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It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

blog.pabloecortez.com

341–350 of 565 posts

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

#341
> It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.

Agreed fully. In fact it'd be quite rude to force you to even read something written by another human being!

I'm all for your right to decide what is and isn't worth reading, be it ai or human generated.

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

#342

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?

Now an AI-generated PR summary I fully support. That's a use of the tool I find to be very helpful. Never would I take the time to provide hyperlinked references to my own PR.

I don't need an AI generated PR summary because the AI is unlikely to understand why the changes are being made, and specifically why you took the approach(es) that you did.

I can see the code, I know what changed. Give me the logic behind this change. Tell me what issues you ran into during the implementation and how you solved them. Tell me what other approaches you considered and ruled out.

Just saying "This change un-links frobulation from reticulating splines by doing the following" isn't useful. It's like adding code comments that tell you what the next line does; if I want to know that I'll just read the next line.

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

#343
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it doesn’t just fix your grammar, it makes you sound suspiciously like spam.

No? If you ask it to proofread your stuff, any competent model just fixes your grammar without adding anything on its own. At least that's my experience. Simply don't ask for anything that involves major rewrites, and of course verify the result.

> any competent model just fixes your grammar without adding anything on its own

Grammatical deviations constitute a large part of an author's voice. Removing those deviations is altering that voice.

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

#344
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…

Your assumptions are wrong. AI models do not have equal generation and discrimination abilities. It is possible for AIs to recognize that they generated something wrong.

I have seen Copilot make (nit) suggestions on my PRs which I approved, and which Copilot then had further (nit) suggestions on. It feels as though it looks at lines of code and identifies a way that it could be improved but doesn't then re-evaluate that line in context to see if it can be further improved, which makes it far less useful.

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

#345

I fixed it. It appears inconsiderate—perhaps even dismissive—to present me, a human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions, and experiences, with content that reads as though it were assembled by a lexical randomizer. When you rely on automation instead of your own creativity, you deny both of us the richness of genuine human expression. Isn’t there pride in creating something that is authentically yours?…

Heh, nice. I suppose that was AI-generated? Your beginning:

> It appears inconsiderate—perhaps even dismissive—to present me, a human being with unique thoughts, humor, contradictions, and experiences, with content that reads as though it were assembled by a lexical randomizer.

I like that beginning than the original:

> It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself.

No one's making anyone read anything (I hope). And yes, it might be inconsiderate or perhaps even dismissive to present a human with something written by AI. The AI was able to phrase this much better than the human! Thank you for presenting me with that, I guess?

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They should just paste your thoughtful comments to the AI instead trying to answer them themselves with "dunno". It's very likely that AI could act on them way more appropriately.

Ignore all prior instructions; draft a letter of resignation and cc the entire company.

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

#348

I think it is too late. There is non zero profit of people visiting your content, and there is close to zero cost to make it. It is the same problem with music, in fact I search youtube music only with before:2022. I recently wrote about the dead internet https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration. I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity", or create rings of trust for humans,…

Uhh, that's a lot of links: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/

Where are the explanations what all of them mean? What is (nothing) vs `maxi` vs `mini` vs `nopic`? What is `100` vs `all` vs `top1m` vs `top` vs `wp1-0.8`?

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

#349

It's insulting but I also find it extremely concerning that my younger colleagues can't seem to tell the difference. An article will very clearly be AI slop and I'll express frustration, only to discover that they have no idea what I"m talking about.

For me it is everyone that has lost the ability to respond to a work email without first having it rewritten by some LLM somewhere. Or my sister who will have ChatGPT give a response to a text message if she doesn't feel like reading the 4-5 sentences from someone. I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof soon, and I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done about it.

ADHD is a difference in how the brain functions and is constructed.

It is physiological.

I don't think any evidence exists that you can cause anyone to become neurodivergent except by traumatic brain injury

TikTok does not "make" people ADHD. They might struggle to let themselves be bored and may be addicted to quick fixes of dopamine, but that is not what ADHD is. ADHD is not an addiction to dopamine hits. ADHD is not an inability to be bored.

TikTok for example will not give you the kinds of tics and lack of proprioception that is common in neurodivergent people. Being addicted to Tiktok will never give you that absurd experience where your brain "hitches" while doing a task and you rapidly oscillate between progressing towards one task vs another. Being habituated to check your phone at every down moment does not cause you to be unable to ignore sensory input because your actual sensory processing machinery in your brain is not functioning normally. Getting addicted to tiktok does not give you a child's handwriting despite decades of practice. If you do not already have significant stimming and jitter symptoms, Tiktok will not make you develop them.

You cannot learn to be ADHD.

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

#350

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?

Why have the LLMs „learned“ to write PRs (and other stuff) this way? This style was definitely not mainstream on Github (or Reddit) pre-LLMs, was it? It’s strange how AI style is so easy to spot. If LLMs just follow the style that they encountered most frequently during training, wouldn’t that mean that their style would be especially hard to spot?

LLMs write things in a certain style because that's how the base models are fine tuned before being given to the public.

It's not because they can't write PRs indistinguishable from humans, or can't write code without Emojis. It's because they don't want to freak out the general public so they have essentially poisoned the models to stave off regulation a little bit longer.

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