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It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

blog.pabloecortez.com

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Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#201

Post by alyxya »

furyofantares wrote: post #89
alyxya wrote: post #54

I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me. > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever el…

People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they…

That’s true, I just wanted to offer a counter perspective to the anti-AI sentiment in the blog post. I agree that the slop issue is probably more common and egregious, but it’s unhelpful to discount all AI assisted writing because of slop. The only way I see to counteract slop is to care about the reputation of the author.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#202

Post by babypuncher »

nbardy wrote: post #46
jihadjihad wrote: post #23

It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji... You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And

"Let the AI check its own homework, what could go wrong?"

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#204

Post by saint_fiasco »

I sometimes share interesting AI conversations with my friends using the "share" button on the AI websites. Often the back-and-forth is more interesting than the final output anyway.

I think some people turn AI conversations into blog posts that they pass off as their own because of SEO considerations. If Twitter didn't discourage people sharing links, perhaps we would see a lot more tweet threads that start with https://chatgpt.com/share/... and https://claude.ai/share/... instead of people trying to pass off AI generated content as their own.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#205

Post by darrenf »

latexr wrote: post #114
nbardy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And

This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time? This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose. And no, using different models doesn’t fix the issue. That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that so…

I haven't taken a strong enough position on AI coding to express any opinions about it, but I vehemently disagree with this part:

> This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose.

I've been the first reviewer for all PRs I've raised, before notifying any other reviewers, for so many years that I couldn't even tell you when I started doing it. Going through the change set in the Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket interface, for me, seems to activate an different part of my brain than I was using when locked in vim. I'm quick to spot typos, bugs, flawed assumptions, edge cases, missing tests, to add comments to pre-empt questions ... you name it. The "reading code" and "writing code" parts of my brain often feel disconnected!

Obviously I don't approve my own PRs. But I always, always review them. Hell, I've also long recommended the practice to those around me too for the same reasons.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#206

Post by ab_io »

jihadjihad wrote: post #23

It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji... You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

100%. My team started using graphite.dev, which provides AI generated PR descriptions that are so bloated with useless content that I've learned to just ignore them. The issue is they are doing a kind of reverse inference from the code changes to a human-readable description, which doesn't actually capture the intent behind the changes.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#207

Post by dinkleberg »

vzaliva wrote: post #192

It is similarly unsulting to read an ungrammatical blog post full of misspelings. So I do not subscribe to the part of your argument "No, don't use it to fix your grammar". Using AI to fix your grammar, if done right, is the part of the learning process.

A critical piece of this is to ensure it is just fixing the grammar and not rewriting it in its own AI voice is key. This is why I think tools like grammarly or similar still have a useful edge over just directly using an LLM as the UX let's you pick and choose which suggestions to adopt. And they also provide context on why they are making a given suggestion. It still often kills your "personal voice", so you need to be judicious with its use.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#208

Post by mmcromp »

mikepurvis wrote: post #139
jihadjihad wrote: post #23

It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji... You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

I would never put up a copilot PR for colleague review without fully reviewing it myself first. But once that’s done, why not?

You're not "reviewing" ai's slop code. If you're using it for generation, use it as a starting point and fix it up to the proper code quality

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#209

Post by latexr »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #160
latexr wrote: post #15

This assumes the person using LLMs to put out a blog post gives a single shit about their readers, pride, or “being human”. They don’t. They care about the view so you load the ad which makes them a fraction of a cent, or the share so they get popular so they can eventually extract money or reputation from it. I agree with you that AI slop blog posts are a bad thing, but there are about zero people who use LLMs to sp…

Don’t most ad platforms and search engines track bounce rate? If too many users see that generic opening paragraph, bullet list and scattering of emoji, and immediately hit back or close, they lose revenue.

Assuming most people can detect LLM writing quickly. I don’t think that’s true. In this very submission we see people referencing cases where colleagues couldn’t detect something is written by LLM even after reading everything.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#210

Post by photonthug »

nbardy wrote: post #46
jihadjihad wrote: post #23

It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji... You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And

> fully AI generated and fully AI review

This reminds me of an awesome bit by Žižek where he describes an ultra-modern approach to dating. She brings the vibrator, he brings the synthetic sleeve, and after all the buzzing begins and the simulacra are getting on well, the humans sigh in relief. Now that this is out of the way they can just have a tea and a chat.

It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish

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