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Warranty Void If Regenerated

nearzero.software

211–220 of 353 posts

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#212
The LLM-ness isn't a hard problem to fix. Break it into sections, run each through an LLM a few times to catch logic issues, use different AIs to double-check. For the writing style, if the author just read it carefully, they can definitely spot the things Claude keeps repeating, and tell it not to do that.

But honestly, the ideas here are really good. The cascading failure from a weather model update, the spaghetti problem with forty tools nobody designed as a system, the $4 toggle switch being the most important tool --- that's sharper thinking about AI than most serious essays on the topic.

A lot of people who publish regularly can't write to this level of thinking. The prose could be cleaner, sure, but it made me think, which is more than most stories do.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#213
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also had no idea this was LLM generated. After reading your comment, I had a similar emotional reaction. Thinking deeper, it seems prudent that we tag submissions like this with a prefix. Example: "LLM: ". This would be similar to "Show HN: ". While we cannot control what the original sources choose to disclose, we can fill that gap ourselves. My point: I agree with you: It is misleading that the blog post does not…

> preface explaining it was written by an LLM why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.

[deleted]

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#214
post #191
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of having the reverse experience with the 2017 New Yorker viral "Cat Person" story [0] which a (usually trustworthy) friend forwarded and enthusiastically told me to read: waste of time shaggy-dog story, intentional engagement-trolling aimed at the intersection of the hot-button topics of its target readership *. But why are we culturally expected to allow more slack to a human author, even a meretric…

(Sorry, the correct link for Roupenian's 2017 story "Cat Person" is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892630 )

Oh god, that was insipid.

It had a very similar quality to the AI'd article from this thread. A sort of attempt at Being Literary but never really ever getting to the point of saying anything. It has the same feeling of wallowing, of over indulging in its shtick.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#215
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. i…

People without sex dolls also have lower birthrates. It's because the time previously used for fucking and childrearing has instead been owed to our masters since before we were born.

the sex doll thing was intended as a metaphor throughout this thread. we've been slaves for thousands of years, that bit hasnt changed. what has changed is that people nowadays no longer care about themselves because they are fried. watching life on a screen feels close enough to the real thing - why bother living at all, living is risky and can hurt you. the usual answer to that would be testosterone pushing us to do risky things, but test rates have cratered. in the absence of risk attraction, values would help, but nobody has any values, because we decided to throw religion in the bin under the expectation that values would spontaneously manifest (which they didnt, no surprise, we are literally monkeys). and after all that, yes we are being worked to the bone more than ever - at least serfs owned their land.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#216
post #61

I'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…

It's treachery, a betrayal of trust. It's the same feeling as when you get sweet-talked into overpaying for something. This time, you overpaid with your attention.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#217
This was good, but I think it could have been 10% as long and still conveyed the ultimate metaphor you were going after. The specifics about intricate farming details (which are apparently wrong in multiple places, according to other commenters) are ultimately kind of unnecessary IMO.

Interesting work, nonetheless. I’d check out Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms for more of what I mean. They are very short, yet very metaphorically dense.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#218
post #61

I'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 had a similar experience a few days ago with some music on Spotify. It was an Irish Pub song, rendering some political satire that seemed pretty consistent with what I figure is a predominant Irish viewpoint. Since I holidayed in Ireland a while ago and adored the public there, I really liked it. I reveled in the fact that somewhere in Ireland, there was a band singing messages in pubs that resonated strongly with…

I've gotten pretty good at identifying AI-genned music. There are two tells that I've noticed so far.

The most quantifiable is the presence of a high frequency component that sort of sounds like someone tried to clean up our restore a highly compressed track. It almost sounds kind it's going to start doing that warbling sound that happens when a teleconferencing call has a bad connection but it's just not bad enough to lose connection completely. I guess it's the sound of being highly noise gated.

The other is more qualitative. The song is boring. Like you said, on paper the song should be something I enjoy. But I suddenly notice that there is no... variation or never hook or anything to make it interesting. Anything to make it something other than the result of a machine. The aural equivalent of eating at Applebee's or reading The New Yorker. The songs just kind of plod onward without ever really getting to a point.

It feels kind of like a vivid dream when you're on the edge of lucidity. You can tell something is wrong, but there is something messing with you faculties. You're trying to see where things are going, how things will resolve, and it never happens. It just keeps going and going in a particular mode. If it does change, it's not to resolve, it's to start on a new thread that is an alternate universe version of the previous thread. With no attempt at establishing continuity, no resolution is ever found.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#219
post #208
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> preface explaining it was written by an LLM why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.

because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions. asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone…

> because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit.

Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do.

For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes:

1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam)

2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough)

3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text)

In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#220

It’s a neat piece of writing, but not nearly dystopic enough for my taste. There will only be one farm and whoever is fixing it will be on the other side of the world.

Dystopians are too easy. The real challenge and reward are interesting utopian novels.

All good stories set in utopias are set in places that are secretly dystopias.
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