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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

#381

Post by D13Fd »

godelski wrote: post #272
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?

> But once that’s done, why not? Do you have the same understanding of the code? Be honest here. I don't think you do. Just like none of us have the same understanding of the code somebody else wrote. It's just a fact that you understand the code you wrote better than code you didn't. I'm not saying you don't understand the code, that's different. But there's a deeper understanding to code you wrote, right? You might…

If you wrote the code, then you’ll understand it and know why it is written the way you wrote it.

If the AI writes the code, you can still understand the code, but you will never know why the code is written that way. The AI itself doesn’t know, beyond the fact that that’s how it is in the training data (and that’s true even if it could generate a plausible answer for why, if you asked it).

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

#383

Post by alyxya »

bee_rider wrote: post #370
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?…

AI assisted blog posts could have an interleaved mix of AI and human written words where a person could edit the LLM’s output. If the whole blog post were simply a few prompts on ChatGPT with no human directly touching the output, then sure it makes sense to share the prompt.

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

#384

Post by pasteldream »

jancsika wrote: post #175
latexr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt. It's like listening to Bach's Prelude in C from WTCI where he just came up with a humdrum chord progression and uses the exact same melodic pattern for each chord, for the entire piece . Thanks, but I can write a trivial…

Sometimes repetition serves a purpose, and sometimes it doesn’t.

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

#386

Post by godelski »

D13Fd wrote: post #381
godelski wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But once that’s done, why not? Do you have the same understanding of the code? Be honest here. I don't think you do. Just like none of us have the same understanding of the code somebody else wrote. It's just a fact that you understand the code you wrote better than code you didn't. I'm not saying you don't understand the code, that's different. But there's a deeper understanding to code you wrote, right? You might…

If you wrote the code, then you’ll understand it and know why it is written the way you wrote it. If the AI writes the code, you can still understand the code, but you will never know why the code is written that way. The AI itself doesn’t know, beyond the fact that that’s how it is in the training data (and that’s true even if it could generate a plausible answer for why, if you asked it).

Exactly! Thanks for summing it up.

There needs to be some responsible entity that can discuss the decisions behind the code. Those decisions have tremendous business value[0]

[0] I stress because it's not just about "good coding". Maybe in a startup it only matters that "things work". But if you're running a stable business you care if your machine might break down at any moment. You don't want the MVP. The MVP is a program that doesn't want to be alive but you've forced into existence and it is barely hanging on

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

#387

Post by alyxya »

caconym_ wrote: post #222
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 would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable. Whether I hand write a blog post or type it into a computer, I'm the one producing the string of characters I intend for you to read. If I use AI to write it, I am not. This is a far, f…

I think of technology as offering a sliding scale for how much assistance it can provide. Your words could be literally the keys you press, or you could use some tool that fixes punctuation and spelling, or something that fixes the grammar in your sentence, or rewrites sentences to be more concise and flow more smoothly, etc. If I used AI to rewrite a paragraph to better express my idea, I still consider it fundamentally my thoughts. I agree that it can get to the point where using AI doesn’t constitute my thoughts, but it’s very much a gray area.

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

#388

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

iknowstuff wrote: post #368
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s below me to use LLMs to comment on HN.

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

#389

Post by pessimizer »

JohnFen wrote: post #343
orbital-decay wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the point. Their voice is unintelligible in English, and they prefer a voice that English-speakers can understand.
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