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

Do your own writing

alexhwoods.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 265 posts

Re: Do your own writing

#231

Post by bigstrat2003 »

aeon_ai wrote: post #146
bandrami wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great example. Just give me the links you would give to the LLM. I also have an LLM and can use it if I want to, or I can read the links and notes. But I have zero interest in reading or hearing a lecture that you yourself find too tedious to write.

Performative nonsense. You have less interest in sifting through multiple articles and wiki pages sent to you by a stranger with a prompt than the one paragraph same stranger selected as their curated point. And pretending like you’d act otherwise is precisely the kind of “anti ai virtue signaling” that serves as a negative mind virus. AI is full of hype, but the delusion and head in sand reactions are worse by a mil…

> And pretending like you’d act otherwise

No pretending here. I don't ever ask an LLM for a summary of something which I then send to people, because I have more respect for my co-workers than that. Nor do I want their (almost certainly inaccurate) LLM summary. It's the 2020s equivalent of "let me Google that for you": I can ask the bag of words to weigh in myself; if I'm asking a person it's because I want that person's thoughts.

Re: Do your own writing

#232

Post by bigstrat2003 »

darth_aardvark wrote: post #224
bandrami wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh Lord, no. Not at all. That's what they're terrible at. They are ok-ish at superficial overviews and catastrophically bad at specific minutiae

Honest, non-confrontational, non-passive aggressive question: Have you used any of the latest models in the last 6 months to do coding? Or frankly, in the last year?

I have. And the people who say "use a frontier" model are full of it. The frontier models aren't any better than the free ones.

Re: Do your own writing

#233

Post by HeinrichAQS »

theAurenVale wrote: post #230

this maps to what im seeing in visual AI too. rendering quality is insane now, nobody disputes that. but most AI generated images look generic and flat because theres no direction behind them same thing with writing imo. the output quality is technically fine but if you didnt wrestle with the ideas yourself the result reads like noone actually thought about it writing forces you to confront where your thinking is vag…

If we see intent as a real part of information which influences the output substantially then this is perfectly explainable - the part of intent is not intrinsic to any artificial generation. Intent can only be given by external input and will be therefor always transformed by the statistical operations which happen during the generation of the output. The wrestling with the ideas is to find the sweetspot between intent, anticipated outcome and the anticipated recognition from other of the result. Even if we put in intent into the generation than the assumption of the consequences of the certain output in certain contexts is still missing. And the core of this problem is in my opinion the missing casual chain - without this no causal link between the generation and its consequences can be established and therefore no "deepness" can be found in the generated artifacts.

Re: Do your own writing

#236

Post by riskable »

mrroryflint wrote: post #193

I recently added an AI Policy to my blog ( https://rory.codes/ai-policy ). The assumption now appears to be AI guilty unless proven innocent which I think is a travesty for readers and writers alike.

I use bullet points a lot in my writing and it seems that, specifically is causing people to accuse me of either:

    * Being an AI bot.
    * Using an LLM to generate it.
It's driving me bonkers!

Re: Do your own writing

#237

Post by antasvara »

anon-3988 wrote: post #186
tomjen3 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want five minutes of audio of me rambling, then some instructions for how to split it up and organise it? Plenty of people make LLMs make text longer, but writing a short accurate text with the essential points is much harder.

What is the difference between you putting your 5 minute monologue into the LLM to summarize it versus me doing it?

I know what I'm trying to say, so I can sanity check the output. You can't, unless you listen to the monologue.

That's why I disagree with people that say "just give me whatever you gave the LLM." That's only useful if you, the writer of the prompt, have no intention of looking at the LLM output before sending it.

Re: Do your own writing

#238

Post by notnullorvoid »

It's interesting to see so many people agree with this perspective when it comes to articles yet disagree when it comes to writing software.

Perhaps some form of Gell-Mann Amnesia, people are better at recognizing good articles than they are at recognizing good software. Combined with a vibe coding effect of never actually reading the source, and thus recognizing how bad it is.

Re: Do your own writing

#239

Post by satvikpendem »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #232
darth_aardvark wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest, non-confrontational, non-passive aggressive question: Have you used any of the latest models in the last 6 months to do coding? Or frankly, in the last year?

I have. And the people who say "use a frontier" model are full of it. The frontier models aren't any better than the free ones.

What are you defining as free versus frontier, and for what purpose? For coding there is a big difference between Opus and GPT 5.3/4 versus Sonnet and other models such as open weight ones.
Post reply on HN