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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

#361

Post by JonChesterfield »

scotty79 wrote: post #282
goostavos wrote: post #178

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.

People do. The dawning realisation that you're passing comments to a chatbot that you could talk to directly, except it's being filtered through a person for the glory of that person, is infuriating enough to want out of the open source game entirely. Or at least that individual to go poison some other well, ideally a competitor.

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

#362

Post by ares623 »

alyxya wrote: post #201
furyofantares wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they…

That’s true, I just wanted to offer a counter perspective to the anti-AI sentiment in the blog post. I agree that the slop issue is probably more common and egregious, but it’s unhelpful to discount all AI assisted writing because of slop. The only way I see to counteract slop is to care about the reputation of the author.

And how does an author build up said reputation?

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

#363

Post by WorldMaker »

reg_dunlop wrote: post #172
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?

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.

But that's not what a PR summary is best used for. I don't need links to exact files, the Diff/Files tab is a click away and it usually has a nice search feature. The Commits tab is a little bit less helpful, but also already exists. I don't need an AI telling me stuff already at my fingertips.

A good PR summary should be the why of the PR. Not redundantly repeat what changed, give me description of why it changed, what alternatives were tested, what you think the struggles were, what you think the consequences may be, what you expect the next steps to be, etc.

I've never seen an AI generated summary that comes close to answering any of those questions. An AI generated summary is a bit like that junior developer that adds plenty of comments but all the comments are:

    // add x and y
    var result = x + y;
Yes, I can see it adds x and y, that's already said by the code itself, why are we adding x and y? What's the "result" used for?

I'm going to read the code anyway to review a PR, a summary of what the code already says it does is redundant information to me.

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

#364

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #312
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?

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?

You may thank millenial hipsters who used think emojis are cute and proliferation of little javascript libraries authored by them on your friendly neighborhood githubs.

Later the cutest of the emojis paved their way into templates used by bots and tools, and it exploded like colorful vomit confetti all over the internets.

When I see this emojiful text, my first association is not with an LLM, but with a lumberjack-bearded hipster wearing thick-framed fake glasses and tight garish clothes, rolling on a segway or an equivalent machine while sipping a soy latte.

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

#365

Post by corporat »

The most thoughtful critique of this post isn’t that AI is inherently bad—but that its use shouldn’t be conflated with laziness or cowardice.

Fact: Professional writers have used grammar tools, style guides, and even assistants for decades. AI simply automates some of these functions faster. Would we say Hemingway was lazy for using a typewriter? No—we’d say he leveraged tools.

AI doesn’t create thoughts; it drafts ideas. The writer still curates, edits, and imbues meaning—just like a journalist editing a reporter’s notes or a designer refining Photoshop output. Tools don’t diminish creativity—they democratize access to it.

That said: if you’re outsourcing your thinking to AI (e.g., asking an LLM to write your thesis without engaging), then yes, you’ve lost something. But complaining about AI itself misunderstands the problem.

TL;DR: Typewriters spit out prose too—but no one blames writers for using them.

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

#366

Post by rideontime »

corporat wrote: post #365

The most thoughtful critique of this post isn’t that AI is inherently bad—but that its use shouldn’t be conflated with laziness or cowardice. Fact: Professional writers have used grammar tools, style guides, and even assistants for decades. AI simply automates some of these functions faster. Would we say Hemingway was lazy for using a typewriter? No—we’d say he leveraged tools. AI doesn’t create thoughts; it drafts i…

For transparency, what role did AI serve in drafting this comment?

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

#367

Post by tptacek »

kibwen wrote: post #357
tptacek wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like ChatGPT's voice any more than you do, but it is definitely not HR-voice. LLM writing tends to be in active voice with clear topic sentences, which is already 10x better writing than corporate-speak.

Yep, it's like Coke Zero vs Diet Coke: 10x the flavor and 10x the calories.

Coke Zero and Diet Coke are both noncaloric.

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

#368

Post by iknowstuff »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #364
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You may thank millenial hipsters who used think emojis are cute and proliferation of little javascript libraries authored by them on your friendly neighborhood githubs. Later the cutest of the emojis paved their way into templates used by bots and tools, and it exploded like colorful vomit confetti all over the internets. When I see this emojiful text, my first association is not with an LLM, but with a lumberjack-be…

This generic comment reads like its AI generated, ironically

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

#369

Post by jacquesm »

cm2012 wrote: post #315
jacquesm wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to know about the law, I'll ask a lawyer (ok, not any lawyer, but it's a useful first pass filter). If I want to know about plumbing I'll ask a plumber. If I want to ask questions or learn about writing I will ask one or more writers. And so on. Experts in the field are way better at their field than 95% of the population, which you can ask but probably shouldn't. There are many 100's of professions, and mo…

In some evaluations, it is already outperforming doctors on text medical questions and lawyers on legal questions. I'd rather trust ChatGPT than a doctor who is barely listening, and the data seems to back this up.

The problem is that you don't know on what evaluations and you are not qualified yourself. By the time you are that qualified you no longer need AI.

Try asking ChatGPT or whatever is your favorite AI supplier about a subject that you are an expert about something that is difficult, on par with the kind of evaluations you'd expect a qualified doctor or legal professional to do. And then check the answer given, then extrapolate to fields that you are clueless about.

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

#370

Post by bee_rider »

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…

It is sort of fun to bounce little ideas off ChatGPT, but I can’t imagine wanting to read somebody else’s ChatGPT responses.

IMO a lot of the dumb and bad behavior around LLMs could be solved by a “just share the prompts” strategy. If somebody wants to generate an email from bullet points and send it to me: just send the bullet points, and I can pass them into an LLM if I want.

Blog post based on interesting prompts? Share the prompt. It’s just text completion anyway, so if a reader knows more about the topic than the prompt-author, they can even tweak the prompt (throw in some lingo to get the LLM to a better spot in the latent space or whatever).

The only good reason not to do that is to save some energy in generation, but inference is pretty cheap compared to training, right? And the planet is probably doomed anyway at this point so we as well enjoy the ride.

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