I don't want to remove pictures of broccoli
| because I don't like broccoli, I'm trying to remove
| pictures of food because it makes me eat more. Similarly, I
| don't want to remove Political Takes I Disagree With, I
| want to remove Political Takes Designed To Make Me Angry.
| The latter has a destructive viral effect whose antidote is
| inattention.
|
| Echo chamber is a loaded term. Nobody is upset about the
| Not Murdering People Randomly echo chamber we've created
| for ourselves in civilised society, and with good reason.
| Many ideologies are internally stable and don't virally
| cause the breakdown of society. The concerning echo
| chambers are the ones that intensify and self-reinforce
| when left alone.
| rcxdude wrote:
| At least when you do this you are aware of it happening.
| Algorithmic feeds can shift biases without you even
| noticing.
| tucnak wrote:
| > Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what
| helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and
| grow as people.
|
| I have another wise-sounding soundbite for you: "I
| disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death
| your right to say it." --Voltaire. All this sounds dandy
| and fine, until you actually try and examine the beliefs
| and prejudeces at hand. It would seem that such examination
| is possible, and it is--in theory, whereas in practice,
| i.e. in application of language--"ideas" simply don't
| matter as much. Material circumstance, mindset, background,
| all these things that make us who we are, are largely
| immutable in our own frames of reference. You can get
| exposed to new words all the time, but if they come in
| language you don't understand, it's of no use. This is not
| a bug, but a feature, a learned mechanism that allows us to
| navigate massive search spaces without getting overwhelmed.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| > I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social
| media which only shows me things I agree with is a good
| thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is
| what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces,
| and grow as people.
|
| You are the one who gets to control what is filtered or
| not, so that's up to you. It's about choice. By the way, a
| social media experience which is not "ultra filtered"
| doesn't exist. Twitter is filtered heavily, with a bias
| towards extreme right wing viewpoints, the ones it's owner
| is in agreement with. And that sort of filtering disguised
| as lack of bias is a mind virus. For example, I deleted my
| account a month or so ago after discovering that the CEO of
| a popular cloud database company that I admired was
| following an account who posted almost exclusively things
| along the lines of "blacks are all subhuman and should be
| killed." How did a seemingly normal person fall into that?
| One "unfiltered" tweet at a time, I suppose.
|
| > To me, only seeing things you know you are already
| interested in is no better than another company curating it
| for me.
|
| I curate my own feeds. They don't have things I only agree
| with in them, they have _topics I actually want to see_ in
| them. I don 't want to see political ragebait, left or
| right flavoured. I don't want to see midwit discourse about
| vibecoding. I have that option on Bluesky, and that's the
| _only_ platform aside from my RSS reader where I have that
| option.
|
| Of course, you also have the option to stare endlessly at a
| raw feed containing everything. Hypothetically, you could
| exactly replicate a feed that aggregates the kind of RW
| viewpoints popular on Twitter and look at it 24/7. But that
| would be your choice.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _For example, I deleted my account a month or so ago
| after discovering that the CEO of a popular cloud
| database company that I admired was following an account
| who posted almost exclusively things along the lines of
| "blacks are all subhuman and should be killed."_
|
| It seems like you're better off knowing that. Without
| Twitter, you wouldn't, right?
|
| A venue that allows people to tell you who they really
| are isn't an unalloyed Bad Thing.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| That's a good way of thinking about it, thank you,
| legitimately.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I've mentioned this a few times in the past, but I'm
| convinced that filters that exclude work much better than
| filters that include.
|
| Instead of algorithms pushing us content it thinks we like
| (or what the advertisers are paying them to push on us),
| the relationship should be reversed and the algorithms
| should push us all content except the content we don't
| like.
|
| Killfiles on Usenet newsreaders worked this way and they
| were amazing. I could filter out abusive trolls and topics
| I wasn't interested in, but I would otherwise get an
| unfiltered feed.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| I'm at risk of sounding like an atproto shill at this
| point, but check out https://www.graze.social/.
|
| I think every social media platform should allow
| something like this. You can make filters that work in
| either direction.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| So far my experience is that unless you subscribe to the
| general narrative of the platform, the discover algorithm
| punishes you with directing the mob your way.
|
| I had two of my Bluesky posts on AI being attacked by all
| kinds of random people which in turn has also lead to some of
| those folks sending me emails and dragging some of my lobster
| and hackernews comments into online discourse. A not
| particularly enjoyable experience.
|
| I'm sure one can have that same experience elsewhere, but
| really it's Bluesky where I experienced this on a new level
| personally.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| I saw that, and I'm sorry it happened. I thought both the
| response to your original post and the resulting backlash
| to both you and everyone who engaged with you sincerely
| were absurd. I think that because of atproto you have the
| flexibility to create a social media experience where that
| sort of thing cannot happen, but I also understand why you
| in particular would be put off from the whole thing.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| I don't think this is a technical problem but a social
| problem. I think the audience defines itself by being the
| antithesis to Twitter instead of being a well balanced
| one.
|
| I was pretty optimistic in the beginning but Bluesky
| doesn't have organic growth and those who hang out there,
| are the core audience that wants to be there because of
| what the platform represents. But that also means
| rejection of a lot of things such AI.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| In many ways I agree with you. In particular the
| conglomeration of high percentages of atproto users onto
| Bluesky owned and moderated algorithms and feeds and the
| replication of Twitter-style dogpiling combined with the
| relative lack of ideological diversity on Bluesky has
| created the perfect environment for toxicity, even if it
| doesn't reach the depths that Twitter does.
|
| But conversely, that's the only place I disagree with
| you. Everything that is bad about Bluesky is much worse
| on Twitter. It's a -- larger -- red mob instead of a blue
| one (or vice versa I guess depending on how one assigns
| colors to political alignment), and some of the mob
| members are actually getting paid to throw bricks!
| jeromegv wrote:
| I enjoy Mastodon a lot. Ad-free, algo-free. I choose what
| goes in my feed, I do get exposed to external viewpoints by
| people boosts (aka re-tweets) and i follow hashtags (to get
| content from people I do not know). But it's extremely
| peaceful, spam and bots are rare and get flagged quickly.
| There's a good ecosystem of mobile apps. I can follow a few
| Bluesky people through a bridge between platforms and they
| can follow me too.
|
| That's truly all I need.
| baiac wrote:
| Doesn't Bluesky have a set of moderation rules that guarantee
| that it will turn into bizarro-world Twitter?
| glitchc wrote:
| Do LinkedIn as well. I got rid of it earlier this year. The "I
| am so humbled/blessed to be promoted/reassigned/fired.." posts
| reached a level of parody that I just couldn't stomach any
| longer. I felt more free immediately.
|
| N.B. Still employed btw.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| LinkedIn bothers me the least, even though it definitely has
| some of the highest level of cringe content. It's still a
| good tool to interact with recruiters, look at companies and
| reach out to their employees. The trick is blocking the feed
| with a browser extension.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I have a special, deep, loathing for linkedin. I honestly
| can't believe how horrible it is and I don't understand why
| people engage with it.
| amrocha wrote:
| You have a special loathing for a site where you can
| message professional contacts when you need to?
|
| Nobody is forcing you to use the social networking
| features. Just use it as a way to keep in touch with
| coworkers.
| hobofan wrote:
| I don't understand how people can be so dismissive of
| LinkedIn purely for its resume function.
|
| For essentially every "knowledge worker" profession with a
| halfway decent CV, a well kept LinkedIn resume can easily
| make a difference of $X0,000 in yearly salary, and the
| initial setup takes one to a few hours. It's one of the
| best ROI actions many could do for their careers.
|
| How dismissive many engineers are of doing that and the
| justifications for that are often full of privilege.
| glitchc wrote:
| I think this statement is highly dependent on market and
| geography. I, for one, have mostly received scams. For
| the occassional real contact, we shifted away from
| LinkedIn as soon as we could after the basic hello.
| boxerab wrote:
| This. Linkedin is garbage, yet I still use it because there
| are no competitors. This is what happens in a monoculture.
| jfindper wrote:
| As someone who doesn't, and never has, had a linkedin. What
| would a "competitor" look like? There's plenty of job
| boards. What are you using linkedin for?
| amrocha wrote:
| Do you really want a "competitor" to linkedin? Do you
| really want to have to make and manage accounts on multiple
| sites because you need a job and you don't know which a
| company uses?
|
| Isn't it better to have a single place you check when you
| need a job because everyone else is also there?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Sorting the feed by "recent" at least gives you a randomized
| assortment of self aggrandizement, instead of algorithmically
| enhanced ragebait
| Aurornis wrote:
| Better suggestion: Ignore the feed if you don't like it.
|
| Don't visit the site unless you have a reason to, like
| searching for jobs, recruiting, or looking someone up.
|
| I will never understand these posts that imply that you're
| compelled to read the LinkedIn feed unless you delete your
| account. What's compelling you people to visit the site and
| read the feed if you hate it so much? I don't understand.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Did you just post basically the same reply to two
| comments 2 minutes apart? :)
| Aurornis wrote:
| You can have a LinkedIn profile without reading the feed.
|
| This is literally how most of the world uses LinkedIn
|
| I never understand why people feel compelled to delete their
| entire account to avoid reading the feed. Why were you even
| visiting the site to see the feed if you didn't want to see
| the feed?
| tayo42 wrote:
| Yeah I just LinkedIn as a public resume and message system
| with recruiters. Though even that goes through my email
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote
| engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies
| etc.
|
| I guess, but I'm on quite a few "algorithm-free" forums where
| the same thing happens. I think it's just human nature. The
| reason it's under control on HN is rigorous moderation; when
| the moderators are asleep, you often see dubious political
| stuff bubble up. And in the comments, there's often a fair
| amount of patently incorrect takes and vitriol.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| I would be intrigued by using an LLM to detect content like
| this and hold it for moderation. The elevator pitch would be
| training an LLM to be the moderator because that's what
| people want to hear, but it's most likely going to end up a
| moderator's assistant.
| Propelloni wrote:
| It would just become part of the shitshow, cf. Grok.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Which is why you should cancel your Twitter account
| unless you're on the same page with the guy who owns it,
| but I digress.
|
| if a site wants to cancel any ideology's viewpoint, that
| site is the one paying the bills and they should have the
| right to do it. You as a customer have a right to not use
| that site. The problem is that most of the business
| currently is a couple of social media sites and the great
| Mastodon diaspora never really happened.
|
| Edit: why do some people think it is their god-given
| right that should be enforced with government regulation
| to push their viewpoints into my feed? If I want to hear
| what you guys have your knickers in a bunch about today,
| I will seek it out, this is the classic difference
| between push and pull and push is rarely a good idea.
