Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 397 posts

Re: AI makes you boring

#101

Post by techblueberry »

aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

What's interesting is how AI makes this problem worse but not actually "different", especially if you want to go deep on something. Like listicles were always plentiful, even before AI, but inferior to someone in substack going deep on a topic. AI generated music will be the same way, there's always been an excessive abundance of crap music, and now we'll just have more more of it. The weird thing is how it will hit the uncanny valley. Potentially "Better" than the crap that came before it, but significantly worse than what someone who cares will produce.

DJing is an interesting example. Compared with like composition, Beatmatching is "relatively" easy to learn, but was solved with CD turntables that can beatmatch themselves, and yet has nothing to do with the taste you have to develop to be a good DJ.

Re: AI makes you boring

#104

Post by minimaxir »

Kalpaka wrote: post #51

[dead]

> Not more blog posts, more emails, more boilerplate — but something structurally new?

This is a point that often results in bad faith arguments from both AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics. Enthusiasts will say "everything is a remix and the most creative works are built on previous works" while skeptics will say "LLMs are stochastic parrots and cannot create anything new by technical definition".

The truth is somewhere in the middle, which unfortunately invokes the Golden Mean Fallacy that makes no one happy.

Re: AI makes you boring

#105

Post by bcrosby95 »

tptacek wrote: post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

What if the AI produces writing that better accomplishes my goal than writing it myself? Why do you feel differently about these two acts?

For what it's worth, the unifying idea behind both is basically a "hazing ritual", or more neutrally phrased, skin in the game. It takes time and energy to look at things people produce. You should spend time and energy making sure I'm not looking at a pile of shit. Doesn't matter if it's a website or prose.

Obviously some people don't. And that's why the signal to noise ratio is becoming shit very quickly.

Re: AI makes you boring

#106

Post by clint »

Yet another boring, repetitive, unhelpful article about why AI is bad. Did the 385th iteration of this need to be written by yet another person? Why did this person think it was novel or relevant to write? Did they think it espouses some kind of unique point of view?

Re: AI makes you boring

#107

Post by jihadjihad »

> Ideas are then further refined when you try to articulate them. This is why we make students write essays. It’s also why we make professors teach undergraduates. Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea.

I agree, but the very act of writing out your intention/problem/goal/whatever can crystallize your thinking. Obviously if you are relying on the output spat out by the LLM, you're gonna have a bad time. But IMO one of the great things about these tools is that, at their best, they can facilitate helpful "rubber duck" sessions that can indeed get you further on a problem by getting stuff out of your own head.

Re: AI makes you boring

#108

Post by tptacek »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #105
tptacek wrote: post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

What if the AI produces writing that better accomplishes my goal than writing it myself? Why do you feel differently about these two acts? For what it's worth, the unifying idea behind both is basically a "hazing ritual", or more neutrally phrased, skin in the game. It takes time and energy to look at things people produce. You should spend time and energy making sure I'm not looking at a pile of shit. Doesn't matter…

It doesn't, is the problem. If it did, I would feel differently.

Re: AI makes you boring

#109

Post by pwython »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #4
tptacek wrote: post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

It's not a hazing ritual, it's a valuable learning experience. Yes, it's nice to have the option of foregoing it, but it's a tradeoff.

Did you just "it's not x, it's y" me?

Re: AI makes you boring

#110

Post by overgard »

tptacek wrote: post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

Gatekeeping can be a good thing -- if you have to put effort into what you create, you're going to be more selective about what ideas you invest in. I wouldn't call that "bloodying your forehead", I'd call it putting work into something before demanding attention
Post reply on HN