I do not want AI to "polish" me • Hacker News Board

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#221

Post by KittenInABox » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

miningape wrote: post #180

KittenInABox wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's also unfair to women that they have to pick up the extra work that was done by the "community" before. And a loss for social cohesion too. I would argue the community explicitly did not do the work of ousting predators. We are only in this generation or so no longer allowed to rape women if we're married to them. It is still legal for adults to marry children, not in an 18-to-17 way but a 38-to-15 way.…

I'd like to clarify when I said "community" I wasn't talking exclusively about friend groups (or your mother's friend groups) helping with recommendations and whatnot. I mean the community as a whole - men and women, the bailiffs and the blacksmiths: When you know everyone in your town and most of the people in your neighbouring towns it becomes much easier to know who is a bad person that'll abuse you (or to find ou…

Yes, I'm pushing back on that because in the past it explicitly legal and normal to abuse women. Women were not allowed to be selective in the first place. So the community explicitly did not perform the protection you are saying. It was only recently illegal to rape your wife.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#222

Post by hibikir » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #162

flatline wrote: post #26

> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something. Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprieta…

Thing is, we've been here before in a much more limited way; people _hated_ it when Microsoft's demonic paperclip did this in Office. "It looks like you're writing a letter". _Hated_ it. It is unclear what the industry thinks has changed, that people will now welcome "It looks like you're [whatever]".

If the automation is much better at the task than I am, then I am happy to donate it the responsibility: It's a matter of accuracy. Clippy kind of sucked even when he was right about what I was trying to do. For many things, the LLMs are getting good enough to outperform me

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#223

Post by bityard » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #75

Is there anyone like me out there who has yet to use AI? I think it's interesting but I have no strong feelings for it. Aside from a few images generated with early image generators I have not used anything else, not even chatgpt. AI search results I mostly scroll past are an exception.

I was an LLM skeptic for a long time. I still have a hard time trusting it to the same extent that most HN'ers appear to. (I would never use an LLM as a substitute for my own "voice" when writing, or put any AI-generated code into production.) But I think I have reached a middle ground: I basically use it as a first approximation when I am exploring something entirely new to me. For example, if I'm learning a programming language, I might ask it for ways to unpack an array into separate variables. Or if I'm reading an ingredients list, I'll ask what psyllium husk is. Basically anything that's moderately easy to verify if I get any suspicion that the LLM is hallucinating again.

These are things that I _used_ to simply ask a search engine, before Google results became 99% SEO-optimized blogspam and therefore useless for actual knowledge-seeking.

I think an important part of overcoming AI skepticism is to understand (at a very high level) how it all works so that you understand its limitations and know when you can and cannot trust it.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#224

Post by rsynnott » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #194

rsynnott wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, we've been here before in a much more limited way; people _hated_ it when Microsoft's demonic paperclip did this in Office. "It looks like you're writing a letter". _Hated_ it. It is unclear what the industry thinks has changed, that people will now welcome "It looks like you're [whatever]".

The customer base for computing has expanded probably 3 or 4 fold or more from those windows xp days in the US. Maybe for the subset of the population that was word processing back then it was annoying. But now we are looking at a different pie entirely where that subset of annoyed power users is but a tiny sliver. There are people today who have no experience even with a desktop os.

This wasn’t the dark ages; in highly developed countries the ‘computer in every desk’ thing had just about come true. I doubt there are that many more regular word processor users now than in the late clippy era, at least in the developed world.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#225

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

While I find AI to be quite useful in many contexts, I 100% agree with this assessment, and I loath all these SV bubble-dwellers who think our lives should be airbrushed and "polished" for presentation.

I think a bunch of Google's Gemini ads highlighted how clueless they were on this subject. Like one of their very first Gemini announcements highlighted how you can get AI to write a caption for your social media photos of your dog. God forbid you actually use your own brain to write an actual human caption (flaws and all) for photos of your dog. Google also highlighted how their Pixel camera AI features can "correct" photos of your kids making funny faces in family photos, because how awful would it be if you didn't look like some sort of Stepford family.

I was glad Google finally got a ton of pushback against their ad about using AI for a young girl to write a fan letter to her Olympic idol. Seriously, fuck off with that. Makes me wonder if these marketing folks are actual humans in the first place.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#226

Post by ergonaught » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

I’m pretty close to wildly unprofessional raging at coworkers sending me LLM-written emails/Slack messages.

So far the 21st century seems to be a mad dash to see who can turn off their brain the most.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#227

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #225

While I find AI to be quite useful in many contexts, I 100% agree with this assessment, and I loath all these SV bubble-dwellers who think our lives should be airbrushed and "polished" for presentation. I think a bunch of Google's Gemini ads highlighted how clueless they were on this subject. Like one of their very first Gemini announcements highlighted how you can get AI to write a caption for your social media phot…

[deleted]

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#228

Post by dcre » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

AlfredBarnes wrote: post #115

dcre wrote: post #23

I actually use LLMs to unpolish dictation results from MacWhisper[0] to match the way I write in chats. MacWhisper lets you set a prompt to automatically post-process your transcribed output. Here is my prompt: 'You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to rewrite this dictation with more casual capitalization and punctuation so it can be used in a chat setting. - Always capitalize "I" and derived w…

Do you know if there is a windows equivalent? I cant seem to find one that is as well done as this MacWhisper.

Nope. I see a few in search results but none look that great.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#229

Post by GeoAtreides » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

idoco wrote: post #22

I get the frustration, but I think there’s a hidden assumption in this discussion: that everyone can write well in English. Only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, but more than twice that number use it daily. For many, AI rewriting isn’t about losing personal style—it’s about making sure they can communicate clearly in a language that isn’t their first. It’s fair to dislike how AI flatte…

copy and pasting chatgpt code won't make people better programmers and copy and pasting english snippets won't make people fluent in english

it just makes them better at copy and pasting

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#230

Post by smitelli » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #75

Is there anyone like me out there who has yet to use AI? I think it's interesting but I have no strong feelings for it. Aside from a few images generated with early image generators I have not used anything else, not even chatgpt. AI search results I mostly scroll past are an exception.

I consider myself principally a software engineer, and like you I have avoided using AI aside from a few "haha look at that" images produced with DALL-E. Very rarely the forced AI content at the top of a search results page has helped me refine the term or concept I was trying to look up.

I like doing the things that AI is supposedly good at. I like learning, I like understanding what I am doing, I like the satisfaction of finally getting to a solution after banging my head against the wall for hours. I like the occasional sensation of being hopelessly lost and finding my way to the light. I like writing text and code. I'm not terribly bored by boilerplate. I like going down rabbit holes and experiencing happy accidents. I can't in good conscience sign my name to something that I did not create and do not understand deeply enough to explain to anybody who asks. I like doing the hard thing.

The immediate response I'm sure that I will get is some variant of "well everybody else is using it as a force multiplier and the way you do it is making the job take too long." And maybe that's true. Maybe I don't care. I am a person who takes pride in my craft. I enjoy the act of making things. Some people don't, I guess.

The day may come where I am viewed as a dinosaur, where the way I work becomes fundamentally incompatible with the way the industry works. And if that day comes, bluntly, fuck the industry. I'll go fix air conditioners instead.