|
| My social media feeds had been reduced to about 30%
| political crap, 20% things I wanted to hear about, and
| about 50% ads for something I had either bought in the
| deep dark past or had once Google searched plus
| occasionally extremely messed up temu ads. That is why I
| left.
| randcraw wrote:
| I think the curation of all media content using your own
| LLM that has been tuned using your own custom criteria
| _must_ become the future of media.
|
| We've long done this personally at the level of a TV news
| network, magazine, newspaper, or website -- choosing info
| sources that were curated and shaped by gatekeeper editors.
| But with the demise of curated news, it's becoming
| necessary for each of us to somehow filter the myriad
| individual info sources ourselves. Ideally this will be
| done using a method smart enough to take our instructions
| and route only approved content to us, while explaining
| what was approved/denied and being capable of being
| corrected and updated. Ergo, the LLM-based custom
| configured personal news gateway is born.
|
| Of course the criteria driving your 'smart' info filter
| could be much more clever than allowing all content from
| specific writers. It could review each piece for myriad
| strengths/weaknesses (originality, creativity, novel info,
| surprise factor, counter intuitiveness, trustworthiness,
| how well referenced, etc) so that this LLM News Curator
| could reliably deliver a mix of INTERESTING content rather
| than the repetitively predictable pablum that editor-
| curated media prefers to serve up.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| That's the government regulation I want but it's probably
| not the government regulation we will get because both
| major constituencies have a vested interest in forcing
| their viewpoints on people. Then there's the endless
| pablum hitting both sides, giving us important vital
| cutting edge updates about influencers and reality TV
| stars whether we want to hear about them or not...
|
| We say we want to win the AI arms race with China, but
| instead of educating our people about the pros and cons
| of AI as well as STEM, we know more than we want to know
| about Kim Kardashian's law degree misadventures and her
| belief that we faked the moon landing.
| ezst wrote:
| I suspect it got worse with the advent of algorithm-driven
| social networks. When rage inducing content is prevalent, and
| when engaging with it is the norm, I don't see why this
| behaviour wouldn't eventually leak to algorithms-free
| platforms.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Algorithm driven social media is a kind of pollution. As
| the density of the pollution on those sites increases it
| spills out and causes the neighbors problems. Think of
| 4chan style raids. It wasn't enough for them to snipe each
| other on their site, so they spread the joy elsewhere.
|
| And that's just one type of issue. You have numerous kinds
| of paid actors that want to sell something or cause trouble
| or just general propaganda.
| vanviegen wrote:
| On HN everybody sees the same ordering. Therefore you get to
| read opinions that are not specifically selected to make you
| feel just the perfect amount of outrage/self-righteousness.
|
| Some of that you may experience as 'dubious political stuff'
| and 'patently incorrect takes'.
|
| Edit, just to be clear: I'm not saying HN should be
| unmoderated.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah this is a critical difference, most of the issues are
| sidestepped because everyone knows nobody can force a
| custom frontpage tailored for a specific reader.
|
| So there's no reason to try a lot of the tricks and schemes
| that scoundrels might have elsewhere, even if those same
| scoundrels also have HN accounts.
| intended wrote:
| The front page is managed extensively on HN, so is this
| an argument for stronger moderation?
| everdrive wrote:
| I think there's an important distinction between strict
| moderation and curation, but in general yes I'd agree.
| actualwitch wrote:
| Only when certain people don't decide to band together and
| hide posts from everyone's feed by abusing "flag" function.
| Coincidentally those posts often fit neatly in the
| categories you outlined.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Abuse of the flagging system is probably one of the worst
| problems currently facing HN. It looks like mods might be
| trying to do something about it, as I've occasionally
| seen improperly-flagged posts get resuscitated, but it
| appears to take manual action by moderators, and by the
| time they get to it, the damage is done: The article was
| censored off the front page.
| shevy-java wrote:
| It seems really so small compared to reddit.
|
| I think I never downvoted anyone on hackernews yet - it
| just does not seem important.
|
| On reddit on the other hand, I just had to downvote wrong
| opinions. This works to some extent, until moderators
| interfere and ban you. That part made me stop use reddit
| actually, in particular since someone made a complaint
| and I got banned for some days. I objected and the
| moderators of course did not respond. I can not allow
| random moderators to just chime in arbitrarily and flag
| "this comment you made is a threat", when it clearly was
| not. But you can not really argue with reddit moderators.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| You can't get banned just for downvoting. Nobody can see
| someone else's voting history. You buried the lead, you
| were banned for your comments not for your voting
| activity.
| actualwitch wrote:
| Even with addition of tomhow, they are clearly stretched
| too thin to make any meaningful impact. Their official
| answer to this issue by the way is to point out that you
| can message them on email to elicit this manual action,
| which if you ask me is a fucking joke and clearly shows
| the mammoth age stack in which this site is written and
| lack of resources allocated to its support is having a
| massive impact on their ability to keep up with massive
| traffic. But then again, this site only exists to funnel
| attention to yc's startups, and it is something that you
| need to keep in mind while trying to answer any questions
| about its current state.
| afavour wrote:
| I don't know why this is being downvoted, I've witnessed
| it many times myself.
|
| It's true that HN has a good level of discussion but one
| of the methods used to get that is to remove conversation
| on controversial topics. So I'm skeptical this is a model
| that could fit all of society's needs, to say the least.
| vanviegen wrote:
| The comment consists of criticism on flagging behavior.
| Though it might have a point, it seems only vaguely
| related to its parent comment about non-personalized
| ordering.
| actualwitch wrote:
| In downvoting it, they are proving me right. For
| posterity, there is a mastodon account [0] collecting
| flagged posts in an easily digestible form, it really
| does paint a certain picture if you ask me.
|
| [0] https://mastodon.social/@hn_flagged
| afavour wrote:
| The DOGE topics are a perfect example. HN users are
| uniquely placed to provide useful perspectives on DOGE
| but it gets flagged very regularly.
| anbotero wrote:
| I want to agree with this. Maybe OP is young or didn't
| frequent other communities before "social networks", but on
| IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually.
|
| Since they are relatively open, at some point comes in
| someone that doesn't give care about anything or it's
| extremely vocal about something and... there goes the nice
| forum.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities
| before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd
| see these behaviors eventually
|
| I'm not exactly old yet, but I agree. I don't know how so
| many people became convinced that online interactions were
| pleasant and free of ragebait and propaganda prior to
| Facebook.
|
| A lot of the old internet spaces were toxic cesspools. Most
| of my favorite forums eventually succumbed to ragebait and
| low effort content.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _pleasant and free of ragebait and propaganda_
|
| Most people are putting forth an argument of
| _pervasiveness and scale_ , not existence.
| macintux wrote:
| I suppose more than a few of us olds remember Serdar
| Argic's attempts to redefine the Armenian genocide on
| IRC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic
|
| But Serdar was relatively easy to ignore, because it was
| just one account, and it wasn't pushed on everyone via an
| algorithm designed to leverage outrage to make more money
| for one of the world's billionaires. You're right:
| pervasiveness and scale make a significant difference.
| cj wrote:
| Right, but that's slightly different.
|
| I think the nuance here is that with algorithmic based
| outrage, the outrage is often very narrow and targeted to
| play on your individual belief system. It will seek out
| your fringe beliefs and use that against you in the name of
| engagement.
|
| Compare that to a typical flame war on HN (before the mods
| step in) or IRC.
|
| On HN/IRC it's pretty easy to identify when there are
| people riling up the crowd. And they aren't doing it to
| seek out your engagement.
|
| On Facebook, etc, they give you the impression that the
| individuals riling up the crowd are actually the majority
| of people, rather than a loud minority.
|
| Theres a big difference between consuming controversial
| content from people you believe are a loud minority vs.
| controversial content from (what you believe is from) a
| majority of people.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Or if the moderation was good someone would go "nope, take
| that bullshit elsewhere" and kick them out, followed by
| everyone getting on with their lives. It wasn't obligatory
| for communities to be cesspits.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| MySpace was quite literally my space. You could basically
| make a custom website with a framework that included
| socialisation. But mostly it was just geocities for those
| who only might want to learn html. So it was a creative
| canvas with a palette.
| everdrive wrote:
| When video games first started taking advantage of behavioral
| reward schedules (eg: skinner box stuff such as loot crates &
| random drops) I noticed it, and would discuss it among
| friends. We had a colloquial name for the joke and we called
| them "crack points." (ie, like the drug) For instance, the
| random drops that happen in a game like Diablo 2 are
| rewarding in very much the same way that a slot machine is
| rewarding. There's a variable ratio of reward, and the bit
| that's addicting is that you don't know whenever next "hit"
| will be so you just keep pulling the lever (in the case of a
| slot machine) or doing boss runs. (in the case of Diablo 2)
|
| We were three friends: a psychology major, a recovering
| addict, and then a third friend with no background for how
| these sorts of behavioral addictions might work. Our third
| friend really didn't "get it" on a fundamental level. If any
| game had anything like a scoreboard, or a reward for input,
| he'd say "it's crack points!" We'd roll our eyes a bit, but
| it was clear that he didn't understand that certain reward
| schedules had a very large effect on behavior, and not
| everything with some sort of identifiable reward was actually
| capable of producing behavioral addiction.
|
| I think of this a lot on HN. People on HN will identify some
| surface similarity, and then blithely comment "see, this is
| nothing new, you're either misguided or engaged in some moral
| panic." I'm not sure what the answer is, but if you cannot
| see how an algorithmic, permanently-scrolling feed differs
| from people being rude in the old forums, then I'm not sure
| what would paint the picture for you. They're very different,
| and just because they might share some core similarity does
| not actually mean they operate the same way or have the same
| effects.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Thanks for this. I didn't realize until you said it why
| this issue might not be observable to a certain group of
| people. I think this is a cognitive awareness issue. You
| cant really see it until you have an awareness of it
| through experience. I came from a drug abuse background and
| my wife was never involved in the level of addiction I was
| involved in and she has a hard time seeing how algorithms
| like this effect behavior
| pixl97 wrote:
| >If any game had anything like a scoreboard, or a reward
| for input, he'd say "it's crack points!"
|
| I don't think it's exactly wrong, you just have to look at
| it on a spectrum of minimal addictiveness to meth level
| addiction. For example in quarter fed games getting a high
| score displayed to others was quite the addictive behavior.
| everdrive wrote:
| I think if you look at it this way then "addiction" is
| just the far end of spectrum that includes any repeated
| behaviors whatsoever.
| gtowey wrote:
| I think you touch on the crux of the issue here, that
| education ioos one of the most potent defenses against this
| kind of psychological manipulation.
