AI makes you boring
marginalia.nu
AI makes you boring
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Re: AI makes you boring
#2I've seen a few people use ai to rewrite things, and the change from their writing style to a more "polished" generic LLM style feels very strange. A great averaging and evening out of future writing seems like a bad outcome to me.
Re: AI makes you boring
#3That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work.
AI for actual prose writing, no question. Don't let a single word an LLM generates land in your document; even if you like it, kill it.
Re: AI makes you boring
#4That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…
It's not a hazing ritual, it's a valuable learning experience. Yes, it's nice to have the option of foregoing it, but it's a tradeoff.
Re: AI makes you boring
#5I mean, can't you just… prompt engineer your way out of this? A writer friend of mine literally just vibes with the model differently and gets genuinely interesting output.
Re: AI makes you boring
#6That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…
It's not a hazing ritual, it's a valuable learning experience. Yes, it's nice to have the option of foregoing it, but it's a tradeoff.
So the point of a "Show HN" is to showcase your valuable learning experience?
Re: AI makes you boring
#7Isnt this just flat out untrue since bots can pass turing tests
Re: AI makes you boring
#8The more interesting question is whether AI use causes the shallowness, or whether shallow people simply reach for AI more readily because deep engagement was never their thing to begin with.
Re: AI makes you boring
#9I've seen a few people use ai to rewrite things, and the change from their writing style to a more "polished" generic LLM style feels very strange. A great averaging and evening out of future writing seems like a bad outcome to me.
I sometimes go in the opposite direction - generate LLM output and then rewrite it in my own words
The LLM helps me gather/scaffold my thoughts, but then I express them in my own voice
Re: AI makes you boring
#10Most ideas people have are not original, I have epiphanies multiple times a day, the chance that they are something no one has come up with before are basically 0. They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it. There is a huge case for having good taste to drive the LLMs toward a good result, and original voice is quite valuable, but I would say most people don't hit those 2 things in a meaningful way(with or without LLMs).