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I know you didn't write this

ammil.industries

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Re: I know you didn't write this

#101

Post by zephen »

potsandpans wrote: post #55

It will probably be unpopular here, where people appear to have drawn the lines and formed unyielding positions, but... The whole llm paranoia is devolving into hysteria. Lots of finger pointing without proof, lots of shoddy evidence put forward and nuance missing points. My stance is this: I don't really care whether someone used an llm or wrote it themselves. My observation is that in both cases people were mostly…

> My observation is that in both cases people were mostly wrong and required strict reviews and verification, with the exception of those who did Great Work.

Sure, but LLMs allow people to be wronger faster now, so they could conceivably inundate the reviewer with a new set of changes requiring a new two hour review, by only pressing buttons for two minutes.

> If you find yourself becoming irrationally upset by something that you're encountering that's largely outside of your control, consider going to therapy and not forming a borderline obsession with purity on something that has always been a bit slippery (creative originality ).

Maybe your take on it is slightly different because your job function is somewhat different?

I assume that many people complaining here about the LLM slop are more worried about functional correctness than creative originality.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#102

Post by mrisoli »

skwirl wrote: post #59
a1j9o94 wrote: post #36

I know I'm an outlier on HN, but I really don't care if AI was used to write something I'm reading. I just care whether or not the ideas are good and clear. And if we're talking about work output 99% of what people were putting out before AI wasn't particularly good. And in my genuine experience AI's output is better than things people I worked with would spend hours and days on. I feel like more time is wasted tryin…

>But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan. The coworker should just give me the five bullet points they put into ChatGPT. I can trivially dump it into ChatGPT or any other LLM myself to turn it into a "plan."

I feel the same way, if all one is doing is feeding stuff into AI without doing any actual work themselves, just include your prompt and workflow into how you got AI to spit this content out, it might be useful for others to learn how to use these LLMs and shows train of thought.

I had a coworker schedule a meeting to discuss a technical design of an upcoming feature, I didn't have much time so I only checked the research doc moments before the meeting, it was 26 pages long with over 70 references, of which about 30+ were reddit links. This wasn't a huge architectural decision so I was dumbfounded, seemed he barely edited the document to his own preferences, the actual meeting was maybe my most awkward meeting I've ever attended as we were expected to weigh in on the options presented but no one had opinions, not even the author, on the whole thing. It was just too much of an AI document to even process.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#103

Post by Veen »

messe wrote: post #2

> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share. This isn't always a great indicator. I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

Yes, I write everything in Obsidian and use "Paste from Markdown" in Google Docs. It's a habit I picked up years ago when Docs was much less reliable and lost work.

Plus, I want to deliver the completed document, not my edit history. Even on the occasions that I have written directly in Google Docs, I've copied the doc to obliterate the version history.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#104

Post by zephen »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #94
isodev wrote: post #81

Once, I had a very frustrating slack chat with a fellow developer. We were discussing edge cases for a new feature and the experience from my perspective was that for each of my messages, I’d get a “in case of … how about …” style reply. The topic was focused around iOS vs. Android app lifecycle. Every now and then my colleague would suggest APIs or events that simply don’t exist. This was before vibe coding, around…

Anyone doing this should be fired. Both for the lack of trust they bring to the team but also because they’re just making themselves a middle man to an LLM. Why not cut out the middle man?

People who make things don't make any money.

People who claim that they are disrupting with disintermediation, but actually simply replace the old intermediary with their own?

Those people get filthy rich.

People who _should_ be making things but are trying this intermediation technique themselves will most likely find that it's like other forms of lying. Go big or go home.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#105

Post by el_benhameen »

messe wrote: post #2

> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share. This isn't always a great indicator. I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

Oh, another fun one: I once got an offer letter via Docs. The edit history included the original paste from another candidate’s offer letter, including their name and salary. Useful for benchmarking!

Re: I know you didn't write this

#106

Post by zephen »

karaterobot wrote: post #47

I'm sometimes asked to produce meaningless 30-page documents that nobody ever reads. I mean literally nobody, since I can see the history of who has accessed it. Me and a proof-reader, and occasionally someone will open it up to check that it exists. But nobody reads them, let alone reads them closely . Not the distant funder who added it as a line-item requirement to their grant (their job is adding line items to gr…

It's like burning fuel to till the soil so you can plant corn to make ethanol.

Almost an inverse Kafka universe; there are tools that can empower you to work the system in such a way that the effects of the externalities are very diffuse.

Still not good, but better than a typical Catch-22.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#107

Post by ArcHound »

jdashg wrote: post #67
ArcHound wrote: post #14

> If you know in your heart of hearts that you didn’t put the work in, you’re undermining the social contract between you and your reader. There's been a lot of social contract undermining lately. Does anyone please know about something that can be done to try and revert back? Social contract of "F you. I got mine" isn't very appealing to me, but that seems to be the current approach.

We literally have to be willing to get taken advantage of sometimes, and we have to come down hard on the "don't hate the player, hate the game" f-you-got-mine assholes. It is not weakness, but strength, to make yourself (reasonably!) vulnerable to being taken advantage of. It is not strength, but weakness, to let bad behavior happen around you. You don't have to do everything , but you have to do something , or noth…

Consider this situation: security review before a project go-live.

I have never seen this team before and I'll "never" see this team after the fact. They might be contracted externally, they might leave before the second review.

Let's say I can sus out people doing this. I don't have the option of giving them the benefit of the doubt and they have the motivation to trick me.