|
| But not just any education. The humanities side of things,
| which are focused on the foundations of thought, morality
| and human psychology.
|
| These things are sadly lacking in technical degrees and it
| shows.
|
| It's also IMO why we see the destruction of our education
| systems as a whole as a element of control over society.
| DSingularity wrote:
| It is of course human nature. The problem is what happens
| when algorithms can reenforce, exaggerate, and amplify the
| effects of this nature to promote engagement and ad-clicks.
| It's cancer that will at the very least erode the agency of
| the average individual and in the worst create a hive mind
| that we have no control over. We are living in the preview of
| it all I think.
| diob wrote:
| The thing is, the people on those "algorithm-free" forums
| still get manipulated by the algorithm in the rest of their
| life. So it seeps into everything.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| One could absolutely push algorithms that personalize towards
| what the user wants to see. I think LLMs could be amazing at
| this. But that's not the maximally profitable algorithm, so
| nobody does it _.
|
| As so many have said, enragement equals engagement equals
| profit.
|
| All my social media accounts are gone as well. They did nothing
| for me and no longer serve any purpose.
|
| _TBF Bluesky does offer a chronological feed, but the well-
| intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean
| girls of the site.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Could someone use a third-party AI agent to re-curate their
| feeds? If it was running from the user's computer I think
| this would avoid any API legal issues, as otherwise ad and
| script blockers would have been declared illegal long ago.
|
| > but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief
| tool for the mean girls of the site.
|
| I've never used it, but yes this is what I expected. It would
| be better to have topical lists that users could manually
| choose to follow or block. This would avoid quite a bit of
| the "mean girl" selectivity. Though I suppose you'd get some
| weird search-engine-optimization like behavior from some of
| the list curators (even worse if anyone could add to the
| list).
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Yes, you absolutely can do this and back in the before
| times Facebook used to have an API that let you design your
| own interface to it.
|
| But now I think that will be treated with as much derision
| by FAANG as ad blockers because you're preventing them from
| enraging you to keep you engaged and afraid. Why won't you
| think of the shareholder value (tm)?
|
| But mandating API access would be fantastic government
| regulation going forward. Don't hold your breath.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my
| Twitter one yesterday.
|
| I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter. My joke is I am
| waiting until they become good. They are still shitty and toxic
| from what I can tell from the outside, so I'll wait a little
| longer ;-)
| criddell wrote:
| A social network can be great. Social media -- usually not.
|
| Something like Instagram where you have to meet with the
| other party in person to follow each other and a hard limit
| on the number of people you follow or follow you (say, 150
| each) could be an interesting thing. It would be hard to
| monetize, but I could see it being a positive force.
| amrocha wrote:
| Your loss.
|
| Twitter was an incredible place from 2010 to 2017. You could
| randomly message something and they would more often than not
| respond. Eventually an opportunity would come and you'd meet
| in person. Or maybe you'd form an online community and work
| towards a common goal. Twitter was the best place on the
| internet during that time.
|
| Facebook as well had a golden age. It was the place to
| organize events, parties, and meetups, before instagram and
| DMs took over. Nothing beats seeing someone post an album
| from last nights party and messaging your friends asking them
| if they remember anything that happened.
|
| I know being cynical is trendy, but you genuinely missed out.
| Social dynamics have changed. Social media will never be as
| positive on an individual level as it was back then.
| Animats wrote:
| Reddit may be next. The number of "promoted" items is
| increasing.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't
| expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's
| tedious and unproductive.
|
| I'm not the biggest Twitter user but I didn't find it that
| difficult to get what I wanted out of it.
|
| You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you
| engage with. If you don't want to hear a lot of Brexit talk,
| don't engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people who are
| talking a lot about Brexit
|
| If you want to see more of something, engage with it. Click
| like. Follow those people. Leave a friendly comment.
|
| On the other hand, some people are better off deleting social
| media if they can't control their impulses to engage with bait.
| If you find yourself getting angry at the Brexit content
| showing up and feeling compelled to add your two cents with a
| comment or like, then I suppose deleting your account is the
| only viable option.
| ben_w wrote:
| I got out of Twitter for a few reasons; part of what made it
| unpleasant was that it didn't seem to be just what _I_ did
| that adjusted my feed, but that it was also affected by what
| _the other people I connected to_ did.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > You get more of what you engage with. If you don't want to
| hear a lot of Brexit talk, don't engage with Brexit content.
|
| The algorithm doesn't show you "more of the things you engage
| with", and acting like it does makes people think what
| they're seeing is a reflection of who they are, which is
| incorrect.
|
| The designers of these algorithms are trying to figure out
| which "mainstream category" you are. And if you aren't in
| one, it's harder to advertise to you, so they want to sand
| down your rough edges until you fit into one.
|
| You can spend years posting prolificly about open source
| software, Blender and VFX on Instagram, and the algorithm
| will toss you a couple of things, but it won't really know
| what to do with you (aside from maybe selling you some stock
| video packages).
|
| But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the
| algorithm goes "GOTCHA! YOU'RE ANTI-BREXIT! WE KNOW WHAT TO
| DO WITH THAT!" And now you're opted into 3 bug ad categories
| and getting force-fed ragebait to keep you engaged, since
| you're clearly a huge poltical junky. Now your feed is trash
| forever, unless you engage with content from another
| mainstream category (like Marvel movies or one of the recent
| TikTok memes).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The algorithm doesn't show you "more of the things you
| engage with",
|
| That's literally what the complaint was that I was
| responding to.
|
| You even immediately contradict yourself and agree that the
| algorithm shows you what you engage with
|
| > But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the
| algorithm goes up
|
| > Now your feed is trash forever, unless you engage with
| content from another mainstream category
|
| This is exactly what I already said: If you want to see
| some content, engage with it. If you don't want to see that
| content, don't engage with it.
|
| Personally, I regret engaging with this thread. Between the
| ALL CAPS YELLING and the self-contradictory posts this is
| exactly the kind of rage content and ragebait that I make a
| point to unfollow on social media platforms.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The issue is that it's not symmetric: the algorithm is
| biased towards rage-baity content, so it will use any
| tiny level of engagement with something related to that
| content to push it, but there's not really anything you
| can do to stop it, or to get it to push less rage-baity
| content. This is also really bad if you realise you have
| a problem with getting caught up in such content (for
| some it's borderline addictive): there's no tools for
| someone to say 'I realise I respond to every message I
| see on this topic, but really that's not good for me,
| please don't show me it in the first place'.
| Uehreka wrote:
| OK sure, if you want to be technically correct, "the
| algorithm shows you what you engage with" in some sense,
| but not any useful sense. There's no proportionality.
|
| As I said above, if you engage heavily with content you
| like that is outside of the mainstream categories the
| algorithm has been trained to prefer, it will not show
| you more of those things.
|
| If you engage one single time, in even the slightest way,
| with one of those mainstream categories, you will be
| seeing nothing but that, nonstop, forever.
|
| The "mainstream categories" are not publicly listed
| anywhere, so it's not always easy to know that you've
| just stepped in one until it's too late.
|
| You can't engage with things you like in proportion to
| how much you care about them. If something is in a
| mainstream category and you care about it only little
| bit, you have to abstain from interacting with it at all,
| ever, and don't slip up. Having to maintain constant
| vigilance about this all the time sucks, that's what
| pisses me off.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I use X. I have an enormouse blocklist and I block keywords.
| I found that I can also block emoji. This keeps my feed
| focused on what I want to see (no politics. Just technology,
| classical and jazz music, etc.)
| graemep wrote:
| > If you don't want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don't
| engage with Brexit content.
|
| That is really limiting though. I do not want to see Brexit
| ragebait in my threads, but I am quite happy to engage in
| intelligent argument about it. The problem is that if, for
| example, a friend posts something about Brexit I want to
| comment on, my feed then fills with ragebait.
|
| My solution is to bookmark the friends and groups pages, and
| the one group I admin and go straight to those. I have never
| used the app.
| binary132 wrote:
| >it's not just X -- it's Y
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| an interesting thing about Twitter, I find, is that plenty of
| rage bait and narcissism bait surface, but amid very highly
| technical information which is also published there, and
| extremely useful (immunology, genomics, and of course
| computational) to me.
|
| i've learned pretty well how to 'guide' the algorithm so the
| tech stuff that's super valuable (to me) does not vanish, but
| still get nonsense bozo posts in the mix.
| drbojingle wrote:
| No, there needs to be control over the algorithms that get
| used. You ought to be able to tune it. There needs to be a
| Google fuu equivalent for social media. Or, instead of one
| platform one algorithm, let users define the algorithm to a
| certain degree, using llms to help with that and then you can
| allow others to access your algorithms too. Asking for someone
| Facebook to tweak the algorithm is not going to help imo.
| rcxdude wrote:
| IMO there should not be an algorithm. You should just get
| what you have subscribed to, with whatever filters you have
| defined. There are better and worse algorithms but I think
| the meat of the rot is the expectation of an algorithm
| determining 90% of what you see.
| drbojingle wrote:
| Dude that's an algorithm.
| anon191928 wrote:
| on the opposite site, you know what they say, "there is no
| algo. for truth"
| ashtakeaway wrote:
| That's the same algorithm Youtube has and is more blatant.
| Phone mics and your coworker's proximity does a great job at
| picking up things you've said even after disabling mic access
| plus airplane mode just by process of elimination.
|
| I'll only use an LLM for projects and building tools, like a
| junior dev in their 20s.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Your facebook feed is now at this URL:
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
| donbox wrote:
| Just started using Minifeed (free account). I am still
| nostalgic about Google Reader.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I eliminated twitter when a certain rich guy took over.
|
| Actually, I deleted my account there before, as twitter sent me
| spam mail trying to lecture me what I write. There was nothing
| wrong with what I wrote - twitter was wrong. I can not accept
| AI-generated spam by twitter, so I went away. Don't really miss
| it either, but Elon really worsened the platform significantly
| with his antics.
|
| > Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't
| expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's
| tedious and unproductive.
|
| Yeah, I can relate to this, but mostly what annoyed me was that
| twitter interfered "we got a complaint about you - they are
| right, you are a troublemaker". I don't understand why twitter
| wants to interfere into communication. Reddit is even worse,
| since moderators have such a wild range of what is "acceptable"
| and what is not. Double-standards everywhere on reddit.
| immibis wrote:
| I call it AI slop and human slop.
