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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

bcantrill.dtrace.org

31–40 of 456 posts

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#31

Why was the title truncated and its casing changed? The original title is > Your intellectual fly is open which makes more sense. Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.

I believe HN does some automated editing of titles to avoid clickbaity titles being displayed. May be that.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#32
So many people seem completely blind to LLM writing, they are fine sharing it on social media or at work. I think it’s people who are “not details people” and are used to judging something without reading it based on superficial cues which is what LLMs are optimized for.

And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory.

On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#33

The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the prose is AI-generated; EDIT: I also link to the original article, and an archived copy if available). Now that archive.org doesn’t mirror many press articles, and now that archive.today is having a lot of…

So does Fair Use in the states?

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#34
post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well.

There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.

And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#35
I think the most important line in this post is: But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you.

When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#36
post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:

1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.

2. The prose style is horrible to read.

If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#37

What baffles me, isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right? And realize how what they put out sounds exactly the same? Or did people completely stop reading what they've "wrote" before hitting that magical submit button?

Yeah I don't quite understand it either. Where's the intersection between people producing AI slop and people that have never read AI slop? I guess it's bigger than we thought... Or maybe they just don't give a shit. That's probably it.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#38
post #23

Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM. I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item. I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challeng…

Some people actually want to enjoy their moment to moment existence on this planet and not read garbage someone shat out. It's just digital pollution.

I hear ya. However, that ship has sailed a long time ago and succumbing to this very idea is exactly why puritans in any form will not survive the next 50 years.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#39
post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effort.
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