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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#181

Post by latexr »

Sol- wrote: post #115
latexr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who is fairly boring As determined by whom? > conversing with AI models and thinking things through with them certainly decreased my blandness Again, determined by whom? I’m being genuine. Are those self-assessments? Because those specific judgement are something for other people to decide.

I think I can observe the world and my relative state therein, no? I know I am unfortunately less ambitious, driven and outgoing than others, which are commonly associated with being interesting. And I don't complain about it, the word has a meaning after all and I'll not delude myself into changing its definition. Definitely at a certain threshold it is for others to decide what is boring and not, I agree with that.…

> I think I can observe the world and my relative state therein, no?

Yes, to an extent. You can, for example, evaluate if you’re sensitive or courageous or hard working. But some things do not concern only you, they necessitate another person, such as being interesting or friendly or generous.

A good heuristic might be “what could I not say about myself if I were the only living being on Earth?”. You can still be sensitive or hard working if you’re alone, but you can’t be friendly because there’s no one else to be friendly to.

Technically you could bore yourself, but in practice that’s something you do to other people. Furthermore, it is highly subjective, a D&D dungeon master will be unbearably boring to some, and infinitely interesting to others.

> I know I am unfortunately less ambitious, driven and outgoing than others

I disagree those automatically make someone boring.

I also disagree with LLMs improving your situation. For someone to find you interesting, they have to know what makes you tick. If what you have to share is limited by what everyone else can get (by querying an LLM), that is boring.

Re: AI makes you boring

#182

Post by JohnMakin »

dormento wrote: post #167
JohnMakin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding. The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one…

> or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding You might be on to something. Maybe its self-selection (as in people who want to engage deeply with a certain topic but lack domain expertise might be more likely to go for "vibecodable" solutions).

I compare it to a project I worked on when I was very junior a very long time ago - I built by hand this complicated harness of scripts to deploy VM's on bare metal and do stuff like create customizable, on-the-fly test environments for the devs on my team. It worked fine, but it was a massive time sink, lots of code, and was extremely difficult to maintain and could have weird behavior or bad assumptions quite often.

I made it because at that point in my career I simply didn't know that ansible existed, or cloud solutions that were very cheap to do the same thing. I spent a crazy amount of effort doing something that ansible probably could have done for me in an afternoon. That's what sometimes these projects feel like to me. It's kind of like a solution looking for a problem a lot of the time.

I just scanned through the front page of the show HN page and quickly eyeballed several of these type of things.

Re: AI makes you boring

#183

Post by exit »

Uehreka wrote: post #89
aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

similarly, i think that something that someone took the time to proof-read/verify can be of value, even if they did not directly write it.

this is the literary equivalent of compiling and running the code.

Re: AI makes you boring

#184

Post by iainctduncan »

tptacek wrote: post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

gatekeeping is just a synonym for curration by people who don't like the currators choice.

And we are going to need more curration so goddamned badly....

Re: AI makes you boring

#185

Post by minimaxir »

ossa-ma wrote: post #176
minimaxir wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very bad idea unless you have 100% accuracy in identifying AI generated writing, which is impossible. Otherwise, your tool will be more-often used to harass people who use those tropes organically without AI. This behavior has already been happening with Pangram Labs which supposedly does have good AI detection.

I agree with the risks. However the primary goal of the site is educational not accusatory. I mostly want people to be able to recognise these patterns. The WIP features measure breadth and density of these tropes, and each trope has frequency thresholds. Also I don't use AI to identify AI writing to avoid accusatory hallucinations. I do appreciate the feedback though and will take it into consideration.

> However the primary goal of the site is educational not accusatory.

How then is it different from the Wikipedia page you linked?

Re: AI makes you boring

#186

Post by fhd2 »

hexaga wrote: post #172
tptacek wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor would I ever want to (the worst thing I could learn about that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings about it). This "developers read code" thing is just special pleading.