I guess I've answered my own question a bit, such an environment isn't built to foster trust at all.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#108

Post by potsandpans »

zephen wrote: post #101
potsandpans wrote: post #55

It will probably be unpopular here, where people appear to have drawn the lines and formed unyielding positions, but... The whole llm paranoia is devolving into hysteria. Lots of finger pointing without proof, lots of shoddy evidence put forward and nuance missing points. My stance is this: I don't really care whether someone used an llm or wrote it themselves. My observation is that in both cases people were mostly…

> My observation is that in both cases people were mostly wrong and required strict reviews and verification, with the exception of those who did Great Work. Sure, but LLMs allow people to be wronger faster now, so they could conceivably inundate the reviewer with a new set of changes requiring a new two hour review, by only pressing buttons for two minutes. > If you find yourself becoming irrationally upset by somet…

If it's important to the argument, my title is "Principal Software Engineer MTS". I review code, ADRs, meeting summaries, design docs, PRDs etc...

> I assume that many people complaining here about the LLM slop are more worried about functional correctness than creative originality.

My point is, I've been in the game for coming up on 16 years, mostly in large corporate FAANG-adjacent environments. People have always been functionally incorrect and not to be trusted. It used to be a meme said with endearment, "don't trust my code, I'm a bug machine!" Zero trust. That's why we do code reviews.

> Sure, but LLMs allow people to be wronger faster now, so they could conceivably inundate the reviewer...

With respect, "conceivably" is doing a lot of work here. I don't see it happening. I see more slop code, sure. But that doesn't mean I _have_ to review it with the same scrutiny.

My experience thus far has been that this is solved quite simply: After a quick scan, "Please give this more thought before resubmitting. Consider reviewing yourself, take a pass at refining and verify functionality."

> Maybe your take on it is slightly different because your job function is somewhat different? > I assume that many people complaining here about the LLM slop are more worried about functional correctness than creative originality.

Interestingly, I see the opposite in the online space. First of all, as an aside, I don't see many people complaining at all in real life (other than the common commiseration of getting slop PRs, which has replaced the common commiseration of getting normal PRs of sub-par quality).

I primarily see people coming to the defense of human creativity and becoming incensed by reading (or I should say, "viewing" more generally) something that an llm has touched.

It appears that mostly people have accepted that llms are a useful tool for producing code and that when used unethically (first pass llm -> production), of course they're no good.

There is a moral outrage and indigence that I've observed however (on HN, and elsewhere) when an LLM has been used for the creative arts.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#109

Post by pessimizer »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #8
GaryBluto wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bizarre to me that this didn't occur even slightly to the post author.

As with many other things (em dashes, emojis, bullet lists, it's-not-x-it's-y constructs, triple adjectives, etc) seeing any one of them isn't a tell. Seeing all of them, or many of them in a single piece of content, is probably the tell. When you use these tools you get a knack for what they do in "vanilla" situations. If you're doing a quick prompt, no guidance, no context and no specifics, you'll get a type of ans…

The author did not do this. The author thought it was wonderful, read the entire thing, then on a lark (they "twigged" it) checked out the edit history. They took the lack of it as instant confirmation ("So it’s definitely AI.")

The rest of the blog is just random subjective morality wank with implications of larger implications, constructed by borrowing the central points of a series of popular articles in their entirety and adding recently popular clichés ("why should I bother reading it if you couldn't bother to write it?")

No other explanations about why this was a bad document, or this particular event at all, but lots of self-debate about how we should detect, deal with, and feel about bad documents. All documents written by LLM are assumed to be bad, and no discussion is attempted about degrees of LLM assistance.

If I used AI to write some long detailed plan, I'd end up going back and forth with it and having it remove, rewrite, rethink, and refactor multiple times. It would have an edit history, because I'd have to hold on to old drafts in case my suggested improvements turned out not to be improvements.

The weirdest thing about the article is that it's about the burden of "verification," but it thinks that what people should be verifying is that LLMs had no part in what they've received. The discussion I've had about "verification" when it comes to LLMs is the verification that the content is not buggy garbage filled with inhuman mistakes. I don't care if it's LLM-created or assisted, other than a lot of people aren't reading and debugging their LLM code, and LLMs are dumb. I'm not hunting for em-dashes.

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edit: my 2¢; if you use LLMs to write something, you basically found it. If you send it to me, I want to read your review of it i.e. where you think it might have problems and why you think it would help me. I also want to hear about your process for determining those things.

People are confusing problems with low-effort contributors with problems with LLMs. The problem with low-effort contributors is that what they did with the LLM was low-effort and isn't saving you any work. You can also spend 5 minutes with the LLM. If you get some good LLM output that you think is worth showing to me, and you think it would take significant effort for me to get it myself, give me the prompts. That's the work you did, and there's nothing wrong with being proud of it.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#110

Post by plorkyeran »

jandrese wrote: post #17
GaryBluto wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bizarre to me that this didn't occur even slightly to the post author.

Or the tell that the guy who usually writes fairly succinctly suddenly dumps five thousand words with all of the details that most people wouldn't bother to write down. It would be interesting to see the history where the whole document is dumped in the file at once, but then edits and corrections are applied top to bottom to that document. Using AI isn't so much the problem as trusting it blindly.

Dumping the entire file into google docs and then editing and corrections applied top to bottom is exactly my normal workflow. I do my writing in vim, paste it into google docs, and then do a final editing pass while fixing the formatting.
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