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It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

blog.pabloecortez.com

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Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#211

Post by ok_dad »

goostavos wrote: post #178
mikepurvis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never put up a copilot PR for colleague review without fully reviewing it myself first. But once that’s done, why not?

It destroys the value of code review and wastes the reviewers time. Code review is one of the places where experience is transferred. It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments and have them met with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it." If all you do is 'review' the output of your prompting before cutting a CR, I'd prefer you just send the prompt.

> Code review is one of the places where experience is transferred.

Almost nobody uses it for that today, unfortunately, and code reviews in both directions are probably where the vast majority of learning software development comes from. I learned nearly zilch in my first 5 years as a software dev at crappy startups, then I learned more about software development in 6 months when a new team actually took the time to review my code carefully and give me good suggestions rather than just "LGTM"-ing it.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#212

Post by px43 »

latexr wrote: post #114
nbardy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And

This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time? This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose. And no, using different models doesn’t fix the issue. That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that so…

> If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review.

So, your minimum bar for a useful AI is that it must always be perfect and a far better programmer than any human that has ever lived?

Coding agents are basically interns. They make stupid mistakes, but even if they're doing things 95% correctly, then they're still adding a ton of value to the dev process.

Human reviewers can use AI tools to quickly sniff out common mistakes and recommend corrections. This is fine. Good even.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#214

Post by trthomps »

abixb wrote: post #18
icapybara wrote: post #9

If they can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?

I'm sure lots of "readers" of such articles fed it to another AI model to summarize it, thereby completely bypassing the usual human experience of writing and then careful (and critical) reading and parsing of the article text. I weep for the future. Also, reminds me of this cartoon from March 2023. [0] [0] https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

I'm curious if the people who are using AI to summarize articles are the same people who would have actually read more than the headline to begin with. It feels to me like the sort of person who would have read the article and applied critical thinking to it is not going to use an AI summary to bypass that since they won't be satisfied with it.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#215

Post by latexr »

darrenf wrote: post #205
latexr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time? This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose. And no, using different models doesn’t fix the issue. That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that so…

I haven't taken a strong enough position on AI coding to express any opinions about it, but I vehemently disagree with this part: > This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose. I've been the first reviewer for all PRs I've raised, before notifying any other reviewers, for so many years that I couldn't even tell you when I started doing it. Going through the change set in the Github/Gitlab/B…

> I vehemently disagree with this part

You don’t, we’re on the same page. This is just a case of using different meanings of “review”. I expanded on another sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723593

> Obviously I don't approve my own PRs.

Exactly. That’s the type of review I meant.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#216

Post by the_af »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #95
the_af wrote: post #12

What amazes me is that some people think I want to read AI slop in their blog that I could have generated by asking ChatGPT directly. Anyone can access ChatGPT, why do we need an intermediary? Someone a while back shared, here on HN, almost an entire blog generated by (barely touched up) AI text. It even had Claude-isms like "excellent question!", em-dashes, the works. Why would anyone want to read that?

In that case, I'd say maybe you didn't have the wisdom to ask the question in the first place? And maybe you wouldn't know the follow up questions to ask after that? And if the person who produced it took a few minutes to fact check, that has value as well.

It's seldom the case that AI slop requires widsom to ask, or is fact-checked in any depth other than cursory. Cursory checking of AI-slop has effectively zero value.

Or do you remember when Facebook groups or image communities were flooded with funny/meme AI-generated images, "The Godfather, only with Star Wars", etc? Thank you, but I can generate those zero-effort memes myself, I also have access to GenAI.

We truly don't need intermediaries.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#218

Post by px43 »

ryanmerket wrote: post #198
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even letting the LLM “clean it up” puts its voice on your text. In general, you don’t want its voice. The associations are LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. It’s the modern equivalent of “talking like a used car salesman”. Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.

It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.

Exactly. It's so wild to me when people hate on generated text because it sounds like something they don't like, when they could easily tell it to set the tone to any other tone that has ever appeared in text.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#219

Post by furyofantares »

kirurik wrote: post #132
furyofantares wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they…

To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. Maybe you only notice it because it is obvious. Just like someone would only notice machine translation if it is obvious.

> To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with.

It's not an assumption. Look at this example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707

The author posted their input to the LLM in the comments after receiving critcism, and that input was much better than their actual post.

In this thread I'm less sure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 - it DOES look like there was something interesting thrown into the LLM that then put garbage out. It's more of an informed guess than an assumption, you can tell the author did have an experience to share, but you can't really figure out what's what because of all the slop. In this case the author redid their post in response to criticism and it's still pretty bad to me, and then they kept using an LLM to post comments in the thread, I can't really tell how much non-garbage was going in.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#220

Post by athrowaway3z »

latexr wrote: post #94
alyxya wrote: post #54

I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me. > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever el…

> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. “Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written. > The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job…

> If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts

The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the sentences or _language_ they're written in. Not completely independent, but to claim thoughts are completely dependent on text (thus also the language) is nonsense.

> Might as well just give people your prompt.

What would be the value of seeing a dozen diffs? By the same logic, should we also include every draft?

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