You're a user of jq in the sense of the comment you're replying to, not a developer. The developer is the developer _of jq_, not developers in general.

Yes, that's exactly how I meant it. I might _rarely_ peruse some code if I'm really curious about it, but by and large I just trust the developers of the software I use and don't really care how it works. I care about what it does.

Re: AI makes you boring

#187

Post by imiric »

ossa-ma wrote: post #165
imiric wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious question is: was it vibe coded? :) As much as I'd like to know whether a text was written by a human or not, I'm saddened by the fact that some of these writing patterns have been poisoned by these tools. I enjoy, use, and find many of them to be an elegant way to get a point across. And I refuse to give up the em dash! So if that flags any of my writing—so be it.

Absolutely vibe coded, I'm sure I disclosed it somewhere on the site. As much as I hate using AI for creative endeavours I have to agree that it excels as nextjs/vercel/quick projects like this. I was mostly focused on the curation of the tropes and examples. Believe me I've had to adjust my writing a lot to avoid these tells, even academics I know are second guessing everything they've ever been taught. It's quite s…

> It's quite sad but I think it will result in a more personable internet as people try to distinguish themselves from the bots.

I applaud your optimism, but I think the internet is a lost cause. Humans who value communicating with other humans will need to retreat into niche communities with zero tolerance for bots. Filtering out bot content will likely continue to be impossible, but we'll eventually settle on a good way to determine if someone is human. I just hope we won't have to give up our privacy and anonymity for it.

Re: AI makes you boring

#188

Post by redwood »

AI is group think. Group think makes you boring. But then the same can be said about mass culture. Why do we all know Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, etc? when there were countless others who came before them and after them? Because they happened to emerge at the right time in our mass culture.

Imagine how dynamic the world was before radio, before tv, before movies, before the internet, before AI? I mean imagine a small town theater, musician, comedian, or anything else before we had all homogenized to mass culture? It's hard to know what it was like but I think it's what makes the great appeal of things like Burning Man or other contexts that encourage you to tune out the background and be in the moment.

Maybe the world wasn't so dynamic and maybe the gaps were filled by other cultural memes like religion. But I don't know that we'll ever really know what we've lost either.

How do we avoid group think in the AI age? The same way as in every other age. By making room for people to think and act different.

Re: AI makes you boring

#189

Post by gary_0 »

mjr00 wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #3

That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…

> That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping "Gatekeeping" became a trendy term for a while, but in the post-LLM world people are recognizing that "gatekeeping" is not the same as "having a set of standards or rules by which a community abides". If you have a nice community where anyone can come in and do whatever they want, you no longer have a community, you have a garbage dump. A gate to keep out the…

I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage newcomers by making their field seem mysterious and only able to be done by super special people, and intimidating or making fun of newbies who come along and ask naive questions.

"Gatekeeping" is NOT when you require someone to be willing learn a skill in order to join a community of people with that skill.

And in fact, saying "you are too stupid to learn that on your own, use an AI instead" is kind of gatekeeping on its own, because it implicitly creates a shrinking elite who actually have the knowledge (that is fed to the AI so it can be regurgitated for everyone else), shutting out the majority who are stuck in the "LLM slum".

Re: AI makes you boring

#190

Post by rubslopes »

Uehreka wrote: post #89
aeturnum wrote: post #21

I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up. Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text and when it goes well other practitioners of the form can appreciate its shape and direction. With AI you can get a lot of 'function' on the page (so to speak)…

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text… Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable). I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these th…

I agree with your sentiment, and it touches on one of the reasons I left academia for IT. Scientific research is preoccupied with finding the truth, which is beautiful but very stressful. If you're a perfectionist, you're always questioning yourself: "Did I actually find something meaningful, or is it just noise? Did I gaslight myself into thinking I was just exploring the data when I was actually p-hacking the results?" This took a real toll on my mental health.

Although I love science, I'm much happier building programs. "Does the program do what the client expects with reasonable performance and safety? Yes? Ship it."

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