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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

#331

Post by JohnFen »

carlosjobim wrote: post #261
latexr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The point of most jobs is not to get anything productive done

That's certainly not my experience. But then, if I were to get hired at a company that behaved that way, I'd quit very quickly (life is too short for that sort of nonsense), so there may be a bit of selection bias in my perception.

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

#332

Post by the_af »

mrguyorama wrote: post #327
athrowaway3z wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>The thoughts I put into a text are mostly independent of the sentences or _language_ they're written in. 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 writin…

> If you reduce "Lord of the flies" to something like "children shouldn't run a community"

To be honest, and I hate to say this because it's condescending, it's a matter of literacy.

Some people don't see the value in literature. They are the same kind of people who will say "what's the point of book X or movie Y? All that happens is ", or the dreaded "it's boring, nothing happens!". To these people, there's no journey, no pleasure with words, the "plot" is all that matters and the plot can be reduced to a sequence of A->B->C. I suspect they treat their fiction like junk food, a quick fix and then move on. At that point, it makes logical sense to have an LLM write it.

It's very hard to explain the joy of words to people with that mentality.

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

#333

Post by danudey »

goostavos wrote: post #178
mikepurvis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> I'd prefer you just send the prompt

Makes it a lot easier to ignore, at the very least.

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

#334

Post by beej71 »

alyxya wrote: post #54

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…

Do you care if a scifi book was written by an AI or human, out of curiosity?

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

#336

Post by kyleee »

collingreen wrote: post #294
ab_io wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. My team started using graphite.dev, which provides AI generated PR descriptions that are so bloated with useless content that I've learned to just ignore them. The issue is they are doing a kind of reverse inference from the code changes to a human-readable description, which doesn't actually capture the intent behind the changes.

I tell my team that the diff already perfectly describes what changed. The commits and PR are to convey WHY and in what context and what we learned (or should look out for). Putting the "what" in the thing meant for the "why" is using the tools incorrectly.

Yes, that’s the hard thing about having a “what changed” section in the PR template. I agree with you, but generally put a very condensed summary of what changed to fulfill the PR template expectations. Not the worst compromise

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

#338

Post by danudey »

lm28469 wrote: post #293
jihadjihad wrote: post #23

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?

The best part is that they write the PR summaries in bullet points and then feed them to an LLM to dilute the content over 10x the length of text... waste of time and compute power that generates literally nothing of value

I would love to know how much time and computing power is spent by people who write bullet points and have ChatGPT expand them out to full paragraphs only for every recipient to use ChatGPT to summarize them back down to bullet points.

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

#340

Post by JohnFen »

chemotaxis wrote: post #305
jzb wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but I don't think I can get angry at them for producing useful content the wrong way" What about plagiarism? If a person hacks together a blog post that is arguably useful but they plagiarized half of it from another person, is that acceptable to you? Is it only acceptable if it's mechanized? One of the arguments against GenAI is that the output is basically plagiarized from other sources -- that is, of course, over…

My personal thoughts on gen AI are complicated. A lot of my public work was vacuumed up for gen AI, and I'm not benefitting from it in any real way. But for text, I think we already lost that argument. To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them on some ultimately muddied arguments along the lines of "it's OK for humans to train on books, but it's not OK for robots". Mind you, it pains me to write this.…

> I just think that ship has sailed.

Sadly, I agree. That's why I removed my works from the open web entirely: there is no effective way for people to protect their works from this abuse on the internet.

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