| mkzet wrote:
| The Internet will become truly dead with the rise of LLMs. The
| whole hacking culture within 90s and 00s will always be the
| golden age. RIP
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Maybe. Nature hates vacuum. I personally suspect that something
| new will emerge. For better or worse, some humans work best
| when weird restrictions are imposed. That said, yes, then wild
| 90s net is dead. It probably was for a while, but were all
| mourning.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| There are still small pockets with actual humans to be found.
| The small web exists. Some forums keep on going, im still
| shitposting on Something Awful after twenty years and it's
| still quite active. Bluesky has its faults but it also has for
| example an active community of scholars you can follow and
| interact with.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I hacked in the 90s and 00s, wasn't that great/golden if you
| took your profession seriously...
| johnwheeler wrote:
| 100%. I miss trackers and napster. I miss newgrounds. This
| mobile AI bullshit is not the same. I don't know why, but I
| hate AI. I consider myself just as good as the best at using
| it. I can make it do my programming. It does a great job. It's
| just not enjoyable anymore.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| Not quite dead yet. For me the rise of LLMs and BigTech has
| helped me turn more away from it. The more I find Ads or AI
| injected into my life, the more accounts I close, or sites I
| ignore. I've now removed most of my BigTech 'fixes', and find
| myself with time to explore the fun side of hacking again.
|
| I dug out my old PinePhone and decided to write a toy OS for
| it. The project has just the right level of challenge and
| reward for me, and feels more like early days
| hacking/programming where we relied more on documentation and
| experimentation than regurgitated LLM slop.
|
| Nothing beats that special feeling when a hack suddenly works.
| Today was just a proximity sensor reading displayed, but it
| invloved a lot of SoC hacking to get that far.
|
| I know there are others hacking hard in obscure corners of
| tech, and I love this site for promoting them.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the
| thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them.
|
| There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm
| both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that
| they are a rare breed.
|
| But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their
| heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that
| many great ideas have gone unshared because the thinker couldn't
| quite figure out how to express it.
|
| In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing, but
| also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared.
|
| Of course, I love a good, unique voice. It's a pleasure to parse
| patio11's straussian technocratic musings. Or pg's as-simple-as-
| possible form.
|
| And I hope we don't lose those. But somehow I suspect we may see
| more of them as creative thinkers find new ways to express
| themselves. I hope!
| LaGrange wrote:
| I hate when people hijack progressive language - like in your
| case the language of accessibility - for cheap marketing and
| hype.
|
| Writing is one of the most accessible forms of expression. We
| were living in a world where even publishing was as easy as
| imaginable - sure, not actually selling/profiting, but here's a
| secret, even most bestselling authors have either at least one
| other job, or intense support from their close social circle.
|
| What you do to write good is you start by writing bad. And you
| do it for ages. LLMs not only don't help here, they ruin it.
| And they don't help people write because they're still not
| writing. It just derails people who might, otherwise, maybe
| start actually writing.
|
| Framing your expensive toy that ruins everything as an
| accessibility device is absurd.
| the_snooze wrote:
| It basically boils down to "I want the external validation of
| being seen as a good writer, without any of the internal
| growth and struggle needed to get there."
| LaGrange wrote:
| I mean, kinda, but also: not only are someone's meandering
| ramblings a part of a process that leads to less meandering
| ramblings, they're also infinitely more interesting than
| LLM slop.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| > "struggle needed to get there."
|
| "Struggle" argument is from gatekeepers and for masochists.
| Thank you very much.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's probably true that it reduces the barrier to entry, you
| don't refute that point in your post. You just call it cheap
| marketing and hype.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Barriers to entry can be a good thing. It's a filter for
| low effort content.
| LaGrange wrote:
| It doesn't. You're not entering anything with an LLM.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| I'm anon, but also the farthest thing from a progressive, so
| I find this post amusing.
|
| I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying but I also
| have a different frame.
|
| Even if we take your claim that LLMs don't make people better
| writers as true (which I think there's plenty to argue with),
| that's not the point at all.
|
| What I'm saying is people are _communicating_ better. For
| most ideas, writing is just a transport vessel for ideas. And
| people now have tools to communicate better than they would
| have been.
|
| Most people aren't trying to become good writers. That's true
| before, and true now.
|
| On the other hand, this argument probably isn't worth having.
| If your frame is that LLMs are expensive toys that ruin
| everything -- well, that's quite an aggressive posture to
| start with and is both unlikely to bear a useful conversation
| or a particularly delightful future for you.
| LaGrange wrote:
| > I'm anon, but also the farthest thing from a progressive,
| so I find this post amusing.
|
| Oh I know. I called it hijacking because the result is as
| progressive as a national socialist is a socialist.
|
| > What I'm saying is people are communicating better.
|
| Actually they're no longer communicating at all.
| encyclopedism wrote:
| > What I'm saying is people are communicating better. For
| most ideas, writing is just a transport vessel for ideas.
| And people now have tools to communicate better than they
| would have been.
|
| You would have to define 'better'.
| freejazz wrote:
| > In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing,
| but also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared.
|
| They aren't your ideas if its coming out of an LLM
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| Are they your ideas if they go through a heavy-handed editor?
| If you've had lots of conversations with others to refine
| them?
|
| I dunno. There's ways to use LLMs that produces writing that
| is substantially not-your-ideas. But there's also definitely
| ways to use it to express things that the model would not
| have otherwise outputted without your unique input.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| counterargument: they still are your ideas even if they went
| through LLM.
| encyclopedism wrote:
| Unsubstantiated
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| wrong
| the_af wrote:
| I seriously doubt people didn't write blog posts or articles
| before LLMs because they didn't know how to write.
|
| It's not some magic roadblock. They just didn't want to spend
| the effort to get better at writing; you get better at writing
| by writing (like good old Steve says in "On Writing"). It's how
| we all learnt.
|
| I'm also not sure everyone should be writing articles and blog
| posts _just because_. _More_ is not _better_. Maybe if you feel
| unmotivated about making the effort, just don 't do it?
|
| Almost everyone will cut novice writers and non-native
| $LANGUAGE speakers some slack. Making mistakes is not a sin.
|
| Finally, my own bias: if you cannot be bothered to write
| something, I cannot be bothered to read it. This applies to AI
| slop 100%.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear
| the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them.
|
| I could agree with you in theory, but do you see the technology
| used that way? Because I definitely don't. The thought process
| behind the vast majority of LLM-generated content is "how do I
| get more clicks with less effort", not "here's a unique,
| personal perspective of mine, let's use a chatbot to express it
| more eloquently".
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| We might get twice as many original ideas but hundred times
| as much filler. Neither of those aspects erases the other.
| Both the absolute number of ideas and the ratio matter.
| leetrout wrote:
| Hits close to home after I've caught myself tweaking AI drafts
| just to make them "sound like me". That uniformity in feeds is
| real and it's like scrolling through a corporate newsletter
| disguised as personal takes.
|
| what if we flip LLMs into voice trainers? Like, use them to
| brainstorm raw ideas and rewrite everything by hand to sharpen
| that personal blade. atrophy risk still huge?
|
| Nudge to post more of my own mess this week...
| whatever1 wrote:
| It's ok. Most of our opinions suck and are unoriginal anyway.
|
| The few ones who have something important to say they will, and
| we will listen regardless of the medium.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| They get drowned by bots and missinformation and rage bait and
| 'easyness'.
|
| Economy is shit? Lets throw out the immigrants because they are
| the problem and lets use the most basic idea of taxing
| everything to death.
|
| No one wants to hear hart truths and no one wants to accept
| that even as adults, they might just not be smart. Just beause
| you became an adult, your education shuld still matter (and i
| do not mean having one degree = expert).
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| The liberal idea that the best ideas win out in the marketplace
| turned out to be laughably wrong.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'd argue that they do win out, it's just not the ideas that
| we thought were best.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Best idea", but it's "best" by memetic reproduction score,
| not by "how well does this solve a real problem?"
|
| Same thing with evolution: "survival of the fittest"
| doesn't mean "survival of the muscle", just whatever's best
| at passing on DNA.
| intended wrote:
| Wouldn't say it's a liberal idea. It was a foundational
| argument in jurisprudence, from Holme's dissent in the
| Abram's case.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Let's clarify, maybe the best ideas would win out in the
| "level marketplace", where the consumer actually is well
| informed on the products, the product's true costs have to be
| priced, and there was no ad-agencies.
|
| Instead, we have misinformation (PR), lobbying, bad
| regulation made by big companies to trench their products,
| and corruption.
|
| So, maybe, like communism, in a perfect environment, the
| market would produces what's best for the
| consumers/population, but as always, there are minority
| power-seeking subgroups that will have no moral barriers to
| manipulate the environment to push their product/company.
| ctoth wrote:
| The marketplace is a terrible mechanism for truth-finding
| except for all the others. What's your proposed alternative
| that doesn't just relocate the problem to whoever gets to be
| the arbiter?
| intended wrote:
| Humans are evolved to spend fewer calories and avoid
| cognitively demanding tasks.
|
| People will spend time on things that serve utility AND are
| calorifically cheap. Doomscrolling is a more popular past time
| than say - completing Coursera courses.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Social media is a reminder we are losing our voice to mass media
| consumption way before LLMs were a thing.
|
| Even before LLMs, if you wanted to be a big content creator on
| YouTube, Instagram, tiktok..., you better fall in line and
| produce content with the target aesthetic. Otherwise good luck.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not sure if it's an endemic problem, just yet, but I expect it to
| be, soon.
|
| For myself, I have been writing, all my life. I tend to write
| longform posts, from time to time[0], and enjoy it.
|
| That said, I have found LLMs (ChatGPT works best for me) to be
| excellent editors. They can help correct minor mistakes, as long
| as I ignore a lot of their advice.
|
| [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/
| aquariusDue wrote:
| I just want to chime in and say I enjoy reading your takes
| across HN, it's also inspiring how informative and insightful
| they are. Glazing over, please never stop writing.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Thanks so much!
| dmezzetti wrote:
| Let's not forget to mention the rise of AI-generated video. You
| can't really trust any video as real anymore.
| analog8374 wrote:
| Process before product, unless the product promises to deliver a
| 1000% return on your investment. Only the disciplined artist can
| escape that grim formula.
| mentalgear wrote:
| I've been thinking about this as well, especially in the context
| of historical precedents in terms of
| civilization/globalization/industrialization.
|
| How LLMs standardize communication is the same way there was a
| standardization in empires expanding (cultural), book printing
| (language), the industrial revolution (power loom, factories,
| assembly procedures, etc).
|
| In that process interesting but not as "scale-able" (or simply
| not used by the people in power) culture, dialects, languages,
| craftsmanship, ideas were often lost - and replaced by easier to
| produce, but often lesser quality products - through the power of
| "affordable economics" - not active conflict.
