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

AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 729 posts

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#371

Post by freetime2 »

Twirrim wrote: post #358
freetime2 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's astonishing to me is how quickly people at my workplace have adopted this habit. Six months ago my manager was vociferously complaining about his boss asking him to review a lengthy document that was clearly AI generated, saying that his boss wasn't even capable of understanding the document the LLM had created. Now the majority of technical communication I get from my manager is just a transcript exported dir…

I've been wondering lately if this is about the end of the road for me for a career in tech (I've had a good long one, so.. maybe?). I'm so tired of AI Slopped architecture documents, code, messages in slack, emails etc. I'm close to flat out rejecting any architecture doc I get that's written by an LLM, because I'm not sure the engineers even understand what they're proposing. The code is often a nightmare under the…

I've decided to leave my current company. It's mostly the result of burnout from working many years at an unsatisfying job, but the advent of AI has certainly exacerbated things. I no longer need the income (although it's certainly nice), and recently have begun to dread the start of every work day. It's time for a change.

I may just get out of the tech industry altogether. But I'm also tempted to try my hand at an indie dev project that I have in mind. With AI, it seems like it would be easier than ever to get a new project off the ground. And I don't really mind AI-assisted development personally. It's mainly all the organizational and interpersonal disruption that is giving me a headache at the moment.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#372

Post by fhe »

gortok wrote: post #36

The 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…

maybe it's not so absolute. if someone else has the talent or takes the effort to come up with a clever prompt that got an interesting response from an LLM, I'd want to read it too. Treating LLMs as a tool, this is not so different from someone else using Blender to create an interesting animation.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#373

Post by nunez »

supermatt wrote: post #162
cortesoft wrote: post #48

I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.

How is this? https://claude.ai/share/99bfee0f-bab9-4593-aabb-377e71f1151d

definitely prefer the rambling; i can break it up into paragraphs sans LLM

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#374

Post by nunez »

jedberg wrote: post #285

Every time this comes up I have to ask, how do you know it is AI? Sure, sometimes there are strong tells, like if they forget to take off the "Do you want me to change anything" at the end. But AI was trained on good writing. Good writing looks like AI. I've had to reduce my use of em dashes for example because they are an "AI tell". I used to like using the term "load bearing". And the list gets longer every day. Ev…

It has that feel to it. Hard to describe. It has a very consistent way of writing that gives it away, even if it's rephrase from text that was previously written by a human.

Beyond that, most AI content is WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY longer than it needs to be to get its point across and is oversaturated with unneeded "mic drop" phrases

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#375

Post by verdverm »

Not the first time this has been used, despite what author wants to claim, not the first time any of this has been said or commented about on HN

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ai%3Bdr

This piece is still slop, human or ai created

fwiw, I'm partial to ns;nt (https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/), but it is different in nuance

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#377

Post by jerezzprime »

gortok wrote: post #36

The 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…

To play devil's advocate here, it is possible for someone to simultaneously use AI to write and also not be a meat proxy. I'm not saying that is the norm, but I have written docs where the vast majority of the words come from AI, but I also spent multiple days on the substance and content.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#378

Post by flitzofolov »

supermatt wrote: post #162
cortesoft wrote: post #48

I really like the point I read somewhere the other day; instead of sending me the AI output, just send me the prompt you used to generate it. That is the only part that contains only the information you are trying to convey. The rest is just guesses flowery language added, and it confuses the actual message being sent.

How is this? https://claude.ai/share/99bfee0f-bab9-4593-aabb-377e71f1151d

This is actually a great representation of what is good and what is insidious about LLM assisted writing.

The practice of writing can serve the purpose of conveying an idea or information to the readers, but it can also be an invaluable tool for the writer to process, digest, and internalize a message.

The act of wordsmithing, and shaping the idea from its raw rambling form into a coherent narrative, is intellectual metabolism.

A good writer will both distill the ideas, present them in such a way that will be pleasurable to their readers, and also bring the reader along the way so they can learn as well, and feel like an active participant.

The LLM tend to produce prose that defeats the purpose for the writer, takes the joy out for the reader, and ultimately does nothing for anyone but take up space.

It's not more words that make good stories, and it's not more code that makes good programs. It's what use is this to anyone, and only humans understand what other humans want and only humans can care.

Seems like people in this thread agree that it's better to express oneself in a less skilled fashion but actually write something that represents your idea, than to present some polished turd and pass it off as your own writing.

Same as a birthday card on some stock paper written in crayon will always be more valuable than a store bought card with generic sentiment.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#379

Post by wpietri »

stronglikedan wrote: post #248
delecti wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the ocean, it's the poster's own team. A simple "AI comments suck" in a sprint retro would be trivially easy and would at least start the conversation.

Doesn't matter. You'll come off as the baddie. It's the foreseeable future. Best just to learn how to interpret AI generated shit, or learn how to run it through AI and have it translate it to a more concise format without all the buzzwords. It'll take getting used to, but it'll save your career.

You don't have to come across as the baddie. There are plenty of neutral ways to start the conversation. E.g., "I notice that there's a lot more generated comments lately. How much are people finding those useful?"

If you really want to save your career, learning how to have real conversations is a vital skill.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#380

Post by x-complexity »

ryankrage77 wrote: post #311
supermatt wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this? https://claude.ai/share/99bfee0f-bab9-4593-aabb-377e71f1151d

The stream-of-consciousness in the prompt is much better than the LLMs response. Yes, it's messy and unpolished, maybe even a little hard to parse, but it's so much richer for it. The way it is written lets me follow your thought process, shows that you were getting the words out quickly without much or any editing, and how you were exploring the idea and making it more concrete by giving it written form. The LLM res…

> Yes, it's messy and unpolished, maybe even a little hard to parse, but it's so much richer for it.

...This part immediately made me link it to the hipster stereotype:

"oh, it's sooooo much better on vinyl because you can hear the cracks & pops"

Neither pieces in the chat log work for me: The prompt was a wall of ramblespeak. The output was a presentation that should've been an email.

Post reply on HN