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ai;dr

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Re: ai;dr

#141

Post by deron12 »

catoc wrote: post #78
ssiddharth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes. Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe

AI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.

Re: ai;dr

#142

Post by cgriswald »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #30
cgriswald wrote: post #18

> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer…

> Outsourcing thinking is bad. I keep seeing this and I don't think I agree. We outsource thinking everyday. Companies do this everyday. I don't study weather myself, I check an app and bring an umbrella if it says it's gonna rain. My team trusts each other do do some thinking in their area, and present bits sideways / upwards. We delegate lots of things. We collaborate on lots of things. What needs to be clear is wh…

Right. I don’t think I disagee with anything you’ve said here.

However, if I had an idea and just fobbed the idea off to an LLM who fleshed it out and posted it to my blog, would you want to read the result? Do you want to argue against that idea if I never even put any thought into it and maybe don’t even care?

I’m like you in this regard. If I used an LLM to write something I still “own” the publishing of that thing. However, not everyone is like this.

Re: ai;dr

#143

Post by 4b11b4 »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #27

I laugh every time somebody qualifies their anti-AI comments with "Actually I really like AI, I use it for everything else". The problem is bad, but the cause of the problem (and especially paying for the cause of the problem)? That's good!

It's not as one-dimensional as good vs bad. Transformers generally are extremely useful. Do I want to read your transformer generated writing? Fuck no. Is code generation/understanding/natural language interfaces to a computer good? I'd have to argue yes, certainly.

I cry every time somebody tries to frame it one dimensionally.

Re: ai;dr

#144

Post by nxobject »

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.

What I do – and I know this isn't conventional style – is use ex dashes. (Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.)

Re: ai;dr

#145

Post by [deleted] »

98codes wrote: post #125
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…

> assume There's your trouble. The real problem is that most internet users are setting their baseline for "standard issue human writing" at exactly the level they themselves write. The problem is that more and more people do not draw a line between casual/professional writing, and as such balk at very normal professional writing as potentially AI-driven. Blame OS developers for making it easy—SO easy!—to add all man…

[deleted]

Re: ai;dr

#146

Post by ericpauley »

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…

I (perhaps naively) still believe that communities can successfully curate human writing. While there's lots of AI slop that gets posted on HN, for instance, the amount of thoughtful human content seems well above the base rate.

Re: ai;dr

#147

Post by cgriswald »

jmull wrote: post #79
cgriswald wrote: post #18

> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer…

> author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells Hardly seems mutually exclusive. Surely you should generally consider the reputation of someone who posts LLM-responses (without disclosing it) to be pretty low. A lot of people don’t particularly want to waste time reading the LLM-responses to someone else’s unknown/unspecified prompts. Someone who would trick you in to that doesn’t have…

I think valuing the source of information over its quality is probably a mistake for most contexts. I’m also very skeptical of people’s ability to detect AI writing in general even though AI slop seems easy enough to identify. (Although lots of human slop looks pretty similar to me.)

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to read (for example) AI fiction because I know there’s no actual mind behind it (to the extent that I can ever know this).

But AI is going to get better and the only thing that’s going to even work going forward is to trust publishers and authors who give high value regardless of how integral LLMs are to the process.

Re: ai;dr

#148

Post by Der_Einzige »

Just use our antislop techniques and no one will ever know you used an LLM. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 (ICLR 2026)

Also you could long use "logit_bias" in the API of models which supported it to ban the EM dash, ban the word "not", ban semicolons, and ban the "fancy quotes" that were clearly added by "those who need to watch" to make sure that they can clearly figure out if you used an LLM or not.

Re: ai;dr

#149

Post by ethmarks »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #16
numbers wrote: post #5

I remember this was back in 2023, when ChatGPT had first launched, and I had a manager whose English was not very good. He started sending emails that felt like they were written by a copywriter. And the messaging was so hard to parse through because there's so much ChatGPT fluff around it. Very quickly we realized that what he was saying was usually in the middle somewhere, but we'd have to read through the intro an…

the solution is simple, ask ChatGPT to summarize it a large part of the business models of these systems is going to consist of dealing with these systems... it's a wonderful scheme

Why bother fixing existing problems if you can just create new problems and then fix those? /s

Re: ai;dr

#150

Post by catoc »

deron12 wrote: post #141
catoc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes. Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe

AI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.

> ”AI never uses em dashes in a pair”

I wish that were true, but I feel a little bit vindicated nevertheless

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