That it was largely/mostly generated by Claude adds a certain poignancy to it.
As an allegory it reminds a lot of one I read as a teen: Joshua by Joseph Girzone. Not a literary masterpiece but a cleaver thought-raising story.
Warranty Void If Regenerated
121–130 of 353 posts
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you? It's the same story, down to the same delicate details. When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now? I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel li…
the story is bad in itself and doesn't add anything to the reader but if you knew it came from a human it would be interesting as a window to learning what the writer was thinking since there is no writer such window doesn't exist either
Yes, this is a thing. Bad writing with an interesting idea underneath it all is still interesting if it comes from a human because we have the expectation that the human will improve in how they share their ideas in the future. In other words, we see potential.
But LLMs don't have potential. You can make an LLM write a thousand articles in the next hour and it will not get one iota better at writing because of it. A person would massively improve merely from the act of writing a dozen, but 100x that effort and the LLM is no better off than when it started.
Despite every model release every 6 months being hailed as a "game changer", we can see from the fact that LLMs are just as empty and dumb as they were when GPT-2 was new half a decade ago that there really is no long term potential here. Despite more and more power, larger and hotter and more expensive data centers, it's an asymptotic return where we've already broken over the diminishing returns point.
And you know, I wouldn't care all that much--hell, might even be enthusiastically involved--if folks could just be honest with themselves that this turd sandwich of a product is not going to bring about AGI.
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#123When I saw this the other day -- and it just went on and on, like a good human author who was going to write this kind of story probably wouldn't -- I looked for a note that it was AI-generated, and I didn't find it. 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…
I continue to resonate with the Oxide take when I hear this kind of sentiment expressed about AI prose
"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and what meaning does it have? It means, "Wow. Cool. I'm a member of a species that taught rocks to think. Holy fuck. That's pretty insanely fucking awesome. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Fuck." That's about all it means. Nothing was removed from your life, but something optional was added.
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Agreed, that will indeed be a problem. We may be building the proverbial Fermi filter.
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#125I'm trying to sort out my own emotions on this. I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling. It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story…
I also did not gin to the fact that it was AI, but I did have the distinct feeling that I was reading something not that great. It bothered me because the message was something I could appreciate but the delivery felt anathema to the message. 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.…
you're saying qntm is NOT an influencer? what a miscalculation i have made
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, which is why some of the comments are from a day ago but the post is only a couple of hours old. We originally downranked it due to being AI-generated. But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this. We just asked the author to…
"it's boring to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this." FTFY
Please don’t post snarky, shallow dismissals or use internet tropes on HN. I explained thought process we went through. Nothing on HN is to everyone’s taste. Plenty of people are finding this post interesting and having a good discussion about it.
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you? It's the same story, down to the same delicate details. When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now? I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel li…
What is your understanding of the luddite movement? I ask because I don't believe many are aware that luddites were not anti-technology. It was a labor movement which was targeted at exploitation by factory owners. Their issue was with factories forcing the use of machines to produce inferior products so owners could use cheaper, low skill labor. https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-la...
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Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Agreed, that will indeed be a problem. We may be building the proverbial Fermi filter.
birth rates have already tanked everywhere that isnt religious. youd think people would move back to religion and save their culture, but the sex doll argument has already pervaded. we werent designed to have our senses constantly hyperstimulated; resultantly, people increasingly dont care about reality. only sociopaths and the well disciplined thrive in this environment, everyone else becomes lost in hyperreality. id love to send it and join the masses ... after contemplating eternal damnation, a few years of sensory pleasure just arent worth it.
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a major bummer. When I first read the story (a few days ago, maybe?) I thought it was an interesting metaphor that didn't quite line up with the observed details of software development with AI. I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go. Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as…
What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you? It's the same story, down to the same delicate details. When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now? I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel li…
Stories are particularly troubling because we have the concept of "suspending disbelief" and readers tend to take a leap of faith with longwinded narratives because we assume the author is going somewhere with the story and has written purposefully.
When AI can write convincingly enough, it is basically a honeypot for human readers. It looks well-written enough. The concept is interesting and we think it is going somewhere. The point is that AI cannot write anything good by itself, because writing is a form of communication. AI can't communicate, only generate output based on a prompt. At best, it produces an exploded version of a prompt, which is the only seed of interest that carries the whole thing.
Somebody had that nugget of an idea which is relevant for today's readers. They told the AI to write it up, with some tone or setting details, then probably edited it a bunch. If we enjoy any part of it, we are enjoying the bits of humanity peeking through the process, not the default text the AI wrote.
Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated
#130with the speed of llm/ai improvement, this too maybe steamrolled