AI—DR
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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
141–150 of 729 posts
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#142AI—DR
I appreciate the pushback!
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#143By the way, just want to say, AI can be good for some bedtime stories while trying to fall asleep lol
After you've exhausted your favorite audiobooks, I mean
Like, I love The Wind in the Willows, but I wish the part where Toad and the gang go on the road in the cart lasted for longer. I asked ChatGPT to invent some fill-in chapters matching the same style and speak it out loud, and it kinda did OK actually.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#144It's an ego issue for most people. For one, part of it comes from genuine intimidation or fear, the notion that a machine can be smarter than you, or at least produce answers that are more knowledgeable than you could. But I think the more striking issue is what LLMs do to the perceived value of expertise. Especially in engineering there's this weird pecking order hierarchy, where someone should be listened to just "…
Admittedly a controversial take, but I think some of the AI skepticism I see is driven by status anxiety, alongside the perfectly legitimate complaints about verbosity, low-effort output, lack of a human voice, etc.
The bar for what counts as expertise is shifting. If someone with relatively little background can use an LLM to get to a reasonably informed answer much faster than before, then experience and credentials alone carry a bit less signalling power than they used to. That obviously doesn't mean the inexperienced person suddenly has the judgement, context or intuition of an actual expert, but I do think some of the hostility toward AI comes from discomfort with that change.
AI is still wrong, goes in weird circular loops, and doesn't solve the fundamental human problems around judgement, organization, learning curves, accountability, etc. But it does seem to be raising the baseline expectation for what a competent knowledge worker should produce, and I feel that shift is genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of people who based their identities around being rigorous abstract problem solvers.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#145The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…
People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.
I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software can start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.
What drives people to cheat at competitive games? I imagine it’s the same genes.
Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#147My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…
Have you considered talking about it? You're in a professional environment collectively working in a new way with a group of people. It's up to somebody to have opinions about what does and doesn't suck. If you silently go along and don't say anything you're dooming yourself and all of us to a lifetime of this garbage.
Fighting the ocean is futile
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#148One of the ways I think about this is to treat AI as if it were another person. If I want to give information to Bob but I think Alice might do a better job of writing something, I'm not going to ask Alice and then copy-paste her response to Bob. I'd either tell Bob to ask Alice, or loop Alice into the conversation. Me being the middleman between Alice and Bob can cause several issues including delayed communication, miscommunication, and obscured provenance.
Alice being AI or a real person doesn't change those factors much.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#149The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…
You and I and everyone else need to make it clear to people who do this that we don't like them doing this and we think they are uncool.
Me calling someone uncool would be rather hypocritical in afraid! I've done some interesting things, cool even, but that doesn't necessarily make conversation with me interesting/cool! I'll go with letting them know I find it dickish and perhaps even a tad offensive.
Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
#150The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…
This is why even if I ask GPT or Claude or whatever to rewrite an email, I still rewrite it by hand with my own words, what I look for is, did the AI remove sentences where I repated myself or that were too wordy? Perfect, I'll ommit those details.