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

ai;dr

0xsid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 313 posts

Re: ai;dr

#281

Post by account42 »

lproven wrote: post #62
alontorres wrote: post #2

I think that this requires some nuance. Was the post generated with a simple short prompt that contributed little? Sure, it's probably slop. But if the post was generated through a long process of back-and-forth with the model, where significant modifications/additions were made by a human? I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

You do you. I do think there's a great deal wrong with that, and I won't read it at all. Human can speak unto human unless there's language barrier. I am not interested in anyone's mechanically-recovered verbiage, no matter how much they massaged it.

Makes me wonder how I would react to Star Trek's universal translator today. Feels like even if there is a language barrier, I would prefer to but in the effort to break it down rather than have a magical solution that may or may not get things across correctly.

Re: ai;dr

#282

Post by account42 »

unconed wrote: post #189

>Before you get your pitchforks out and call me an AI luddite, I use LLMs pretty extensively for work. Chicken. Seriously, the degree to which supposed engineering professionals have jumped on a tool that lets them outsource their work and their thinking to a bot astounds me. Have they no shame?

No, we truly live in a post-shame society and that's definitely not a good thing. Shame is (or was) an important tool to enforce social norms and the acceptance of AI slop (both writing and code) is only the latest where a sufficiently large percentage of people think anything goes that it feels literally pointless to speak up at times.

Re: ai;dr

#283

Post by written-beyond »

account42 wrote: post #272
written-beyond wrote: post #197

I've had friendships broken because people couldn't understand why I didn't appreciate their "hard work" on writing a series of 10 articles they wrote with Claude. Mind you this person is an excellent writer, they had great success with ghost writing and running a small news website where they wrote and curated articles. But for some reason the opportunity for Claude to write stuff they can never have the time for is…

> I don't care if you used AI for 99.99% of your research I do because you should be manually verifying anything you get out of the stochastic parrot before you present it to others - and that's going to be more than 0.01% of the work.

It's still okay to do that, LLMs models are literally terabytes big I'm sure they've crammed enough information in there and enough verification tools to be extremely accurate. Now whether the information matches your true internal intent, rather than the prompt, is another thing.

Re: ai;dr

#284

Post by abustamam »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #265
abustamam wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not confident that the average person is aware of an em dash nor that it is widely associated with AI; I think the current culturally dominant meaning is just a fat hyphen (which most people just call a dash anyway).

My wife was working from home recently and I overheard a meeting she was having. It's a very non technical field. She and her team were working on a presentation and her boss said "let's use one of those little AI dashes here."

I find that amusing but I know somewhere an English major is crying.

Re: ai;dr

#285

Post by assimpleaspossi »

account42 wrote: post #279
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cry every time someone uses the f-word in their writing for no apparent reason.

I'd rather read "fuck" than "f-word". The latter is like eating dumplings for lent because surely $deity won't see the meat in there.

Cultured people have no need for such words in public discourse so I'd rather not see either of them or the need. People are judged by the words they use.

Re: ai;dr

#286

Post by user____name »

ssiddharth wrote: post #50
losvedir wrote: post #6

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an exp…

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

My history teacher thought me to use "8==3" instead, the Romans used it to sign their graffities.

Re: ai;dr

#287

Post by msephton »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #264
msephton wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "show it to people" I guess you don't mean the people in India, Japan, etc who still use the symbol for its original purpose?

I think it's safe to assume they meant it within their specific cultural context. They the symbol has different connotations in other cultures doesn't really change the point being made.

My point is just: if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’ depends on choosing an audience that conveniently erases everyone who uses it differently, that’s not describing intrinsic meaning, that’s describing the author’s cultural bubble and bias.

And on em dashes—most people outside tech circles see no “AI fingerprint,” and designers like myself have loved them since early Mac DTP, so the suspicion feels hilariously retroactive and very knee-jerk. So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?

Re: ai;dr

#288

Post by nananana9 »

raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

There's real reasons behind the huge divide in how the median programmer views LLMs vs how the median artist views image models.

1. Most programmers are better than SOTA LLMs, while most artists can't match the rendering quality of a SOTA image model. Artists rightfully see image models as a way bigger threat than we see LLMs.

2. While it's true that LLMs are trained on unlicensed code and image models are trained on unlicensed art, a lot of the publicly available code was essentially released with a license of "here's some code, you can use it for whatever"

3. Code is seen as a means to an end, while art is an end in itself. Few people, even among professional programmers love programming, or program recreationally (this forum obviously has disproportionately many). Most artists love the process of making art.

Re: ai;dr

#289

Post by AlecSchueler »

msephton wrote: post #287
AlecSchueler wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to assume they meant it within their specific cultural context. They the symbol has different connotations in other cultures doesn't really change the point being made.

My point is just: if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’ depends on choosing an audience that conveniently erases everyone who uses it differently, that’s not describing intrinsic meaning, that’s describing the author’s cultural bubble and bias. And on em dashes—most people outside tech circles see no “AI fingerprint,” and designers like myself have loved them since early Mac DTP, so the suspicion feels hilarious…

> So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?

Then they might not read it at all. I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.

I'm also not sure there is an "AI bubble." Everyone I know is using it in every industry. Museum education, municipal health services, vehicle engineering, publishing, logistics, I'm seeing it everywhere.

As mentioned elsewhere I've seen non-tech people refer to them as "AI dashes."

> if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’

There was no suggestion of such a test. No symbol has an intrinsic meaning. The point GP was about considering how your output will be received.

That point was very obviously made within a specific cultural context, at the very least limited to the world of the Latin alphabet. I'm sure there are other LLM signifiers outside of that bubble.

Re: ai;dr

#290

Post by xtiansimon »

dontwannahearit wrote: post #25

It's pretty much over for the human-internet. Search was gamed, its usefulness has plummeted, so humans will increasingly ask their LLM of choice and that LLM will have been trained on the content of the internet. So when someone wants to know something about the topic that my website is focused on, chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly, but a summary of what the LLM learned from…

> "It's pretty much over for the human-internet ... chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly..."

Well, we're here. HN manages to call me back to the community nearly every day with articles I would not have otherwise found by search or AI.

No doubt web search just feels inadequate by the qualities of chat initiated search. But the results of chat can lead to websites and books and all manner of media consumed by the ChatAi. The pathways are still there to find those pages.

What I think you're talking about are business statistics in consumer industry. Maybe you're thinking of a person who drinks Bud Lite and eats Lays potato chips (highly ranked sales) and envision they'll use ChatAi apps and never use a search engine again. If that's the demographic you want, then writing a website is prolly not going to reach them anyway. If you want to reach that audience, then you need to become part of that mass consumer media ecosystem. You need to create/invent virality--it's the one shared element consumer society revolves upon and industry can't get enough of.

Post reply on HN