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It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

blog.pabloecortez.com

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Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#261
post #114
post #46

Earlier 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…

> 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?

The point of most jobs is not to get anything productive done. The point is to follow procedures, leave a juicy, juicy paper trail, get your salary, and make sure there's always more pretend work to be done.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#263

It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji... You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

I absolutely have used AI to scaffold reproduction scenarios, but I'm still validating everything is actually reproducing the bug I ran into before submitting.

It's 90% AI, but that 90% was almost entirely boilerplate and would have taken me a good chunk of time to do for little gain other than the fact I did it.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even letting the LLM “clean it up” puts its voice on your text. In general, you don’t want its voice. The associations are LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. It’s the modern equivalent of “talking like a used car salesman”. Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.

It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.

I have tried this. It doesnt work. Why? A human’s unique style when executed has a pattern but in each work there are “experiments” that deviate from the pattern. These deviations are how we evolve stylistically. AI cannot emulate this, it only picks up on a tiny bit of the pattern so while it may repeat a few beats of the song, it falls far short of the whole.

This is why heavily assisted ai writing is still slop. That fundamental learning that is baked in is gone. It is the same reason why corporate speak is so hated. It is basically intentional slop.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#265
I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people visiting your content, and there is close to zero cost to make it. It is the same problem with music, in fact I search youtube music only with before:2022.

I recently wrote about the dead internet https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration.

I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity", or create rings of trust for humans, but now I think the ship has sailed.

Today a colleague was sharing their screen on google docs and a big "USE GEMINI AI TO WRITE THE DOCUMENT" button was front and center. I am fairly certain that by end of year most words you read will be tokens.

I am working towards moving my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist, and after that just using local indexes with some datahorading. (squid, wikipedia, SO, rfcs, libc, kernel.git etc)

Maybe in the future we just exchange local copies of our local "internet" via sdcards, like in Cuba's Sneakernet[1] El Paquete Semenal[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#266
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fully AI generated and fully AI review This reminds me of an awesome bit by Žižek where he describes an ultra-modern approach to dating. She brings the vibrator, he brings the synthetic sleeve, and after all the buzzing begins and the simulacra are getting on well, the humans sigh in relief. Now that this is out of the way they can just have a tea and a chat. It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers o…

> It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish I've been thinking this for a while, despairing, and amazed that…

As something of a technophile myself.. I see a lot more value in arguments that highlight totally ridiculous core assumptions rather than focusing on some kind of "humans first and only!" perspectives. Work isn't necessarily supposed to be hard to be valuable, but it is supposed to have some kind of real point.

In the dating scenario what's really absurd and disgusting isn't actually the artificiality of toys.. it's the ritualistic aspect of the unnecessary preamble, because you could skip straight to tea and talk if that is the point. We write messages from bullet points, ask AI to pad them out uselessly with "professional" sounding fluff, and then on the other side someone is summarizing them back to bullet points? That's insane even if it was lossless, just normalize and promote simple communications. Similarly if an AI review was any value-add for AI PR's, it can be bolted on to the code-gen phase. If editors/reviewers have value in book publishing, they should read the books and opine and do the gate-keeping we supposedly need them for instead of telling authors to bring their own audience, etc etc. I think maybe the focus on rituals, optics, and posturing is a big part of what really makes individual people or whole professions obsolete

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#267

I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people visiting your content, and there is close to zero cost to make it. It is the same problem with music, in fact I search youtube music only with before:2022. I recently wrote about the dead internet https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration. I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity", or create rings of trust for humans,…

> thought we should do "proof of humanity"

I thought about this in another context and then I realized: what system is going to declare you're human or not? AI of course

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#268
post #169
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read? Like, I’m totally on board with rejecting slop, but not all content that AI was involved in is slop, and it’s kind of frustrating so many people see things so black and white.

> Except the prompt is a lot harder and less pleasant to read?

It’s not a literal suggestion. “Might as well” is a well known idiom in the English language.

The point is that if you’re not going to give the reader the result of your research and opinions and instead will just post whatever the LLM spits out, you’re not providing any value. If you gave the reader the prompt, they could pass it through an LLM themselves and get the same result (or probably not, because LLMs have no issue with making up different crap for the same prompt, but that just underscores the pointlessness of posting what the LLM regurgitated in the first place).

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#269
It is the duality of generated content.

It feels great to use. But it also feels incredibly shitty to have it used on you.

My recommendation. Just give the prompt. If if your readers want to expand it they can do so. don't pollute others experience by passing the expanded form around. Nobody enjoys that.

Re: It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

#270

It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji... You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?

I would never put up a copilot PR for colleague review without fully reviewing it myself first. But once that’s done, why not?

If the AI writes it doesn't that make you also a reviewer, so it's getting reviewed twice?
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