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Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

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Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#161

Post by WillAdams »

moffkalast wrote: post #72
keiferski wrote: post #60

I bookmarked this comment a few months ago because I thought it was hilarious and increasingly accurate: It's approaching a very strange situation where people make overly wordy and bloated AI generated content and other people try to use AI to compress it back into useful pellets vaguely corresponding to the actual prompts used to generate the initial content. Which were the only bits anybody cared about in the firs…

Reminds me of this comic: https://preview.redd.it/v1ylid5639ra1.png?width=1024&auto=we... In a culture where pointless busywork is seen as mandatory to appear proper, people will eventually automate it.

Rather than busywork, why can't we have a shorter work-week?

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#162

Post by WillAdams »

criddell wrote: post #40
talkingtab wrote: post #34

Much of the trash on the internet has nothing to do with AI, but instead is caused by using AdSense type funding. If you have a site and use revenue from ads as your funding, then the way to in increase your revenue is more show more ads. So add more fluff, move the actual thing people are looking for to the bottom, etc. Oh and add controversy, "The only authentic". Then add sex - a suggestive photo. The thing is tha…

Speaking of recipes, I just tried this on a page with a quiche recipe. The original page was pretty much a novella built around a recipe. OPs tool worked perfectly. Nicely done.

There is a special-purpose tool for this:

https://www.justtherecipe.com/

which was mentioned here a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160959

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#163

Post by chaosite »

lolinder wrote: post #152
DanielHB wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really interesting because I have been using LLMs a lot for reading legalese documents. At least in the realm of Legal matters we already have this dynamic of "people make overly wordy and bloated LAWYER generated content and other people try to use LAWYERS to compress it back into useful pellet" So at least for legal documents this LLM craze is a big improvement! It is much harder to out-spend other people on…

Obligatory warning: a lot of what seems like bloat in legal documents is there for a reason and has a specific purpose that your LLM isn't guaranteed to be able to handle. Sure, some lawyers add bloat just for the sake of it, but in many cases the text is there because it changes or clarifies the meaning of the surrounding document in a way that matters in court. An LLM can probably help you understand the document i…

And in other cases the text is there because it has been used in other legal documents, and might not be needed for this document, but those documents were good and it doesn't cost anything to put that text in so we should keep using it.

In other words it's a cargo cult.

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#164

Post by lolinder »

chaosite wrote: post #163
lolinder wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory warning: a lot of what seems like bloat in legal documents is there for a reason and has a specific purpose that your LLM isn't guaranteed to be able to handle. Sure, some lawyers add bloat just for the sake of it, but in many cases the text is there because it changes or clarifies the meaning of the surrounding document in a way that matters in court. An LLM can probably help you understand the document i…

And in other cases the text is there because it has been used in other legal documents, and might not be needed for this document, but those documents were good and it doesn't cost anything to put that text in so we should keep using it. In other words it's a cargo cult.

The question is, do you trust an LLM to distinguish the cargo cult from the actually necessary text?

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#165

Post by DanielHB »

lolinder wrote: post #152
DanielHB wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really interesting because I have been using LLMs a lot for reading legalese documents. At least in the realm of Legal matters we already have this dynamic of "people make overly wordy and bloated LAWYER generated content and other people try to use LAWYERS to compress it back into useful pellet" So at least for legal documents this LLM craze is a big improvement! It is much harder to out-spend other people on…

Obligatory warning: a lot of what seems like bloat in legal documents is there for a reason and has a specific purpose that your LLM isn't guaranteed to be able to handle. Sure, some lawyers add bloat just for the sake of it, but in many cases the text is there because it changes or clarifies the meaning of the surrounding document in a way that matters in court. An LLM can probably help you understand the document i…

I have been using it to ask questions about the document. For example I throw the document at the LLM and ask something and ask it to quote the original text. Then I ctrl+f the original text for the quote just to make sure the LLM is right.

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#166

Post by _heimdall »

josephg wrote: post #150
_heimdall wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are interesting parallels between LLMs and downloading pirated movies/shows. In the first case its a trillion dollar business based on scraping the entire internet and sharing out a lossy, compressed version of the content with no attribution or financial contributions to the original creator. In the second case its a shady, technically illegal practice of scraping DVDs or online video streams and sharing a los…

> no attribution or financial contributions to the original creator This is an interesting idea, but I don't think it makes much sense to apply that logic to classic kitchen recipes. Who, exactly, is the original creator here? The common recipes I'm asking chatgpt about - crepes, homemade pasta or bechamel sauce - are hundreds of years old. We could extend your metaphor to say that the bechamel sauce recipe has been…

I think the underlying question there, and one I don't have a solid answer for, is whether ChatGPT is considered to be scraping the underlying recipe or the webpage itself and all the content that goes along with it. The recipe may be centuries old potentially, but the page, content, images, etc are all content created and owned by the site creator

Edit: for a better example - Brothers Grimm stories aren't protected, but if someone makes a movie based on those stories the movie absolutely protected.

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#167

Post by _heimdall »

vidarh wrote: post #148
_heimdall wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure calculating GDP by production would capture this. It should, mind you, as all GDP calculations should get the same answer, but a silly/stupid example of two LLMs digging and filling in a hole may not fit in a production calculation. > the production approach estimates the total value of economic output and deducts the cost of intermediate goods that are consumed in the process (like those of materials…

In both income and expenditure-based GDP calculations income or consumption by households are part of the calculation (which means the calculations will not give the same result). You can make an argument that if the hypothetical workers are salaried they're not technically paid for any given task, while I'd argue that there was an opportunity cost (they could have done other work than digging/filling it in), so ther…

Sounds like you prefer expenditure or income calculations over production. That makes sense and I think I'd agree.

I'm not sold on tying it back to opportunity cost though. That may require knowing the potential value of work that could have been done instead. It also means that we could view GDP as the potential economic value if everything is optimized, regardless of what is actually produced. That feels wrong to me at first glance but I'd have to really dig into it further to have a more clear argument why.

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#168

Post by worldsayshi »

lolinder wrote: post #155
bloomingkales wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s also add the fact that most sites cannot afford AI.

Have you looked into OpenAI's GPT-4o pricing lately? They charge $10 for 1M output tokens, or 500k tokens for the price of a $5/mo VPS. If we assume a generous 2 tokens per word on average (OpenAI suggests it's actually 3 tokens per 4 words), that's still 5 full 50k word novels worth of text every month for the price of a single DigitalOcean droplet.

This pricing cannot be sustainable in the long term right? The LLM companies are currently bleeding money.

Re: Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

#169

Post by efitz »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #157
xnorswap wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of lawyers though, it's more akin to paying someone to find and document edge cases. That tends to end up verbose. In the case of other realms, it's just padding because previously word-count was a metric used as a proxy for quality or depth of analysis.

In effect, we pay lawyers to be ridiculously pedantic for us where pedanticism is required or desired. That level of pedanticism elsewhere, though, is incredibly annoying or precisely what is not desired.

I’ve wondered from time to time if we could replace some of the wordiness of laws and legal documents with bullet lists. For example, a trial about some interpretation of a word in a law could be contributed back to the law as a bullet point that says, “this also applies if …”.
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