|
| We already have the English 'business concise, buzzwordheavy
| language' formal messaging trained into chatGPT (or for informal
| the casual overexcited American), which I'm afraid might take
| hold of global communication the same way with advanced LLM
| usage.
| mold_aid wrote:
| >How LLMs standardize communication is the same way there was a
| standardization in empires expanding (cultural), book printing
| (language), the industrial revolution (power loom, factories,
| assembly procedures, etc).
|
| Explain to me how "book printing" of the past "standardized
| communication" in the same way as LLMs are criticized for
| homogenizing language.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I'm taking "same way" to be read as "authoritative", whether
| de facto or de jure. Basically by dint of people using what's
| provided instead of coming up with their own.
|
| Everyone has the same few dictionary spellings (that are now
| programmed into our computers). Even worse (from a
| heterogeneity perspective), everyone also has the same few
| grammar books.
|
| As examples: How often do you see American English users
| write "colour", or British English users write "color", much
| less colur or collor or somesuch?
|
| Shakespeare famously spelled his own last name half a dozen
| or so different ways. My own patriline had an unusual variant
| spelling of the last name, that standardized to one of the
| more common variants in the 1800s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English_grammars
|
| "Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modelled on William Lily's
| Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534).[9] Lily's
| grammar was being used in schools in England at the time,
| having been "prescribed" for them in 1542 by Henry VIII.[5]"
|
| It goes on to mention a variety of grammars that may have
| started out somewhat descriptive, but became more
| prescriptive over time.
| mold_aid wrote:
| Right, prior to "dictionary-ization" you could have variant
| spellings etc. You're correct about prescription. It's an
| interesting idea, how to understand authority in these
| contexts.
|
| Transitions in media and writing - you could take
| Charlemagne's attempts to standardize HRE script in the
| administrative state as a sort of "standardization of
| Empire," the development of English as the web's lingua
| franca, the role of the Stationers' co. during the
| development of early printed media as standardization of
| surveillance, the history of copyright law, all that - were
| in many cases state power responding to their inability to
| control both the infrastructure and content of
| communication. We're not afraid a chatbot is going to use
| an unrecognizable typeface in communication with another
| chatbot, or publish dissident pamphlets and spread them to
| other chatbots. We're afraid our literate practices will
| atrophy from outsourcing. That we start to communicate
| _like_ the chatbot.
|
| Put it this way: if you had everyone learn the five-
| paragraph essay style, you'd have the same lack of voice;
| and, boy, did "we" (US) ever get that exact consequence.
| You raise an interesting point about "standards" in that
| respect because that's a specific ideological, state-driven
| attempt to prioritize and measure skills. But if you tell
| students to write without that specific priority, they lose
| all sense of writing. So it's destructive, there's an
| expressive issue there. So, yeah, as you say: "even worse."
| They forget a skill they never had.
|
| I'm just wondering, I guess, about the harm. The past has
| these examples of standardization in the West and if we say
| "well this is just another case of a historically
| prescriptivist tendency in writing" I guess that's fine,
| but we don't really look at these examples as beneficial or
| with a shrug. We don't even want everybody writing like EB
| White , we certainly don't want everybody writing like
| _Elon Musk_.
| intended wrote:
| I've realized that if you say that pro AI commenters are actually
| bot accounts, theres not really much that can be done to prove
| otherwise.
|
| The discomfort and annoyance that sentence generates, is
| interesting. Being accused of being a bot is frustrating, while
| interacting with bots creates a sense of futility.
|
| Back in the day when Facebook first was launched, I remember how
| I felt about it - the depth of my opposition. I probably have
| some ancient comments on HN to that effect.
|
| Recently, I've developed the same degree of dislike for GenAI and
| LLMs.
| ArcHound wrote:
| I think that this is imbalanced in favour of wannabe influencers,
| who want to be consistent and popular.
|
| If you really have no metrics to hit (not even the internal
| craving for likes), then it doesn't make much sense to outsource
| writing to LLMs.
|
| But yes, it's sad to see that your original stuff is lost in the
| sea of slop.
|
| Sadly, as long as there will be money in publishing, this will
| keep happening.
| blenderob wrote:
| FWIW this prompt works for very good for me:
| Improve grammar and typos in my draft but don't change my writing
| style.
|
| Your mileage may vary.
| arionmiles wrote:
| There are deterministic solutions for grammar and spellcheck. I
| wouldn't rely on LLMs for this. Not only is it wasteful, we're
| turning to LLMs for every single problem which is quite sad.
| analog31 wrote:
| Soon, we'll be nostalgic for social media. The irony.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| "Over time, it has become obvious just how many posts are being
| generated by an LLM. The tell is the voice. Every post sounds
| like it was posted by the same social media manager."
|
| I'd love to see an actual study of people who think they're
| proficient at detecting this stuff. I suspect that they're far
| less capable of spotting these things than they convince
| themselves they are.
|
| Everything is AI. LLMs. Bots. NPCs. Over the past few months I've
| seen demonstrably real videos posted to sites like Reddit, and
| the top post is someone declaring that it is obviously AI, they
| can't believe how stupid everyone is to fall for it, etc. It's
| like people default assume the worst lest they be caught out as
| suckers.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| The global alignment also happens through media like tv shows and
| movies, the internet overall.
|
| I agree I think we should try to do both.
|
| In germany for example, we have very few typical german brands.
| Our brands became very global. If you go Japan for example, you
| will find the same product like ramen or cookies or cakes a lot
| but all of them are slighly different from different small
| producers.
|
| If you go to an autobahn motorway/highway rest area you will find
| local products in japan. If you do the same in germany, you find
| just the generic american shit, Mars, Modneles, PepsiCo,
| Unilever...
|
| Even our german coke like Fritz cola is a niche / hipster thing
| even today.
| j45 wrote:
| We lose our voice based on how we use our voice.
|
| We improve our use of words when we work to improve our use of
| words.
|
| We improve how we understand by how we ask.
| rdtsc wrote:
| I call it the enshittification fix-point. Not only are we losing
| our voice, we'll soon enough start thinking and talking like
| LLMs. After a generation of kids grows up reading and talking to
| LLMs, that will be only way they'll know how to communicate.
| You'll talk to a person and you couldn't tell the difference
| between them and LLMs, not because LLMs became amazing, but
| because our writing and thinking style become more LLM-like.
|
| - "Hey, Jimmy, the cookie jar is empty. Did you eat the cookies?"
|
| - "You're absolutely right, father -- the jar seems to be empty.
| Here is bullet point list why consuming the cookies was the right
| thing to do..."
| homeonthemtn wrote:
| For those of us not constantly online, we're doing just fine.
|
| I suppose when your existence is in the cloud, the fall back to
| earth can look scary. But it's really only a few inches down.
| You'll be ok.
| truelson wrote:
| It's still an editor I can turn to in a pinch when my favorite
| humans aren't around. It makes better analogies sometimes. I like
| going back and forth with it, and if it doesn't sound like me, I
| rewrite it.
|
| Don't look at social media. Blogging is kinda re-surging. I just
| found out Dave Barry has a substack.
| https://davebarry.substack.com/ That made me happy :) (Side note,
| did he play "Squirrel with a Gun??!!!")
|
| The death of voice is greatly exaggerated. Most LLM voice is
| cringe. But it's ok to use an LLM, have taste, and get a better
| version of your voice out. It's totally doable.
| dlisboa wrote:
| It's ironic that https://substack.com/@davebarry uses a lot of
| AI-generated imagery. Maybe the death of vision is not
| exaggerated.
|
| I don't judge, I'm not an artist so if I wanted to express
| myself in image I'd need AI help but I can see how people would
| do the same with words.
| AstroBen wrote:
| There's something unique about art and writing where we just
| don't want to see computers do it
|
| As soon as I know something is written by AI I tune out. I don't
| care how good it is - I'm not interested if a person didn't go
| through the process of writing it
| oidar wrote:
| And what's more is the suspicion of it being written by AI
| causes you to view any writing in a less charitable fashion.
| And because it's been approached from that angle, it's hard to
| move the mental frame to being open of the writing. Even
| untinged writings are infected by smell of LLMs.
| zwnow wrote:
| Thats whats happening to me with music and discovering new
| artists. I love music so much but I simply can not trust new
| music anymore. The lyrics could be written by AI, the
| melodies couldve been recommended by AI or even the full
| blown song could've been made by AI. No thanks, back to the
| familiar stuff...
| turtletontine wrote:
| If the writer's entire process is giving a language model a few
| bullet points... I'd rather them skip the LLM and just give me
| the bullet points. If there's that little intent and thought
| behind the writing, why would I put more thought into reading
| it than they did to produce it?
| tucnak wrote:
| > There's something unique about art and writing where we just
| don't want to see computers do it
|
| Speak for yourself. Some of the most fascinating poetry I have
| seen was produced by GPT-3. That is to say, there was a short
| time period when it was genuinely thought-provoking, and it has
| since passed. In the age of "alignment," what you get with
| commerical offerings is dog shite... But this is more a
| statement on American labs (and to a similar extent, the
| Chinese whom have followed) than on "computers" in the first
| place. Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of
| computational literature, where authors like me would be
| empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters
| ACTUALLY living in the computer. (With added option of the
| reader playing one of the parts.) This will radically change
| how we think about textual form, and I cannot wait for compute
| to do so.
|
| Re: modern-day slop, well, the slop is us.
|
| Denial of this comes from a place of ignorance; let the
| blinkers off and you might learn something! Slop will
| eventually pass, but we will remain. This is the far scarier
| proposition.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| "inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer"
|
| It's hard to imagine these feeling like characters from
| literature and not characters in the form of influencers /
| social media personalities. Characters in literature are in a
| highly constrained medium, and only have to do their story
| once. In a generated world the character needs to be
| constantly doing "story things". I think Jonathan Blow has an
| interesting talk on why video games are a bad medium for
| stories, which might be relevant.
| tucnak wrote:
| Please share! Computational literature is my main area of
| research, and constraints are very much in the center of
| it... I believe that there are effectively two kinds of
| constraints: in the language of stories themselves, as
| thing-in-itself, as well as those imposed by the author. In
| a way, authorship is incredibly repressive: authors impose
| strict limits on the characters, what they get to do, etc.
| This is a form of slavery. Characters in traditional plays
| only get to say exactly what the author wants them to say,
| when he wants them to say it. Whereas in computational
| literature, we get to emancipate the characters! This is a
| far-cry from "prompting," but I believe there are concrete
| paths forward that would be somewhat familiar (but not
| necessarily click) for game-dev people.
