Warranty Void If Regenerated

It's really interesting to hear about others that have been exploring generating fiction with Claude. I clearly need some more work based on some of the comments, but it has been really interesting discovering and coming up with different techniques both LLM-assisted and manual to end up with something I felt confident enough about to put out.

I'd be curious to hear more about your experience!

All I found was a human name given as the author.

We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.

I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.

It felt like it was written by someone trying to quit an addiction to Corporate Memphis content spam. Like it came from some weird timeline where qntm was a LinkedIn influencer. It straddles an uncanny valley of being a criticism of the domination of The Corporation over human culture while at the same time wallowing in The Corporate Eunuch Voice, not because it's a subversion of form, but because it knows no other way.

I then came to the comments section and found the piece that brought the picture into focus.

It's just... hard to explain the specific kind of disappointment. Perhaps there is a German phrase-with-all-the-spaces-removed kind of word that describes it succinctly. I feel like I exist in this Truman Show kind of world where everyone is trying to gaslight me into thinking LLMs are important, but they aren't very good at it and whenever I try to find out how or why, it all evaporates away. I was very reluctant to say that because I'm sure it's going to come with a heaping side of Extremely Earnest Walruses ready to Have A Debate about it and I just don't have the energy for it anymore. That's the baseline existence right now. It's like a really boring version of Gamergate.

And then this thing comes along. And yeah, it's a thing. You got me. Ha. Ha. Joke's on me. I lost the shitty, fake version of the Turing Test that I didn't even ask to be a part of. And it reminds me of the Microsoft Hololens: a massively impressive technological achievement that was ultimately a terrible consumer experience. Like if you figured out Fusion Power but it could only power Guy Fieri restaurants.

Ever since the pandemic I've been keenly aware of the complete destruction of every enjoyable social structure around me. The meetups that evaporated. The offices we essentially squatted in that suddenly turned Extremely Concerned about what people were doing. The complete lack of any social interaction at work because we're all so busy because we're running at half-workforce and pretty sure the executive suite is salivating at the bit to lay the rest of us off. The lack of care about how this is impacting open source software. The lack of concern for people.

I feel like my entire adult life was this slow, agonizing, but at least constant push forward into recognizing the humanity in others and creating a kind and diverse world and then over night it's all been destroyed and half the people I see online are cheering it on like it's Technojesus coming to absolve them of their sins of never learning to invert a binary tree. Where the blogs and books and startups of the early 2000s were about finding the hidden potential in people--the college dropout working as a barista who just needs someone to give them a chance to be a programmer or a graphic designer or an artist or whatever--the modern era seems to all be about the useless middle management guy who never had any creative bone in his body no longer having to write status reports to his equally mendacious boss on his own anymore.

We might be restarting old coal plants, but at least Kevin in middle management gets to enjoy "programming" again.

Prompts in, garbage out.