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

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

#231

Post by zahlman » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

anon84873628 wrote: post #108

wavemode wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs write better than most journalists In my personal experience I strongly disagree. Curious what publications you read wherein this is the case.

I suspect the commenter prefers the concise, factual summary of an LLM. It is true that modern journalism on the web is trying to get ad impressions. After all, this is how we ended up with clickbait. Sure you still have the Economist and Atlantic (which aren't beyond criticism), but your local county paper is an absolute mess. The content is stretched, meandering, and designed to keep you scrolling through more impr…

> concise, factual summary of an LLM.

Pardon; the what?

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

#232

Post by bigstrat2003 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

bcherny wrote: post #166

jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…

> Now, the code is largely high quality...

No. No it is not. Nobody who actually cares about the quality of their work is letting an LLM just turn out code without reviewing it carefully.

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

#233

Post by bigstrat2003 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #199

bcrosby95 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim writing is thinking, but imply writing code isn't thinking. My opinion of LLM design review isn't that high - it seems to miss design tweaks that could vastly simplify corner cases. But if your code isn't written for human consumption maybe it doesn't matter. I'm still directly responsible for what I commit, so I can't just offload it to Claude.

I still write code, I just write it in English now. It's still rock and roll to me.

That... isn't writing code.

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

#234

Post by antonvs » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #206

antonvs wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We reward the appearance of understanding. Which is exactly what happens with human evolution and development. Sure, we can say LLMs don’t have “human” understanding - which is something we can’t really define anyway - as long as we’re not trying to claim LLMs don’t have understanding at all. The latter is a much higher bar. > We define goals that we cannot conceive of reaching without something like understanding…

I don't think its the same. Evolution dealt with the real world where there were real consequences to poor understanding. The reason LLMs are good at math and programming is because selection is truly based on results, not perceived results. I think AI models do have something like understanding - I think Leela understands chess and I think Claude understands code in some very real sense, though not a human sense. Bu…

I think your claim is narrower than I was imagining.

Sure, the exact nature of the understanding that an LLM exhibits is different from a human's. The differences in the training data we're each exposed to can explain a great deal of that, and of course there are architectural differences etc. as well.

But the specific quote I responded to was "We reward the appearance of understanding." My point is that's no different from humans: evolution and a child's upbringing rewards the appearance of understanding. The result is imperfect, e.g. people end up with an understanding of the world that in some cases is completely nonsensical (all religions except the one true religion, mine, are false!), but it's sufficient for them to survive.

This demonstrates that "appearance of understanding" is not a meaningful distinction between LLMs and humans. The meaningful distinction is in the training data and the specifics of the reward functions.

Many people seem to try to make a kind of "no true Scotsman" claim about understanding, that somehow LLMs "don't have real understanding". Based on the above quote, it seemed like you might be making that kind of argument. The counter to that argument is simple: if LLMs don't have real understanding, then neither do humans, because broadly speaking, both operate on similar principles: we learn from training data, there are reward (and punishment!) functions that influence what we learn, and the result is a "mind" that demonstrates an understanding of the world.

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

#235

Post by tomjen3 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

jkahrs595 wrote: post #96

jampekka wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt. I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there…

> Not all writing is thinking Would love an example where you’re able to write without transferring your thoughts. Besides the obvious: fjcjfjrnjfjfifjfnrnakosifnrbwkofgjrj

When you transfer other people's thoughts. On this board, we are engaged in pursuits where the truth matters. A lot of writing is about showing that you belong to the right in-groups. That is better done by repeating their talking points than sitting down and coming up with an earnest way to show that you agree.

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

#236

Post by AngryData » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #109

andy99 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified. LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already…

> An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.

You are right, writing by AI is far less trustworthy or reliable than copy and pasting wikipedia.

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

#237

Post by mpyne » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

andy99 wrote: post #47

dynm wrote: 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,…

This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified. LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already…

> Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas.

Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use.

All that "X is a thing only humans do" type of circular definitions will buy you, is to expand the definition of what humanity is. And I doubt that's really what you think.

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

#238

Post by rogerrogerr » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #226

electric_toucan wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compilers like GCC are deterministic and the source code already fully defines the behavior. LLMs are non-deterministic and will accept ambiguity, filling in details where you haven’t. These sorts of comparisons aren’t really fair. In the case of writing, it’s like hiring someone to write a book for you vs. hiring someone to translate a book you wrote into another language. In the first case, you didn’t really define…

Sure, but I don't know what GCC's behavior is, and I don't vet behavior differences between compiler upgrades. As long as the output works, why does it matter that the black box is deterministic?

Because _someone_ has vetted the output of GCC. It’s used in flight-critical stuff.

The closest thing we have to vetting LLMs is “whoa look, it escaped this sandbox, that’s prolly not great but it’s so cool!”

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

#239

Post by yehoshuapw » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

brabel wrote: post #181

trhaynes wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I'm curious what the security team has to say about that approach, for example.

If you get an AI to review the code especially for security, it does a very good job st finding issues. Better than any human reviewers I have worked with, and getting better. As someone who works in security , I feel much less worried about security bugs on code reviewed by a AI for security issues, be it written by AI or human.

extra reviews never hurt. But trusting only the AI to both code and review security-wise? not even close to usable

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

#240

Post by mpyne » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

jonahx wrote: post #208

Sharlin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effo…

I think this is the cleanest formulation of why it's wrong that I've heard. It's simply plagiarism and misrepresentation.

And it doesn't foreclose the possibility of LLM achieving human-like writing ability. If I stole the writing of a human author much better than me it would still be plagiarism.

Of course, with real books we do have the problem of ghostwriting, where an author willingly writes for a book that will be published under someone else's authorship. That may be where things end up here, with requirements to acknowledge sources, whether ghostwritten for you or written by others.