|
| Now, there's fundamental limits of the medium (as function
| of computation) but that's a different story.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Characters in traditional plays only get to say exactly
| what the author wants them to say
|
| But the human actors sometimes adlib. As well as being in
| control of intonation and body language. It takes a great
| deal of skill to portray someone else's words in a
| compelling and convincing manner. And for an actor I
| imagine it can be quite fun to do so.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Just so I understand who I am talking with here, when you
| say authorship is a form of slavery, is that because you
| believe the characters in a written story have a
| consciousness/sentience/experience just like animals do,
| or are you just using the word 'slavery' to mean that in
| traditional literature the characters are static? One of
| the strengths of traditional literature is that
| staticness, however, because the best stories from
| literature are necessarily highly engineered and
| contrived by the author. Great stories don't happen in
| the real world (without dramatization of the events)
| exactly because too many things can happen for a coherent
| narrative to unfold.
|
| I'm a huge fan of Dwarf Fortress, but the stories aren't
| Great without imagination from the player selectively
| ignoring things. Kruggsmash is able to make them
| compelling because he is a great author
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational
| literature, where authors like me would be empowered to
| engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY
| living in the computer.
|
| So you want sapient, and possibly sentient, beings created
| solely for entertainment? Their lives constrained to said
| entertainment? And you'd want to create them inside of a box
| that is even more limited than the space we live in?
|
| My idea of godhood is to first try to live up to a moral code
| that I'd be happy with if I was the creation and something
| else was the god.
|
| If this isn't what you meant, then yes, choose your own
| adventure is fun. But we can do that now with shared worlds
| involving other humans as co-content creators.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| > So you want sapient, and possibly sentient, beings
| created solely for entertainment? Their lives constrained
| to said entertainment? And you'd want to create them inside
| of a box that is even more limited than the space we live
| in?
|
| Sshh! If they know we've figured it out, we'll all be
| restarted again.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| A person can be just as wrong as an LLM, but unless they're
| being purposefully misleading, or sleep-writing, you know they
| reviewed what they wrote for their best guess at accuracy.
| randycupertino wrote:
| I had a weird LLM use instance happen at work this week, we
| were in a big important protocol review meeting with 35 remote
| people and someone asks how long IUDs begin to take effect in
| patients. I put it in ChatGPT for my own reference and read the
| answer in my head but didn't say anything (I'm ops, I just row
| the boat and let the docs steer the ship). Anyone this bigwig
| Oxford/Johns Hopkins cardiologist who we pay $600k a year pipes
| up in the meeting and her answer is VERBATIM reading off the
| ChatGPT language word for word. All she did was ask it the
| answer and repeat what it said! Anyway it kinda made me sad
| that all this big fancy doctor is doing is spitting out lazy
| default ChatGPT answers to guide our research :( Also everyone
| else in the meeting was so impressed with her, "wow Dr. so and
| so thank you so much for this helpful update!" etc. :-/
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _her answer is VERBATIM reading off the ChatGPT language
| word for word_
|
| How could it be verbatim the same response you got? Even if
| you both typed the exact same prompt, you wouldn't get the
| exact same answer.[0, 1]
|
| [0] https://kagi.com/assistant/8f4cb048-3688-40f0-88b3-931286
| f8a...
|
| [1] https://kagi.com/assistant/4e16664b-43d6-4b84-a256-c038b1
| 534...
| randycupertino wrote:
| We have a work enterprise GPT account across the company.
| mtlynch wrote:
| How does that explain what you observed?
|
| The only way I can understand that as an explanation is
| if your entire company can see each other's chats, and so
| she clicked yours and read the response you got. Is that
| what you're saying?
| randycupertino wrote:
| How else would she have been able to parrot the exact
| same GPT response without reading it directly? You think
| she just thought of it word for word exactly the same off
| the top of her head?
| khannn wrote:
| They're saying that the shared account is enough for
| OpenAI to provide the same result. Very interesting, I'd
| like to know more like was it a generic IUD or a specific
| one in the query. Also, the Doc is a cardiologist, they
| don't specialize in Gyno stuff and their
| training/schooling is enough for them to evaluate
| sources.
|
| Just for reference before AI it was typical for employers
| of doctors to pay for a service/app called UpToDate which
| provided vetted info for docs like google.
| randycupertino wrote:
| There were several specific brands cited in the response
| and she read through them one by one in the same order
| with the supporting details, word for word. I think it
| just gave us the same response and she read it off the
| page.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Itemized Bill: - hitting the ChatGPT button: $1
| - knowing where to hit the ChatGPT button: $600k/year
| khannn wrote:
| I know some GPs that use WebMD so it plays out like:
|
| - Google search: free
|
| - Having the schooling, training, and experience to
| evaluate the results: $300k per year
| grey-area wrote:
| The LLM may well have pulled the answer from a medical
| reference similar to that used by the dr. I have no idea why
| you think an expert in the field would use ChatGPT for a
| simple question, that would be negligence.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| A climate scientist I follow uses Perplexity AI in some of
| his YouTube videos. He stated one time that he uses it for
| the formatting, graphs, and synopses, but knows enough
| about what he's asking that he knows what it's outputting
| is correct.
|
| An "expert" might use ChatGPT for the brief synopsis. It
| beats trying to recall something learned about a completely
| different sub-discipline years ago.
| randycupertino wrote:
| She read it EXACTLY as written from the ChatGPT response,
| verbatim. If it was her own unique response there would
| have been some variation.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Or both the doctor and ChatGPT were quoting verbatim from a
| reputable source?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The one thing a cardiologist should be able to do better than
| a random person is verify the plausibility of a ChatGPT
| answer on reproductive medicine. So I guess/hope you're
| paying for that verification, not just the answer itself.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I would love to see true really good AI art. Right now the
| issue is that AI is not there where it by itself could produce
| actually good art. If we had to define art it would be kind of
| opposite of what LLMs produce right now. LLMs try to produce
| the statistical norm, while art is more so about producing
| something out of the norm. LLMs/AI right now if it wants to try
| to produce out of norm things, it will only produce something
| random without connections.
|
| Art is something out of the norm, and it should make some sense
| at some clever level.
|
| But if there was AI that truly could do that, I would love to
| see it, and would love to see even more of it.
|
| It can be clearly seen, if you try to ask AI to make original
| jokes. These usually aren't too good, if they are good it's
| because they were randomly lucky somehow. It is able to come up
| with related analogies for the jokes, but this is just simple
| pattern matching of what is similar to the other thing, not
| insightful and clever observation.
| tim333 wrote:
| I've lost the link but there was quite a cool video of
| virtual architecture created by AI. It was ok because it
| wasn't trying to be human like - it was kind of uniquely AI.
| Not the exact one but this kind of stuff https://www.reddit.c
| om/r/Futurism/comments/1oedb0m/were_ente...
| kentm wrote:
| Art, writing, and communication is about humans connecting with
| each other and trying to come to mutual understanding.
| Exploring the human condition. If I'm engaging with an AI
| instead of a person, is there a point?
|
| There's an argument that the creator is just using AI as a tool
| to achieve their vision. I do not think that's how people using
| AI are actually engaging with it at scale, nor is it the
| desired end state of people pushing AI. To put it bluntly, I
| think it's cope. It's how I try to use AI in my work but it's
| not how I see people around me using it, and you don't get the
| miracle results boosters proclaim from the rooftop if you use
| it that way.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. I don't care how much prompt or model
| finetuning you did, if something is shat out by an LLM I'm not
| interested even remotely.
|
| I wish more people held the same opinion actually.
| Unfortunately, my sense is that most people don't care, they
| are fine with LLM generated crap
|
| It honestly makes me want to blow my brains out
| muldvarp wrote:
| Writing nice sounding text used to require effort and attention
| to detail. This is no longer the case and this very useful
| heuristic has been completely obliterated by LLMs.
|
| For me personally, this means that I read less on the internet
| and more pre-LLM books. It's a sad development nevertheless.
| gtowey wrote:
| You're absolutely right! Art is the soul of humanity and
| without it our existence is pointless. Would you like me to
| generate some poetry for you, human?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| If you think about how an LLM works, it's rounds off the
| outliers in its training data so the result is sort of averaged
| and homogenized. Art and writing are an expression of the very
| thing that LLMs discard - our unique qualities, our outlying
| quirks, that make us more than just another human.
| zavg wrote:
| In one of the WhatsApp communities I belong to, I noticed that
| some people use ChatGPT to express their thoughts (probably
| asking it to make their messages more eloquent or polite or
| whatever).
|
| Others respond in the same style. As a result, it ends up with
| long, multi-paragraph messages full of em dashes.
|
| Basically, they are using AI as a proxy to communicate with each
| other, trying to sound more intelligent to the rest of the group.
| truelson wrote:
| A friend of mine does this as English as second language and
| his tone was always misconstrued. I'd bug him about his slop,
| but he'll take that over getting his tone misconstrued. I get
| it
| LightBug1 wrote:
| LOL ... in whatssap! ... sorry, we're fucked ...
| motbus3 wrote:
| Also that these models are being used to promote fake news and
| create controversy ou interact with real humans with unknown
| purposes
|
| Talking to some friends and they feel the same. Depending where
| you are participating a discussion you just might not feel it is
| worth it because it might just be a bot
| bookofjoe wrote:
| The LLM v human debate here reminds me of the now dormant "Are
| you living in a simulation?" discussions of previous decades.
| coffeecoders wrote:
| I actually think we're overestimating how much of "losing our
| voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the
| same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the
| same corporate tone.
|
| Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more
| distinct voices because sameness has become the default
| background.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Content recycling has become so cheap, effort-wise, it's killed
| the business. Thank god.
| coffeecoders wrote:
| Yes. That particular content-farm business model (rewrite 10
| articles -> add SEO slop -> profit) is effectively dead now
| that the marginal cost is zero.
|
| I'm not mourning it.
| LunaSea wrote:
| It doesn't it just makes it cheaper by not requiring human
| effort.
| acedTrex wrote:
| I mean, if you typed something by your own hand it is in your
| voice. The fact that everyone tried to EMULATE the same
| corporate tone does not at all remove peoples individual ways
| of communicating.
| coffeecoders wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment. You can type
| something "by hand" and still have almost no voice in it if
| the incentives push you to flatten it out.
|
| A lot of us spent years optimizing for clarity, SEO,
| professionalism etc. But that did shape how we wrote, maybe
| even more than our natural cadence. The result wasn't voice,
| it was everyone converging on the safe and optimized
| template.
| ori_b wrote:
| If you chose to trade your soul to 'incentives', and
| replace incisive thought with bland SEO and professionalism
| -- you chose this. Your voice has become the bland language
| of business.
