I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here yet, and I don't want to be pedantic, but for centuries famous artists, musicians, writers, etc. have used assistants to do their work for them. The list includes (but in no way is this complete): DaVinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Warhol, Koons, O'Keefe, Hepworth, Hockney, Stephen King, Clancy, Dumas, Patterson, Elvis, Elton John, etc. etc. Further, most scientific, engineering and artistic innovations are made "on the shoulders of giants." As the saying goes: there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing. I suggest that the use of an LLM for writing is just another tool of human creativity to be used freely and often to produce even more interesting and valuable content.
It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
241–250 of 565 posts
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#242I don't like binary takes on this. I think the best question to ask is whether you own the output of your editing process. Why does this article exist? Does it represent your unique perspective? Is this you at your best, trying to share your insights with the world? If yes, there's probably value in putting it out. I don't care if you used paper and ink, a text editor, a spell checker, or asked an LLM for help. On th…
Exactly. If it's substantially the writer's own thoughts and/or words, who cares if they collaborated with an LLM, or autocomplete, or a spelling/grammar-checker, or a friend, or a coworker, or someone from Fiverr? This is just looking for arbitrary reasons to be upset.
If it's not substantially their own writing or ideas, then sure, they shouldn't pass it off as such and claim individual authorship. That's a different issue entirely. However, if someone just wanted to share, "I'm 50 prompts deep exploring this niche topic with GPT-5 and learned something interesting; quoted below is a response with sources that I've fact-checked against" or "I posted on /r/AskHistorians and received this fascinating response from /u/jerryseinfeld", I could respect that.
In any case, if someone is posting low-quality content, blame the author, not the tools they happened to use. OOP may as well say they only want to read blog posts written with vim and emacs users should stay off the internet.
I just don't see the point in gatekeeping. If someone has something valuable to share, they should feel free to use whatever resources they have available to maximize the value provided. If using AI makes the difference between a rambling draft riddled with grammatical and factual errors, and a more readable and information-dense post at half the length with fewer inaccuracies, use AI.
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#243Who cares about your feelings, it's a blog post. If the goal is to get the job done, then use AI. Do you really want to waste precious time for so little return?
"I'm choosing to be 'insulted' by the existence of an arbitrary thing in the universe and then upset by the insult I chose to ascribe to it."
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. Maybe you only notice it because it is obvious. Just like someone would only notice machine translation if it is obvious.
> To be fair, you are assuming that the input wasn't garbage to begin with. It's not an assumption. Look at this example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707 The author posted their input to the LLM in the comments after receiving critcism, and that input was much better than their actual post. In this thread I'm less sure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 - it DOES look like there was somethin…
What's really sad here is that it is all form over function. The original got the point across, didn't waste words and managed to be mostly coherent. The result, after spending a lot of time on coaxing the AI through the various rewrites (11!) was utter garbage. You'd hope that we somehow reach a stage where people realize that what you think is what matters and not how pretty the packaging is. But with middle management usually clueless we've conditioned people to having an audience that doesn't care either, they go by word count rather than by signal:noise ratio, clarity and correctness.
This whole AI thing is rapidly becoming very tiresome. But the trend seems to be to push it everywhere, regardless of merit.
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And
This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time? This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose. And no, using different models doesn’t fix the issue. That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that so…
I suspect you could bias it to always say no, with a long list of pointless shit that they need to address first, and come up with a brand new list every time. maybe even prompt "suggest ten things to remove to make it simpler".
ultimately I'm happy to fight fire with fire. there was a time I used to debate homophobes on social media - I ended up writing a very comprehensive list of rebuttals so I could just copy and paste in response to their cookie cutter gotchas.
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#246I don’t know. As a neurodivergent person I have been insulted for my entire life for lacking “communication skills” so I’m glad there is something for levelling the playing field.
I’d rather be insulted for something I am and can at least try to improve, than praised for something I’m not or can’t do, despite my physiological shortcomings.
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#247I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me. > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever el…
As long as you’re not using an autopen, because that is definitely not you!
https://archive.ph/20250317072117/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.
Chatbots are more reliable than 95% of people you can ask, on a wide variety of researched topics.
If I want to know about the law, I'll ask a lawyer (ok, not any lawyer, but it's a useful first pass filter). If I want to know about plumbing I'll ask a plumber. If I want to ask questions or learn about writing I will ask one or more writers. And so on. Experts in the field are way better at their field than 95% of the population, which you can ask but probably shouldn't.
There are many 100's of professions, and most of them take a significant fraction of a lifetime to master, and even then there usually is a daily stream of new insights. You can't just toss all of that information into a bucket and expect that to outperform the When Idiocracy came out I thought it was a hilarious movie. I'm no longer laughing, we're really putting the idiots in charge now and somehow we think that quantity of output trumps quality of output. I wonder how many scientific papers published this year will contain AI generated slop complete with mistakes. I'll bet that number is >> 0.
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#249I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me. > No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever el…
> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. “Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written. > The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job…
> “Blog” stands for “web log”. If it’s on the web, it’s digital, there was never a period when blogs were hand written.
Did you use AI to write this...? Because it does not follow from the post you're replying to.
Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
#250I agree with the author. If I detect that the article is written by an AI, I bounce off.
I similarly dislike other trickery as well, like ghostwriters, PR articles in journalism, lip-syncing at concerts, and so on. Fuck off, be genuine.
The thing why people are upset about AI is because AI can be used to easily generate a lot of text, but its usage is rarely disclosed. So then when someone discovers AI usage, there is no telling for the reader of how much of the article is signal, and how much is noise. Without AI, it would hinge on the expertise or experience of the author, but now with AI involved, the bets are off.
The other thing is that reading someone's text involves a little bit of forming a connection with them. But then discovering that AI (or someone else) have written the text, it feels like they betrayed that connection.