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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#211

Post by themafia »

taude wrote: post #11

AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. It'll also make people who write better than average, worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use wisely. EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. Don't…

> AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers.

If they don't care enough to improve themselves at the task in the first place then why would they improve at all? Osmosis?

If this worked then letting a world renown author write all my letters for me will make me a better writer. Right?

Who cares if you're a "good writer?" Are you "easy to understand" is the real achievement.

Re: AI makes you boring

#212

Post by aaroninsf »

Setting aside the marvelous murk in that use of "you," which parenthetically I would be happy to chat about ad nauseum,

I would say this is a fine time to haul out:

Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.

Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.

Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved; they're just unevenly distributed.

I can never these days stop thinking about the XKCD the punchline of which is the alarmingly brief window between "can do at all" and "can do with superhuman capacity."

I'm fully aware of the numerous dimensions upon which the advancement from one state to the other, in any specific domain, is unpredictable, Hard, or less likely to be quick... but this the rare case where absent black swan externalities ending the game, line goes up.

Re: AI makes you boring

#213

Post by oytis »

tonymet wrote: post #111
daxfohl wrote: post #40

And the irony is it tries to make you feel like a genius while you're using it. No matter how dull your idea is, it's "absolutely the right next thing to be doing!"

you can prompt it to stop doing that, and to behave exactly how you need it. my prompts say "no flattery, no follow up questions, PhD level discourse, concise and succinct responses, include grounding, etc"

> PhD level discourse

What is that? Do you think PhDs have some special way of talking about things?

Re: AI makes you boring

#214

Post by c22 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #121
c22 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most ideas aren't interesting. Implementations are interesting. I don't care if you worked hard on your implementation or not, but I do care if it solves the problem in a novel or especially efficient way. These are not the hallmarks of AI solutions.

In the vast majority of contexts I don’t want “novel” and “interesting” implementations, I want boring and proven ones.

In the vast majority of contexts I'm not using "Show HN" submissions to manage important functions of my life.

Re: AI makes you boring

#215

Post by lywald »

swiftcoder wrote: post #54
lasgawe wrote: post #8

The more interesting question is whether AI use causes the shallowness, or whether shallow people simply reach for AI more readily because deep engagement was never their thing to begin with.

AI enables the stereotypical "idea guy" to suddenly be a "builder". Of course, they are learning in realtime that having the idea was always the easy part...

I had found this rebuttal: Ideas are cheap only if you have cheap ideas.

I would argue good ideas are not so easy to find. It is harder than it seems to fit the market, and that is why most of apps fail. At the end of the day, everyone is blinded by hubris and ignorance... I do include myself in that.

Re: AI makes you boring

#217

Post by claudiulodro »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time. The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

> Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time.

I had a similar realization. My team was discussing whether we should hook our open-source codebases into an AI to generate documentation for other developers, and someone said "why can't they just generate documentation for it themselves with AI"? It's a good point: what value would our AI-generated documentation provide that theirs wouldn't?

Re: AI makes you boring

#218

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

minimaxir wrote: post #104
Kalpaka wrote: post #51

[dead]

> Not more blog posts, more emails, more boilerplate — but something structurally new? This is a point that often results in bad faith arguments from both AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics. Enthusiasts will say "everything is a remix and the most creative works are built on previous works" while skeptics will say "LLMs are stochastic parrots and cannot create anything new by technical definition". The truth is somewhere…

Funny thing is, LLMs can create novel ideas, they're just crap. Turn the temperature setting up or expand top_p and it'll come up with increasingly wacky responses, some of which might even be good.

Creativity often requires reasoning in unusual ways, and evaluating those ideas requires learning. The first part we can probably get LLMs to do; the latter part we can't (RL is a separate process and not really scalable).

Even without any of that, you can prompt your way into new things. I'm building a camper out of wood, and I've gotten older LLM models to make novel camper designs just by asking it questions and choosing things. You can make other AI models make novel music by prompting it to combine different aspects of music into a new song. Human creativity works that way too. Think of all the failed attempts at new things that humans come up with before a good one actually sticks.

Re: AI makes you boring

#219

Post by kshacker »

JohnMakin wrote: post #72
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too? I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?

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…

we need a stackoverflow "dupe" structure, something meme-worthy
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