| O_H_E wrote:
| So in that case, would someone willing to publish LLM-
| speak under their name be similarly adopting that
| "voice".
|
| Does that entail that LLMs are not in fact erasing our
| societal voices, only making it easier to adopt bland-
| corporate en-mass?
| ori_b wrote:
| That's a reasonable interpretation. People are choosing
| to mute their voices, and replace their identity with
| ChatGPT.
|
| It's not a passive loss of voice. Their voice didn't fall
| off and slip between the couch cushions.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Yes, fully agreed. Most people producing content were always
| doing it to get quick clicks and engagement. People always had
| to filter things anyhow and you had to choose where you get
| your content from.
|
| People were posting Medium posts rewriting someone else's
| content, wrongly, etc.
| gregates wrote:
| Also ironic is how the post about having a unique voice is
| written in one-sentence-paragraph LinkedIn clickbait style.
| ryandv wrote:
| You're absolutely right! Tell me more about how ironic is how
| the post about having a unique voice is written in one-
| sentence-paragraph LinkedIn clickbait style.
| harvey9 wrote:
| The other day I interviewed a candidate who had lost their
| unique voice...
| sam345 wrote:
| Spoken like an Ai bot.
| gordonhart wrote:
| My theory is that LLMs are accelerating [online] radicalization
| by commoditizing bland, HR-approved opinions. If you want to
| sound like a human on the internet, for better or for worse the
| easiest way is to say something that would make Anthropic's
| safety team have a heart attack.
| 6thbit wrote:
| I mean there's still Grok... surely that gives may safety
| teams heartburn.
|
| But I find this take interesting. The brewing of a new kind
| of counter culture that forces humans to express themselves
| creatively. Hopefully it doesn't get too radical.
| jrockway wrote:
| Grok still has that annoying tone, it just uses it to say
| weird things.
| Sammi wrote:
| Grok sounds like the "how do you do fellow kids" meme. It
| just sounds cringe.
| ryandv wrote:
| > commoditizing bland, HR-approved opinions. If you want to
| sound like a human on the internet, for better or for worse
| the easiest way is to say something that would make
| Anthropic's safety team have a heart attack.
|
| I agree.
|
| LLMs are like blackface for dumbfucks: LLMs let the
| profoundly retarded put on the makeup and airs of the
| literati so they can parade around self-identifying as if
| they have a clue.
|
| If you don't like the barbs in this kind of writing prepare
| for more anodyne corporate slop. Every downvote signals to
| the algorithm that you prefer mediocrity.
| harvey9 wrote:
| "Every downvote signals to the algorithm that you prefer
| mediocrity."
|
| Not on hn it doesn't.
| pksebben wrote:
| I'm all about using the rainbow of language to it's full
| breadth, but if you're going to go for shock jock you
| should maybe have something better to say than "hurdurr I
| smart and world bad 'cause dumb people". Makes you sound a
| little like you're trying too hard to be part of the
| 'literati', whatever that's supposed to mean.
| hhh wrote:
| Bullshit. You can just use ANY abliterated model or non-
| safety aligned model. People have popularized 'hard r or
| you're hardware' for a while now, but any self hosted LLM
| that's de-aligned will gladly say whatever.
|
| People believe this and continue to get fooled by LLMs all
| day.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't think I would want to hang out in any online space
| where the n-word is a shibboleth. The practice of asking
| members to do something that would ostracize you from the
| rest of society is cult behavior--even if it's not intended
| as such.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| You are right. An observation, even before the rise of LLMs,
| was that computers were becoming more human-like and humans
| were acting more like machines
|
| The sculpting force of algorithms is bite sized zingers, hot
| takes, ragebait, and playing to the analytics
| ryandv wrote:
| Bingo. Your message is only what the medium promotes.
| binary132 wrote:
| Ironically I find it hard to tell whether this writing is LLM or
| merely a bit hollow and vapid.
| robinhood wrote:
| You are downvoted but I actually agree with you. This blog post
| could have been a LinkedIn post from any "influencer",
| considering how generic it is.
| O_H_E wrote:
| I don't find that current generation LLMs output such short
| sentences that would start with the same prefix such as "Your
| voice".
| meindnoch wrote:
| You're absolutely right.
|
| Here's why:
| fithisux wrote:
| We're losing our code too.
|
| Skill becomes expensive mechanized commodity
|
| old code is left to rot while people try to survive
|
| we lose our history, we lose our dignity.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Even before LLMs, entire SEO industry was writing content
| optimized to the tee with templates.
| outside1234 wrote:
| We have a channel at work where we share our experiences in using
| AI for software engineering.
|
| Predictably, this has turned into a horror zone of AI written
| slop that all sounds the same, with section titles with "clever"
| checkbox icons, and giant paragraphs that I will never read.
| SMAAART wrote:
| Some people, but not everyone, are abdicating their agency.
| Period.
|
| And that too is an expression of their own agency. #Laissez-faire
| bachittle wrote:
| If you give an LLM enough context, it writes in your voice. But
| it requires using an intelligent model, and very thoughtful
| context development. Most people don't do this because it
| requires effort, and one could argue maybe even more effort than
| just writing the damn thing yourself. It's like trying to teach a
| human, or anyone, how to talk like you: very hard because it
| requires at worst your entire life story.
| ashton314 wrote:
| * it writes in an _imitation_ of your voice.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| Why does this even matter? If it can say something more
| eloquently, in less stilted way something what I wanted to
| say, adding some interesting nuance on the way, while still
| sounding close to me - why not? I meanwhile, can learn one-
| two rhetorical tricks from LLMs reading the result.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Why the f- would I train software to do my thinking and
| reasoning for me!?
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| It is not what training is, but with edgy attitude like
| yours, no one will want to give you their arguments.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Something that freaked me out a little bit is that I've now
| written enough online (i.e.: HN comments) that the top models
| know my voice already and can imitate it on request without
| having to be fed any additional context.
|
| There's a data centre somewhere in the US running additions and
| multiplications through a block of numbers that has captured my
| voice.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Social media has become a reminder of something precious we
| are losing in the age of LLMs: unique voices._
|
| Social media already lost that nearly two decades ago - it died
| as _content marketing_ rose to life.
|
| Don't blame on LLMs what we've long lost due to cancer that is
| advertising[0].
|
| And don't confuse GenAI as a technology with what the cancer of
| advertising coopts it to. The root of the problem isn't in the
| generative models, it's in what they're used for - and the
| problem uses aren't anything new. We've been drowning in slop for
| decades, it's just that GenAI is now cheaper than cheap labor in
| content farms.
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
| Frieren wrote:
| > The root of the problem isn't in the generative models, it's
| in what they're used for
|
| That's like giving weapons to everybody in the world for free,
| and asking to be blamed for the increased deaths and violence.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No, that's like pretending the weapons weren't already
| available. Everyone had assault rifles for two decades,
| giving access to smart rifles isn't really changing anything
| about the nature of the problem.
| nusl wrote:
| Sometime within the next few years I imagine there will be a term
| along the lines of "re-humanise," where folks detox from AI use
| to get back in touch with humanity. At the rate we're going,
| humanity has become a luxury and will soon demand a premium.
| e-dant wrote:
| You never had a voice to lose
| redwheelbarr0w wrote:
| test
| ruuda wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree, I wrote about this at
| https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions.
| stonecharioteer wrote:
| Your post reminded me how I could tell my online friend was
| pissed just because she typed "okay." or "K." instead of
| "okay". We could sense our emotional state from texting. One of
| those friendships you form over text through the internet. I
| wouldn't recommend forming these too deeply since some in
| person nuance is lost, we could never transition to real life
| friends despite living close by. But we could tell what mood we
| were in just from typing. It was wild.
| poolnoodle wrote:
| I'm just using the internet less and less recreationally. Except
| for pirating movies.
| fpauser wrote:
| 100% agree.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| The problem with the "your voice is unique and an asset" argument
| is what we've promoted for so long in the software industry.
|
| Worse is better.
|
| A unique, even significantly superior, voice will find it hard to
| compete against the pure volume of terrible non unique LLM
| generated voices.
|
| Worse is better.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| The posts sounds beige and AI-generated ironically.
|
| In any case, as someone who experimented with AI for creative
| writing, LLM _do not destroy_ your voice; it does flatten your
| voice, but with minimal effort you can make it sound the way you
| find reflects you thought best.
| logsr wrote:
| In my view LLMs are simply a different method of communication.
| Instead of relying on "your voice" to engage the reader and
| persuade them of your point of view, writing with LLMs for
| analysis and exploration through LLMs, is about creating an idea
| space that a reader can interact with and explore from their own
| perspective, and develop their own understanding of, which is
| much more powerful.
| Lapsa wrote:
| police ignores me for 2 years and counting
| ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote:
| There has been an explosion in verbose status update emails at my
| job recently which have all clearly been written by ChatGPT. It's
| the fucking emojis though that drive me wild. It's so hard to
| read the actual content when there's an emoji for every single
| sentence.
|
| And now when I see these emoji fests I instantly lose interest
| and trust in the content of the email. I have to spend time
| sifting through the fluff to find what's actually important.
|
| LLMs are creating an assymetric imbalance in effort to write vs
| effort to read. What is taking my coworkers probably a couple
| minutes to draft requires me 2-3x as long to decipher. That
| imbalance used to be the opposite.
|
| I've raised the issue before at work and one response I got was
| to "use AI to summarize the email." Are we really spending all
| this money and energy on the worlds worst compression algorithm?
| btbuildem wrote:
| I think that's for the best. It was human-made slop, now it's
| automated slop. Can't wait for people to stop paying it attention
| so that it withers. "It" being the whole attention economy scam.
| franciscator wrote:
| Deus Ex-Machina is starting to take off ...
| simianwords wrote:
| 1) People who use LLMs for generating
|
| 2) People who use LLMs for understanding
|
| I think I'll stick to 2) for many reasons.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Well - voice is ultimately coupled to a person. LLMs thus fake
| and pretend being a person. There are, however had, use cases for
| LLMs too. I saw it used for the creation of video games; also
| content generated by hobbyists. So, while I think AI should
| actually die, for hobbyists generating mods for old games, AI
| voice overs may not be that bad. Just as AI generating images for
| free to play browser games may not be solely bad either.
|
| Of course there are also horrible use of AI, liars, scummy
| cheaters and fake videos on youtube, owned by a greedy mega-
| corporation that sold its soul to AI. So the bad use cases may be
| higher than the good use cases, but there are good use cases, and
| the "losing our voice to LLMs" isn't a whole view of it, sorry.
| tptacek wrote:
| If you care about voice, you still _can_ get a lot of value from
| LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they
| generate.
