Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can just say it

noperator.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 241 posts

Re: You can just say it

#211

Post by nlawalker »

emodendroket wrote: post #153
nlawalker wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine. It's because it's a pretty safe bet that the prompt either implicitly or explicitly says "I don't really care," and the act of using AI to generate the response is almost entirely an effort to conceal that.

I don't think that's a safe bet at all; the choice to put the message to an AI may express a desire, however misguided, to produce a "better" (clearer, less likely to cause offense, whatever) message than the author feels able to manage unaided.

Yeah my comment was maybe a bit too snarky. I am personally a huge believer in assuming good faith and intent and giving people the benefit of the doubt, it’s just that when it comes to this, I’ve been in many situations where I have enough context that, even though I don’t have proof, I don’t have much doubt either.

Re: You can just say it

#212

Post by LtWorf »

fcarraldo wrote: post #124
nojs wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“tell my obnoxious boss to fuck off about the tps reports” isn’t a great career move for them though

I would rather my reports tell me to fuck off than to generate something telling me to fuck off in polite but insincere terms full of emojis and em dashes. Honesty is valuable.

I think it has extra value in that it will be more unnerving to them than using profanities.

Re: You can just say it

#213

Post by LtWorf »

delusional wrote: post #169
fcarraldo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather my reports tell me to fuck off than to generate something telling me to fuck off in polite but insincere terms full of emojis and em dashes. Honesty is valuable.

I too would much rather that, because then I get to know them as unhelpful whining complainers and fire them. That's not a great outcome for that person though.

Lol you can't fire people for using AI when the corporate mandate lately is to use AI.

Re: You can just say it

#214

Post by LtWorf »

afavour wrote: post #117
nojs wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“tell my obnoxious boss to fuck off about the tps reports” isn’t a great career move for them though

Generating AI responses to all your emails isn’t a great career move either, though

My former CTO was doing that all the time.

Re: You can just say it

#215

Post by strken »

cautiouscat wrote: post #19

This quote from the authors friend really hit home with me. > “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.” I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey…

I'm actually a bit offended, or at least wary, when a human writes an email with the length and structure of an LLM's output.

Too many words per idea shows me that they're trying to hide something, manage or manipulate me, or play some other game.

Re: You can just say it

#216

Post by floxy »

coldtea wrote: post #110
roenxi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's one of those sentiments where people say it but they probably don't mean it literally. Much like if your boss asks for honest feedback giving it to them with both barrels is a career limiting move. You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes and the damage those mistakes do is limited if you follow some structural rules of how to communicate (aka polite…

Nope, I would prefer getting the prompt. I would also prefer anyone sending me the AI output and not either their ideas or their prompt, to not contant me ever again. If I wanted the output of the AI, I'd ask it myself. You're just a useless intermediary if you send it to me.

I've been going back and forth on this, and I think I agree with you about 95%. But for some cases, where I don't really have a choice about whether or not I'm going to hear from you, there are certain dullards that I'd rather have filtered through a chat bot. It really would be an improvement over whatever they had to say. Listening to their genuine human output has negative value, but filtered through an LLM might bring that value up to zero.

Re: You can just say it

#217

Post by noddybear »

pash wrote: post #144
cautiouscat wrote: post #19

This quote from the authors friend really hit home with me. > “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.” I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey…

The obvious solution is to run things in reverse, inputting the AI-generated output to recover the prompt that generated it. Most generative models can be run in reverse by algorithms that already exist [0], but you have to have the model weights. For closed-weight models, or for a process that can handle unknown models, you’d have to do some engineering. But do we have the technology to build models that back out th…

Most of the functions that LLMs perform aren’t bijective, though.

What prompt constructs the output ‘The answer is 3’ or ‘Yes that’s a great idea’?

Re: You can just say it

#218

Post by noddybear »

IndeanCondor wrote: post #193
hackingonempty wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are mortal. C.S. Lewis died over sixty years ago.

And yet here you are, strongly reacting to a philosophical argument made by him. He's mortal, he's dead, and yet he's affected you here, a throwaway comment on a forum post no one will think about in a week's time.

He also believed in the immortal soul that survives after death, so he may have had a more literal meaning.

Re: You can just say it

#219

Post by originalcopy »

> The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.

I love the post. I feel generating AI content is like doing informational compression (weirdly enough, by bloating up the size).

When giving it a prompt, the "normalized AI brain" guesses the intent based on what's the most plausible. All the diverse human brains get filtered, bucketed, here you go, this is the "standard artifact".

And yes, it is a compression because real life is not one shot prompt. If I get an unclear message from my colleague, I ask for clarification. If the message is bloated by AI and some information is added, it already scraped some of the real intent by bucketizing it. Sometimes it may be what the original author meant. Sometimes not.

I don't know what is anyone's motivation in compressing the facts by making text longer and harder to read. This whole.email generation idea is bizarre.

Re: You can just say it

#220

Post by hackingonempty »

IndeanCondor wrote: post #193
hackingonempty wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are mortal. C.S. Lewis died over sixty years ago.

And yet here you are, strongly reacting to a philosophical argument made by him. He's mortal, he's dead, and yet he's affected you here, a throwaway comment on a forum post no one will think about in a week's time.

I didn't think about it that way, thanks!
Post reply on HN