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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

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

#511

Post by johnnyanmac »

kennyadam wrote: post #310
yoyohello13 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! that comment you linked speaks to me. I was watching a review video for a game yesterday that was so obviously written by AI it was actually painful to listen to. I started reading the comments and there were several people praising this Youtuber on their great use of metaphor. Literally "subbed because you're such an amazing writer." It actually shook me to my core. If those were real people making those commen…

At least you didn’t over-react. Some people seem so afraid of consuming AI-generated content that they see it everywhere. A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI. In the comments for any blog post or article that hits the HN front page, there is always someone confidently calling it out for being unmistakeably writ…

>A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI.

In this era, I live by two principles

1. Do my best to avoid AI slop. If you agree, this is straightforward. I don't always succeed and I'm sure I've "fallen for it" in quite a few places, but I disengage if I sense it.

2. Let sleeping dogs lie. Because I'm not some almighty judge of AI, I'm not going around accusing others of doing so. There is zero benefit for me to call out random internet pieces on if something is AI. And ultimately, I'm in discussions to engage with humans, not to monitor bots nor even to argue about the existence of bots (I feel I've said all I can on the topic, I have moved on internally in terms of discussion).

>It was apparently good enough for people to praise it specifically. Why is that a problem?

Writing is subjective, but I can certainly see some dangerous anti-patterns develop if you take bad advice as a beginner, especially advice that ultimately came from hallucinations in an LLM.

I was watching a Youtube video about "developing taste" and how culture has been impacted in the modern age. TYou risk becoming "tasteless" consuming AI slop, because AI by its nature is trying to average out all the inputs and cut of all the edges of any given culture. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you just wanted to get a brief overview of a culture, but is poison if it comes time to try and become part of that culture.

as a huge summation of an interesting video: There's 3 aspects of a culture: embodied,objectified, and institutionalized. it's never been easier to pretend to be a "poser" in this era of AI and be rewarded for it, because AI makes objectified easier than ever. But it doesn't mean it truly embodies you into the culture. And that's dangerous for multiple reasons (in my eyes).

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

#512

Post by anematode »

kqr wrote: post #503
LPisGood wrote: post #56

My 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…

I think your last sentence is getting close to the truth. You're no longer the audience for those descriptions. Other robots are. I'm not saying that's good or bad because I don't know, but I think that's the idea of dumping all that junk into PR descriptions. However, annoyingly, we still need to review those descriptions very closely, because the robots are trained to put a lot of weight into things they read in th…

Even worse, in a brownfield codebase that was once fairly light with comments, that's now being subject to these modifications, the insane amounts of commentary around the parts newly touched by AI lead to an excessive emphasis on those parts, for both human and AI readers (who think, well if this one part is commented so thoroughly, it must be unusually subtle)

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

#513

Post by teo_zero »

jackjeff wrote: post #183
rockinghigh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.

There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.

> using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter

I'm sure that's the intention, but the alarming trend, at least here on HN, is crying wolf at the first em-dash.

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

#514

Post by Taek »

preg_match wrote: post #382
koyote wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity. I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by makin…

I have to ask Claude to compact the comments every time, and I give specific criteria for it. Never ever reiterate what’s in the code, never mention decisions not made, never mention the conversation, etc etc. Even then it is conservative. For the love of God, compact the comments. Comments become a huge maintenance burden, especially in the age of AI. They just grow and grow, and then mislead the AI later on.

I just wrote a utility to rip all comments out of the code. Now the code is fully uncommented and it has saved lots of input tokens and also lots of meandering because the model is no longer getting stuck on bad ideas it told itself about.

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

#515

Post by Ekaros »

afr0ck wrote: post #107

I think the main reason many people (including me), very often, lack the motivation to read content that is likely generated by AI is the suspicion that it comes from a place of intellectual laziness. Another reason, based on personal experience, is that AI content may suffer from too much verbosity, too much jargon and over-confidence, which makes the reading experience feel fake and border-line irritating. In many…

It is extremely annoying when you have a certain problem that surely should have someone making a solution for it and then you find a blog post. And in the end blog post doesn't actually solve the issue as it does has final step. But actually never implemented the most important middle bits. Thankfully I found someone who had actually solved that middle bit in workable hack. But still those blogs are really annoying pollution.

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

#516

Post by koe123 »

koyote wrote: post #263
aaaronic wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity. I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by makin…

I have a theory that AI code looks good because you never subsequently come up with your own alternative.

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

#517

Post by teo_zero »

dktoao wrote: post #406

There is a sort of symmetry here with there also being things that everyone writes that no one reads. * Cover Letters * Most test reports * Lots of docs required by the government * I'm sure there are more you can think of So now we can have stuff written that no-one ever writes and no-one ever reads? Hmm...

Even worse: cover letters, presentation letters, even CVs themselves are routinely read by AI, at least in the screening phase.

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

#518

Post by johnnyanmac »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #213
jackjeff wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.

I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander. Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

>Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet).

For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.

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

#519

Post by roarcher »

doix wrote: post #510
foolserrandboy wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, you said "landed"! It's dug into our brains!

I hate that I have to change the way I write to avoid AI-isms. I loved using "load bearing" to describe weird code that you think you can delete but is actually holding everything together. Now people think I'm just parroting what Claude said. It sucks. I want my catch phrases back, I guess this is how em dash users felt

As a former em-dash enjoyer, I indeed feel your pain.

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

#520

Post by bitwize »

LPisGood wrote: post #56

My 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…

> My 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.

They're just helping you understand the whole picture!

> Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name.

You futilely grasp for control and it eludes you. The Way is to ride the tides of life, move with the forces that shape you. Your code base is in the hands of the Machines now.

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