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The revolt of the reader

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#21

Post by throwaway219450 »

> Today, legitimate businesses are very careful about how they use bulk e-mail

I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder.

PR pieces and software companies don’t write tutorials to be helpful, they are advertising to you. If the LLM can do it for cheap, they really don’t care.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#22

Post by Forgeties79 »

Lerc wrote: post #13

How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text? If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it. There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI. There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand th…

This is very handwavy and dismissive. It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. We’ve all seen so many examples of the exact same cadence and verbiage that we’ve learned how to identify it pretty reliably. The ones who are “slipping past us” are actually putting in the work make not just pasting raw LLM outputs, which is the real issue here. If somebody has edited it meaningfully after the fact then it’s not the same crime.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#23

Post by mitxela »

jonstewart wrote: post #6
duhhhhh1212 wrote: post #3

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap. Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).

AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.

AI comments are auto-flagged, but not posts.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#24

Post by dcre »

bcantrill wrote: post #7
duhhhhh1212 wrote: post #3

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap. Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).

That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking." Glad those words proved prophetic! [0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the…

“Not every one of those 11,970 carries the same weight, and the paper is careful about that rather than rounding it up.”

AAUGH IT BURNS

Re: The revolt of the reader

#25

Post by Forgeties79 »

>to use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader: we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create.

Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#26

Post by rcxdude »

Lerc wrote: post #13

How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text? If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it. There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI. There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand th…

I don't think this is about edge cases where someone has successfully disguised the writing to some degree: the current crop of LLMs have some pretty blatant (and frankly annoying) habits by default, ones that are hard to miss once you have read a decent amount of their output. If I had to describe them broadly, I would say they are a collection of habits which are common in certain kinds of persuasive and emotive writing, but are usually applied way out of proportion to the topic at hand, which tends to make the result quite grandiose, overly dramatic, and tiring to read: a LLM will often write a TODO app README like it's a cross between a thriller novel, a political speech, and a bombshell news article. There's lots of specific tics (and just by sheer volume and uniformity almost any habit an LLM picks up is going to rapidly shoot into cliche regardless of its own merit) but this is the general effect which I think is objectionable independent of the source of the text.

I do think the sensitivity to it can vary a lot: it depends a lot on how much and how closely you read the text, and how much exposure you have to LLM writing. Certainly it seems like a lot of people just don't really notice, or at least don't care much.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#27

Post by pavo-etc »

duhhhhh1212 wrote: post #3

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap. Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).

I would go even further, I want a browser extension that scans all words on every page and colours them more and more transparent as the likelihood of llm prose is increased.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#28

Post by edoceo »

cagenut wrote: post #9

if its not worth your time to write, its not worth my time to read this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately

I hate to say this but AI assisted short pitch deks from founder to angel (usually their first time) have improved with AI. But also, they follow the same formula so are sorta obvious. Still, the decks are generally more business focused than typical founders early deck being very product/solution oriented.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#29

Post by bcantrill »

dcre wrote: post #24
bcantrill wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking." Glad those words proved prophetic! [0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the…

“Not every one of those 11,970 carries the same weight, and the paper is careful about that rather than rounding it up.” AAUGH IT BURNS

Right?! When I hit "That work was genuinely valuable" I literally hollered in exasperation.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#30

Post by dyauspitr »

This meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.
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