I love that we came to almost the same conclusion regarding grammar. I wrote a very similar article you might enjoy
https://noonker.github.io/posts/2024-07-25-i-respect-our-sha...
ai;dr
31–40 of 313 posts
Re: ai;dr
#32I would be glad to read anyone's prompts they use to generate AI text. I don't see why I need to necessarily read the output, though.
I can take the other person's prompt and run it through an LLM myself and proceed from there.
Re: ai;dr
#33I 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…
LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (Cantrill)
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The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. (Brandolini)
Re: ai;dr
#34I agree with the general statement, if you didn’t spend time on writing it, I am not going to spend time reading it. That includes situations where the writer decides to strip all personality by letting AI format the end product. There’s irony in not wanting to read AI content, but still using it for code and especially documentation though, where the same principle should apply.
Re: ai;dr
#35> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer…
> Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer. Homogenization is good for milk, but not for writing.
I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement "homogenization is good for milk". What makes it "good"?
Re: ai;dr
#36>I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding.
Doesn't ai;dr kind of contradict ai generated documentation? If I want to know what claude thinks about your code I can just ask it. Imo documentation is the least amenable thing to ai. As the article itself says, I want to read some intention and see how you shape whatever you're documenting.
(AI adding tests seems like a good use, not sure what's meant by scaffolding)
Re: ai;dr
#37Many engineers suck at writing. I'm fine with AI prose if it's more organized and information-dense than human prose. I'm sick of reading 6 page eng blogs to find a paragraph's worth of information.
Re: ai;dr
#38I 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.
I don't see what value the LLM would add - writing itself isn't that hard. Thinking is hard, and outsourcing that to an LLM is what people dislike.
Using an LLM to ask you questions about what you wrote can help you explore assumptions you are making about the reader, and can help you find what might be better written another way, or elaborated upon.
Re: ai;dr
#39I laugh every time somebody qualifies their anti-AI comments with "Actually I really like AI, I use it for everything else". The problem is bad, but the cause of the problem (and especially paying for the cause of the problem)? That's good!
I laugh every time somebody thinks every problem must have a root cause that pollutes every non-problem it touches.
It's a problem to use a blender to polish your jewelry. However, it's perfectly alright to use a blender to make a smoothie. It's not cognitive dissonance to write a blog post imploring people to stop polishing jewelry using a blender while also making a daily smoothie using the same tool.
Re: ai;dr
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer. Homogenization is good for milk, but not for writing.
I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement "homogenization is good for milk". What makes it "good"?
Fair enough, tastes vary. Many people prefer that milk not be chunky or lumpy, and want it to be uniform and consistent. Perhaps some do not.