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ai;dr

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Re: ai;dr

#101

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

> Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops

No doubt, but I think there a bit of a difference between AI generating something utilitarian vs something expected to at least have some taste/flavor.

AI generated code may not be the best compared to what you could hand craft, along almost any axis you could suggest, but sometimes you just want to get the job done. If it works, it works, and maybe (at least sometimes) that's all the measure of success/progress you need.

Writing articles and posts is a bit different - it's not just about the content, it's about how it's expressed and did someone bother to make it interesting to read, and put some of their own personality into it. Writing is part communication, part art, and even the utilitarian communication part of it works better if it keeps the reader engaged and displays good theory of mind as to where the average reader may be coming from.

So, yeah, getting AI to do your grunt work programming is progress, and a post that reads like a washing machine manual can fairly be judged as slop in a context where you might have hoped for/expected better.

Re: ai;dr

#102

Post by fleebee »

I wasn't about to call them a luddite. This is a pretty poorly veiled attempt at drumming the inevitability of AI coding. Did they really need to defend their preference for not reading LLM prose with "I will never write code manually again"?

Re: ai;dr

#103

Post by jama211 »

fmbb wrote: post #74
dematz wrote: post #36

>I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. Doesn't ai;dr kind of contradict ai generated documentation? If I want to know what claude thinks about your code I can just ask it. Imo documentation is the least amenable thing to ai. As the article itself says, I want to read some intention and see how you shape whatever you're documenting. (AI adding tests seems li…

The article is definitely contradicting itself. There are only two sentences between > Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? and > I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. So they expect nobody to read their documentation.

That’s not a contradiction - documentation often needs to be written with no expectation anyone will ever read it.

Re: ai;dr

#104

Post by jama211 »

9999gold wrote: post #12

> I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding Shouldn’t we bother to write these things?

Nah.

Re: ai;dr

#105

Post by comboy »

dontwannahearit wrote: post #25

It's pretty much over for the human-internet. Search was gamed, its usefulness has plummeted, so humans will increasingly ask their LLM of choice and that LLM will have been trained on the content of the internet. So when someone wants to know something about the topic that my website is focused on, chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly, but a summary of what the LLM learned from…

There there, remember when all images were hand painted? (me neither)

And I know it's different, but I'm surprised the overall sentiment is so pessimistic on HN. So maybe we will communicate through yet another black box on top of hundreds of existing ones already. But probably mostly when seeking specific information and wanting to get it efficiently. Yes this one is different, it makes human contact over text much more difficult, but the big part of all of this was happening already for years and now it's just widely available.

When posting on HN you don't see the other person typing like using talk command on unix, but it is still meaningful.

Ideally we would like to preserve what we have untouched and only have new stuff as an option but it's never been like this. Did we all enjoy win 3.11? I mean it was interesting.. but clicking.. so inefficient (and of course there are tons of people who will likely scream from their GUIs that it still is and windows sucks, I'd gladly join, but we have our keyboard bindings, other operating systems, and get by somehow)

Re: ai;dr

#106

Post by steveBK123 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #96
steveBK123 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Ai writing is that its a waste of everyones time. It’s literal content expansion, the opposite of gzip’ing a file. It’s like a kid who has a 500 word essay due tomorrow who needs to pad their actual message up to spec.

Well, LLMs can be either side of that. They can also be used to turn something verbose into a series of bullet points. I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew. [1] Looking at you, New Yorker magazine.

Right we are headed towards LLM generated slop summarized by another LLM. Wire format is expanded slop.

Re: ai;dr

#107

Post by [deleted] »

dematz wrote: post #36

>I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. Doesn't ai;dr kind of contradict ai generated documentation? If I want to know what claude thinks about your code I can just ask it. Imo documentation is the least amenable thing to ai. As the article itself says, I want to read some intention and see how you shape whatever you're documenting. (AI adding tests seems li…

[deleted]

Re: ai;dr

#108

Post by Bukhmanizer »

ssiddharth wrote: post #50
losvedir wrote: post #6

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an exp…

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

You’re absolutely right. I hate AI writing — it’s not that I hate AI, it’s that it makes everything it says sound a specific combination of smug and authoritative — No matter the content. Once you realize it’s not saying anything, that’s the real aha moment.

\s

Re: ai;dr

#109

Post by lelanthran »

wrs wrote: post #88
parsimo2010 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes. AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it. My personal situation is fi…

If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you.

> If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you.

No, you are writing for people who see LLM-signals and read on anyway.

Not sure that that's a win for you.

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