321–330 of 565 posts
I sometimes share interesting AI conversations with my friends using the "share" button on the AI websites. Often the back-and-forth is more interesting than the final output anyway. I think some people turn AI conversations into blog posts that they pass off as their own because of SEO considerations. If Twitter didn't discourage people sharing links, perhaps we would see a lot more tweet threads that start with htt…
The problem is that the current generation of tools "looks like something" even with minimal effort. This makes people lazy. Actually put in the effort and see what you get, with or without AI assist.
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I disagree. You can use it to point out grammar mistakes and then fix them yourself without changing the meaning or tone of the subject.
Paste passages from Wikipedia featured articles, today’s newspapers or published novels and it’ll still suggest style changes. And if you know enough to know to ignore ChatGPTs suggestions, you didn’t need it in the first place.
This will invalidate even ispell in vim. The entire point of proofreading is to catch things you didn’t notice. Nobody would say “you don’t need the red squiggles underlining strenght because you already know it is spelled strength.”
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> They are selfish. The point is themselves, not the reader. True! But when I encounter a web site/article/video that has obviously been touched by genAI, I add that source to a blacklist and will never see anything from it again. If more people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to decline.
> I add that source to a blacklist Please do tell more. Do you make it like a rule in your adblocker or something else? > If more people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to decline. I’m not convinced. The effort on their part is so low that even the lost audience (which will be far from everyone) is still probably worth it.
Otherwise, I just remember that particular source as being untrustworthy.
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It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.
Exactly. It's so wild to me when people hate on generated text because it sounds like something they don't like, when they could easily tell it to set the tone to any other tone that has ever appeared in text.
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It destroys the value of code review and wastes the reviewers time. Code review is one of the places where experience is transferred. It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments and have them met with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it." If all you do is 'review' the output of your prompting before cutting a CR, I'd prefer you just send the prompt.
> Code review is one of the places where experience is transferred. Almost nobody uses it for that today, unfortunately, and code reviews in both directions are probably where the vast majority of learning software development comes from. I learned nearly zilch in my first 5 years as a software dev at crappy startups, then I learned more about software development in 6 months when a new team actually took the time to…
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> 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…
> If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the sentences or _language_ they're written in. Not completely independent, but to claim thoughts are completely dependent on text (thus also the language) is nonsense. > Might as well just give people your prompt. What would be the value of seeing a dozen diffs? By the same logic, sho…
Not even true! Turning your thoughts into words is a very important and human part of writing. That's where you choose what ambiguities to leave, which to remove, what sort of implicit shared context is assumed, such important things as tone, and all sorts of other unconscious things that are important in writing.
If you can't even make those choices, why would I read you? If you think making those choices is unimportant, why would I think you have something important to say?
Uneducated or unsophisticated people seem to vastly underestimate what expertise even is, or just how much they don't know, which is why for example LLMs can write better than most fanfic writers, but that bar is on the damn floor and most people don't want to consume fanfic level writing for things that they are not fanatical about.
There's this weird and fundamental misconception in pro-ai realms that context free "information" is somehow possible, as if you can extract "knowledge" from text, like you can "distill" a document and reduce meaning to some simple sentences. Like, there's this insane belief that you can meaningfully reduce text and maintain info.
If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like "children shouldn't run a community", you've lost immense amounts of info. That is not a good thing. You are missing so much nuance and context and meaning, as well as more superficial (but not less important!) things like the very experience of reading that text.
Like, consider that SOTA text compression algorithms can reduce text to 1/10th of it's original size. If you are reducing a text by more than that to "summarize" or "reduce to it's main points" a text, do you really think you are not losing massive amounts of information, context, or meaning?
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I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources, and sometimes I can rely on that source to fact check.
> The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI slop is by checking the sources posted at the end and seeing they don’t exist. Asking for sources isn’t a magical incantation that suddenly makes things true. > It isn’t guaranteed that content written by human…
In tech-related matters such as coding, I've come to expect every link ChatGPT provides as reference/documentation is simply wrong or nonexistent. I can count with fingers from a single hand the times I clicked on a link to a doc from ChatGPT that didn't result in a 404.
I've had better luck with links to products from Amazon or eBay (or my local equivalent e-shop). But for tech documentation which is freely available online? ChatGPT just makes shit up.
I 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…
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.