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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

#371

Post by munificent »

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…

> The only thing that matters to me is the content.

The content itself does have value, yes.

But some people also read to connect with other humans and find that connection meaningful and important too.

I believe the best writing has both useful content and meaningful connection.

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

#372

Post by subsection1h »

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…

> I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not.

0% of your HN comments include URLs for sources that support the positions and arguments you've expressed at HN.[1] Do you generally not care about the sources of ideas? For example, when you study public policy issues, do you not differentiate between research papers published in the most prestigious journals and 500-word news articles written at the 8th-grade level by nonspecialist nobodies?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:alyxya+htt...

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

#373

Post by corporat »

rideontime wrote: post #366
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?

AI was used to analyze logical fallacies in the original blog post. I didn’t use it to draft content—just to spot the straw man, false dilemma, and appeal-to-emotion tactics in real time.

Ironically, this exact request would’ve fit the blog’s own arguments: "AI is lazy" / "AI undermines thought." But since I was using AI as a diagnostic tool (not a creative one), it doesn’t count.

Self-referential irony? Maybe. But at least I’m being transparent. :)

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

#375

Post by stephendause »

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?

This is total speculation, but my guess is that human reviewers of AI-written text (whether code or natural language) are more likely to think that the text with emoji check marks, or dart-targets, or whatever, are correct. (My understanding is that many of these models are fine-tuned using humans who manually review their outputs.) In other words, LLMs were inadvertently trained to seem correct, and a little message that says "Boom! Task complete! How else may I help?" subconsciously leads you to think it's correct.

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

#376

Post by pasteldream »

> people are far kinder than you may think

Not everyone has this same experience of the world. People are harsh, and how much grace they give you has more to do with who you are than what you say.

That aside, the worst problem with LLM-generated text isn’t that it’s less human, it’s that (by default) it’s full of filler, including excessive repetition and contrived analogies.

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

#377

Post by foxfired »

Earlier this year, I used AI to help me improve some of my writing on my blog. It just has a better way of phrasing ideas than me. But when I came back to read those same blog posts a couple months later, you know after I've encountered a lot more blog posts that I didn't know were AI generated at the time, I saw the pattern. It sounds like the exact same author, +- some degree of obligatory humor, writing all over the web with the same voice.

I've found a better approach to using AI for writing. First, if I don't bother writing it, why should you bother reading it? LLMs can be great soundboards. Treat them as teachers, not assistants. Your teacher is not gonna write your essay for you, but he will teach you how to write, and spot the parts that need clarification. I will share my process in the coming days, hopefully it will get some traction.

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

#378

Post by CuriouslyC »

the_af wrote: post #216
CuriouslyC wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, I'd say maybe you didn't have the wisdom to ask the question in the first place? And maybe you wouldn't know the follow up questions to ask after that? And if the person who produced it took a few minutes to fact check, that has value as well.

It's seldom the case that AI slop requires widsom to ask, or is fact-checked in any depth other than cursory. Cursory checking of AI-slop has effectively zero value. Or do you remember when Facebook groups or image communities were flooded with funny/meme AI-generated images, "The Godfather, only with Star Wars", etc? Thank you, but I can generate those zero-effort memes myself, I also have access to GenAI. We truly…

You don't need human intermediates either, what's the point of teachers? You can read the original journal articles just fine. In fact what's the point of any communication that isn't journal articles? Everything else is just recycled slop.

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

#379

Post by NewsaHackO »

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?

I wonder if it's due to emojis being able to express a large amount of infomation per token. For instance, the bulls-eye emoji is 16 bits. Also, Emoji's don't have the language barrier.

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

#380

Post by DEADMEAT »

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.…

> To the average person, LLMs are too useful to reject them

The way LLMss are now, outside of the tech bubble the average person has no use for 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"

This is a bizarre argument. Humans don't "train" on books, they read them. This could be for many reasons, like to learn something new or to feel an emotion. The LLM trains on the book to be able to imitate it without attribution. These activities are not comparable.

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