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

Various LLM Smells

shvbsle.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 312 posts

Re: Various LLM Smells

#31

Post by jvanderbot »

gchamonlive wrote: post #26
dvt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. One book a month is hardly an aspirational goal. You don't even have to read Melville or Hemingway or Chaucer or Shakespeare, just pick up any popular NYT best seller, and it'll be significantly better than anything an LLM can generate.

Really hard to take your comment serious when the only post on dvt.name is a hello world page, because at least OP is trying to publish and you are lacking moral high ground to judge him thinking LLM writing is good.

Oh if I had a nickle for every web domain I bought and put a hello-world.html into s3 and never checked again ...

FWIW, I'm with GP. It's quite easy to get just mind-numbingly tired reading beyond the first two sentences of a typical LLM output, let alone on something I'm familiar with.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#32

Post by cryzinger »

sublinear wrote: post #25
xienze wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbrevia…

Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook? At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.

I think it's both true that most LLM writing ("writing") sucks and that it's better than what a lot of people can produce unassisted. Which to me doesn't mean that we should roll over and accept LLM output as a lesser evil... it just means that the bar is so low it might as well be in hell, and rapidly getting lower :')

Re: Various LLM Smells

#33

Post by solumunus »

sublinear wrote: post #25
xienze wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbrevia…

Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook? At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.

It’s acceptable for someone to buy a ready meal or takeout if it’s better than what they can cook. Why wouldn’t it be? Is that the greatest choice for their personal development? Probably not, but life is complex and folk have limited capability and bandwidth for acquiring skills.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#34

Post by xienze »

sublinear wrote: post #25
xienze wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbrevia…

Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook? At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.

Tell me your thoughts on the quality of LLM-generated code. I've never understood this attitude where people are absolutely disgusted by the slightest whiff of AI prose but will happily slurp up AI-generated code by the bucketful and proudly proclaim that it's OK because it's better than the average developer can produce.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#35

Post by srik »

spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

These LLM idioms are constantly being consumed every day and are bound to make it into the next, if not current, generation's vernacular. It's going to be unbearable.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#36

Post by knollimar »

n42 wrote: post #2

No ___, no ____. Just _____ or using "honest" to describe an approach.

Honest, straight, genuine, actual, real are all words that paper over a weak claim to me. Im thinking about a hook that injects a subagent fact checking in an "are you sure" style here because it's so bad.

Also the false not X it's Y is used in a similar way for faux distinctions like a sov cit claiming "it's not driving, it's traveling in a car"

Re: Various LLM Smells

#37

Post by jochem9 »

mil22 wrote: post #7

Those cards, so familiar! Exactly what Opus produced for me. Did Anthropic and/or OpenAI deliberately train their models to produce websites with a specific design language, or did these stylistic preferences emerge naturally as some kind of LLM-selected optimum?

AI has no taste, so I suspect the labs just gave it a bunch of decent looking boilerplate as preferred style.

When you bring your own ideas you can get AI to dev pretty nice looking non-generic stuff.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#39

Post by Aperocky »

flatline wrote: post #30
Planktonne wrote: post #8

> The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

I don't disagree about the probability, but the current frontier models are not completely useless for writing even in areas where I have significant knowledge. I would not have said that a year ago. You have to watch them like a hawk -- they are good at spitting out plausible sounding nonsense that is hard even for an expert to discern. But the dice roll going on behind the scenes is continually more biased towards…

On factual things, potentially. But if I want to read your writing, wouldn't I be trying to pick your brain? Otherwise why don't I read wikipedia or usage documentation?
Post reply on HN