|
| I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing.
| A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor
| considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe
| audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put
| in, and how far will I need to cut it back?". Then I'll go
| paragraph by paragraph asking whether it has a clear topic,
| flows, and then I'll say "I'm not sure this graf earns its keep"
| or something like that.
|
| GPT5 and Claude will always respond to these kinds of prompts
| with suggested alternative language. I'm convinced the trick to
| this is _never to use those words_ , even if they sound like an
| improvement over my own. At the first point where that happens, I
| get dial my LLM-wariness up to 11 and take a break. Usually the
| answer is to restructure paragraphs, not to apply the spot
| improvement (even in my own words) the LLM is suggesting.
|
| LLMs are quite good at (1) noticing multi-paragraph arcs that go
| nowhere (2) spotting repetitive word choices (3) keeping things
| active voice and keeping subject/action clear (4) catching non-
| sequiturs (a constant problem for me; I have a really bad habit
| of assuming the reader is already in my head or has been chatting
| with me on a Slack channel for months).
|
| Another thing I've come to trust LLMs with: writing two versions
| of a graf and having it select the one that fits the piece
| better. Both grafs are me. I get that LLMs will have a bias
| towards some language patterns and I stay alert to that, but
| there's still not that much opportunity for an LLM to throw me
| into "LLM-voice".
| vee-kay wrote:
| I think you just did another non-sequitur.. What is a graf? Is
| it journalism slang for "paragraph"?
| tptacek wrote:
| Yeah, easier to type, easier to read, deliberately misspelled
| so it sticks out to copyeditors. I use it sometimes without
| thinking. An LLM would have caught that! :)
| Animats wrote:
| > copyeditors
|
| Do those jobs still exist?
| lambda wrote:
| All of this sounds like something you could just do yourself
| after putting a piece down for a day or two and coming back to
| it with fresh eyes. What benefit is there of cooking the oceans
| with a bullshit generator?
|
| Like, sure, it's possible to do this with an LLM, but it's also
| possible to do it without, at roughly similar levels of effort,
| without contributing to all of the negative externalities of
| the LLM/genAI ecosystem.
| tptacek wrote:
| If you don't want to eat meat on Fridays, I'm certainly not
| going to tell you that you should. You do you.
| fragmede wrote:
| Because the complaints about the power and water usage of AI
| are mostly motivated reasoning. I don't like AI, therefore
| I'm going to find a reason not to like it. I Listen, if it's
| Greta Thunberg pointing out that AI datacenters use a lot of
| resources, yeah, I'm willing to listen. But when the voices
| saying "but what about all the water/electricity is wasting"
| is coming from individuals I know personally haven't
| previously given a shit about the planet or conservation or
| recycling and have made fun of me for reusing things instead
| of throwing stuff into the garbage, I'm sorry, but those
| complaints from those individuals fall on deaf ears. Not
| saying you are, just a theme I've noticed with people in my
| life.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Being able to get useful feedback immediately rather than 48
| hours later is useful if you need text today.
| golergka wrote:
| Anything you could automate you could do yourself. What's the
| benefit?
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| What I struggle more with the things like Grammarly, where it's
| a mix of fixing very nitpicky grammar spelling structure issues
| that push things from casual writing with my own voice into
| more of a professional tone.
| danenania wrote:
| They're also great, in my experience, for overcoming writer's
| block and procrastination. Just as a rubber duck to bounce
| ideas off of and follow different threads.
|
| It makes the writing process faster and more enjoyable, despite
| never using anything the LLM generates directly.
|
| Workshopping with humans is even better, if you find the right
| humans, but they have an annoying habit of not being available
| 24/7.
| 6thbit wrote:
| It's a little odd for a capitalist society that values outputs so
| highly to also value process as much.
|
| We've proved we can sort of value it, through supporting
| sustainability/environmental practices, or at least _pretending
| to_.
|
| I just wonder, what will be the "Carbon credits" of the AI era.
| In my mind a dystopian scheme of AI-driven companies buying
| "Human credits" from companies that pay humans to do things.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I generally agree with the sentiment, but I can't help but feel
| like we're attributing to much of this change to LLMs. While
| they're certainly driving this change even further, this is a
| trend that has already started way before LLMs became as
| widespread as they are today.
|
| What personally disturbs me the most is the self censorship that
| was initially brought forward by TikTok and quickly spread to
| other platforms - all in the name of being as advertiser friendly
| as possible.
|
| LinkedIn was the first platform where I really observed people
| losing their unique voice in favor of corporate friendly - please
| hire me - speak. Now this seems to be basically any platform. The
| only platform that seems to be somewhat protected from it is
| Reddit, where many mods seem to dislike LLMs as much as everybody
| else. But more likely, its just less noticeable
| anon7000 wrote:
| > the self censorship that was initially brought forward by
| TikTok
|
| I think that's even too soon! YouTube has had rules around
| being advertising friendly for longer than TikTok has existed.
| And the FCC has fined swearing on public broadcasts for like
| 50+ years.
|
| But I do agree, we're attributing too much to LLMs. We don't
| see personal, human-oriented content online because social
| media is just not about community.
|
| 1. Young people (correctly) realized they could make lots of
| money being influencers on social media. TikTok does make that
| easier than ever. I have close friends who make low 6 figures
| streaming on TikTok (so obviously they quit the low wage jobs
| they were doing before).
|
| 2. People have been slowly waking up to the fact that social
| media has always been pretty fake. I quit 6 years ago, and most
| of my friends have slowly reduced how much they use it. All of
| the platforms are legally incentivized to only care about
| profit and engagement. Capitalism doesn't allow a company to
| care about community and personal voice, if algorithmic feeds
| of influencers will make them more money.
|
| There's still good content out there if you know where to look.
| But digital human connection happens in group chats, DMs, and
| FaceTime, not on public social media.
| benterix wrote:
| A devils advocate in me would say that this post was authored by
| one of LLM models creator realizing they really need more fresh
| meat to train on.
| TonyAlicea10 wrote:
| I'm the OP. I can attest that I am not an LLM model creator! :)
|
| I consider myself an LLM pragmatist. I use them where they are
| useful, and I educate people on them and try to push back on
| all the hype marketing disguised as futurism from LLM creators.
| tetraca wrote:
| Subsume your agency. Stop writing. Stop learning. Stop thinking
| for yourself. Become hylic. Just let the machine think everything
| for you and act as it acts. Those that own them are benevolent
| and there will never be consequences.
| nechalnikaSama wrote:
| it's not the voice. it's the lack of need to talk tough about the
| hard problems. if you accept what is and just babble, anything
| you write will sound like babbling.
|
| there's enough potential and wiggle room but people align, even
| when they don't, just to align.
|
| when Rome was flourishing, only a few saw what was lingering in
| the cracks but when in flourishing Rome ...
| morgengold wrote:
| First we need to think about why we consume content? I am happy
| to read llm created stuff when I need to know sth and it delivers
| 100%. Other reasons like "get perspectives of real humans", or
| "resonate" ... not so much
| lutusp wrote:
| I'm in complete agreement with the idea that people should
| express themselves in their own words. But this collides with
| certain facts about U.S. adults (and students). This summary
| (https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...)
| reveals that:
|
| * 28% of U.S. adults are at or below "level 1" literacy,
| essentially meaning people unable to function in an environment
| that requires written language skills.
|
| * 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
|
| These statistics refer to an inability to _interpret_ written
| material, much less _create_ it. As to the latter, a much smaller
| percentage of U.S. adults can compose a coherent sentence.
|
| We're moving toward a world where people will default to reliance
| on LLMs to generate coherent writing, including college students,
| who according to recent reports are sometimes _encouraged_ to
| rely on LLMs to complete their assignments.
|
| If we care to, we can distinguish LLM output from that of a
| typical student: An LLM won't make the embarrassing grammatical
| and spelling errors that pepper modern students' prose.
|
| Yesterday I saw this headline in a major online media outlet:
| "LLMs now exceed the intelect [sic] of the average human." You
| don't say.
| officehero wrote:
| It's more that people who historically didn't have a voice now
| have one. It's often stupid but sometimes also interesting and
| innovative. Saw a channel where a university professor "I" comes
| to the realization she's been left-leaning/biased for decades,
| that her recent male students no longer dare engage in debate
| because of shaming/gaslighting etc. Then I click channel
| description and turns out it's "100% original writing". Now if it
| hadn't said that it would be strawman propaganda. But now it
| does... Not sure how to put a finger on it, there's some nervous
| excitement when reading these days, not knowing who the sender
| is, getting these 'reveal' moments when finding out whole thing
| was made up by some highschool kid with AI or insane person.
| satisfice wrote:
| Don't write anything with LLMs, ever. Unless having no
| credibility is your goal.
| ftrsprvln wrote:
| [Sometime in the near future] The world's starved for
| authenticity. The last original tweet crowned a God... then
| killed the kid chasing that same high. Trillionaires run
| continent-wide data centers, endlessly spinning up agents that
| hire cheap physical labor to scavenge the world for any spark of
| novelty. The major faith is an LLM cult forecasting the turning
| of the last stone. The rest of us choke on recycled ad slop.
| pksebben wrote:
| The potentially bitter pill to swallow here is that we all need
| to get better at critical thinking.
|
| There's a lot of talk over whether LLMs make discourse 'better'
| or 'worse', with very little attention given to the crisis we
| were having with online discourse before they came around.
| Edelman was astroturfing long before GPT. Fox 'news' and the
| spectrum of BS between them and the NYT (arranged by how
| sophisticated they considered their respective pools of rubes to
| be) have always, _always_ been propaganda machines and PR firms
| at heart wearing the skin of journalism like buffalo bill.
|
| We have needed to learn to think critically for a very long time.
|
| Consider this; if you are capable of reading between the lines,
| and dealing with what you read or hear on the merits of the
| thoughts contained therein, then how are you vulnerable to slop?
| If it was written by an AI (or a reporter, or some rando on the
| internet) but contains ideas that you can turn over and
| understand critically for yourself, is it still slop? If it's
| dumb and it works, it's not dumb.
|
| I'm not even remotely suggesting that AI will usher in a flood of
| good ideas. No, it's going to be used to pump propaganda and
| disseminate bullshit at massive scale (and perhaps occasionally
| help develop good ideas).
|
| We need to inoculate ourselves against bullshit, as a society and
| a culture. Be a skeptic. Ironnman arguments against your beliefs.
| Be ready to bench test ideas when you hear them and make it
| difficult for nonsense to flourish. It is (and has been) high
| time to get loud about critical thinking.
| raver1975 wrote:
| I am going to name my first egg baby Llmon
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