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

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

#381

Post by jonahx »

snk wrote: post #377
jonahx wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it would be fine. Someone's actual writing (or talking) is a rich stream of information about who they are, their motives, their preferences, modes of persuasion, and so much more. Undetectable LLM writing essentially allows someone to assume another person's identity. That is not good for anyone except the person trying to pull off a "scam" of some sort, in the broadest sense of that term. It's bad for…

Good for privacy and productivity.

Privacy in anonymous posts is a legitimate use.

"Productivity" is not. It's only good for fake productivity. The consumers of the product will almost always be better off with you disclosing what the LLM did, and what you did.

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

#382

Post by snk »

SecretDreams wrote: post #248
anon84873628 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you must be one very unique and special person if you converse the way you write. By definition, a carefully written and edited piece will be much more refined and cogent than an extemporaneous conversation. Just watch an interview with a famous author. Or compare a legal brief to what court actually sounds like.

I've engaged with people at work where they led with an LLM via slack before I connected with them on a call. It's quite jarring and disappointing to see the gap in cohesion and knowledge going from one form of communication to the other. If you're using an LLM to tidy something up, that's one thing. If the LLM is your voice and is supplanting your knowledge, I might as well cut you out and talk to the LLM directly.…

So connecting with them on a call and cutting out the LLM was an error?

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

#383

Post by snk »

mitxela wrote: post #310
fn-mote wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative uses for reading: 1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written. 2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation. 3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If…

If some Nerds for Nginx article is AI-written, it's probably subtly wrong. How does this influence your opinion of it?

The title, for example, should likely be Nginx for Nerds, and that error was human, not AI, right?

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

#384

Post by chvid »

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…

Many programmers don't write long text; their way of getting a deep understanding of a problem domain is to build something, is to write code - in a process very similar to writing a long piece of text - it has the same reflection and externalization of thought.

The widespread introduction of LLM code generation is very destructive to that.

Perhaps LLMs can be brought to support human cognition in the same way writing can; but that has yet to be designed and it does not seem to be the way things are heading.

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

#385

Post by ivansavz »

brabel wrote: post #185
arctic-true wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect some amount of long form writing will go the way of code - long form writing for the purpose of consumption by other AIs. Writing as a means of exchanging qualitative information, with no regard for how the reader will feel about it (beyond understanding what the words mean). Not everything can be distilled into data, but this doesn’t mean it is beyond the reach of LLMs. On the other hand, long form writing…

What makes you think it will take a long time? AI seems capable of imitating any writing style if prompted to do so already, and I think it will get better on this quickly since the AI writing style is a main focus of AI labs right now. I can see no reason at all to believe this is a matter of years still, more like a few months.

The style you refer to is the "container" of the writing. The medium. Like the specific encoding of the message. What @arctic-true was talking about was the "content" of the writing, which is bounded from above[1] by the information content of the prompt.

So, I'm not sure if it's a question of time at all: if a LLM text contains some piece of information beyond the information that went into the prompt, where does this "extra" information come from? [Note, I'm not thinking about facts which could trivially come from the training corpus, I'm thinking specifically as information in the sense of intended message from sender (author) to receiver (reader)]

[1] cf. this comment where I explain this analogy between LLMs and noise channel in communication theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510244

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

#386

Post by hparadiz »

chvid wrote: post #384
bcherny wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Many programmers don't write long text; their way of getting a deep understanding of a problem domain is to build something, is to write code - in a process very similar to writing a long piece of text - it has the same reflection and externalization of thought. The widespread introduction of LLM code generation is very destructive to that. Perhaps LLMs can be brought to support human cognition in the same way writin…

Miss me with this. I write way more now than a year ago. Mainly because I have to explain myself to the LLM. I'm fairly certain I write 50x more than before simply because before my weekend was spent gaming and watching anime. Now I'm having fun building things.

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

#387

Post by olalonde »

> When you use an LLM to author a post, you may think you are generating plausible writing, but you aren’t

There's some toupee fallacy at play here. The author probably reads a lot of LLM assisted content without batting an eye, but only spots the worse of the LLM outputs. There's a big difference between "write a post about _" vs "improve the grammar/style of my post: _". It's a bit like saying that movie CGI really sucks because you can always tell it's fake.

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

#388

Post by glub »

mlinhares wrote: post #370
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…

Same. I do not use LLMs for writing and I recommend everyone i work with to do the same. Even for code, I come to the code with the idea of what I want and provide that to the agent, then we iterate on what needs iteration or decisions. Just did this for some caching, started with the structure of what I wanted the cache to look like, asked the agent to start the work, didn't like how the architecture came about, scr…

I now have dozens of projects where I've embraced the yolo. I went through elaborate systems, workflows, review triages, architectural linters, specialist agents, yet, they all still suffered the same fate - slop which I don't understand and now LLMs don't understand either.

The only thing that worked was a standing instruction and periodic system reminder injected from the harness:

"If any assumption doesn't hold, if there's a fork in the road, any architectural decision needs be made, STOP and report back to the user. Do not try to push through the problem."

This has worked remarkably well for me. Now I have to think a whole lot more. It's much slower, yes, but I don't really see any other way that doesn't end up in garbage.

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

#389

Post by snk »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #369

Personally I never use an LLM or "AI" for any reason. Don't find them useful and, like others, don't find their writing compelling or interesting. I can understand using it as a coding tool, but can't fathom anyone wanting or needing to filter their own thoughts and ideas through it. Is it really that difficult for anyone to send a letter or an email without machine assistance?! If someone sent me a machine generated…

If you never used any particular tool, you probably wouldn't find it useful, right?

I asked Gemini about my unicycling this morning, and it coached me on weighting the seat; e.g., looking ahead instead of down helps unweight the pedals.

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

#390

Post by snk »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #340
softwaredoug wrote: post #152

It’s never been easier to differentiate yourself as a writer. You just write with some personality. People don’t want writing that doesn’t look average, but looks novel. I despair much less for human writers than a did maybe a year ago.

> You just write with some personality. I used to do that, then someone on HN basically said I had mental problems because of the way I wrote the article. Best part is Claude told me to tone it down a bit, and I completely ignored its advice. Wouldn't have happened if I had listened to the AI. I've also been called a schizophrenic on a GNU mailing list because of my idea and the working code I submitted. Caused me to…

Yeah, for some of us, that is bad advice. The version I can most safely implement is, "Be your best self."
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