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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

#441

Post by palmotea »

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

An LLM generated blog post is by definition derivative and bland.

> 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.

Then say so, up front.

But that's not what people do. They're lazy or lack ideas but want "content" (usually for some kind of self-promotional reason). So you get to read that.

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

#442

Post by robin_reala »

latexr wrote: post #83
JohnFen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are selfish. The point is themselves, not the reader. True! But when I encounter a web site/article/video that has obviously been touched by genAI, I add that source to a blacklist and will never see anything from it again. If more people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to decline.

> I add that source to a blacklist Please do tell more. Do you make it like a rule in your adblocker or something else? > If more people did that, then the selfish people would start avoiding the use of genAI because using it will cause their audience to decline. I’m not convinced. The effort on their part is so low that even the lost audience (which will be far from everyone) is still probably worth it.

I use Kagi for this: you can block domains from appearing in your search results. https://kagi.com/settings/user_ranked

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

#443

Post by schmookeeg »

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?

Imagine hand-crafting a PR and fighting through the AI-generated review comments with no cultural support for pushing back. It's like Brandolini's Law but in github.

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

#444

Post by rolisz »

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?

There's some research that shows that LLMs finetuned to write malicious code (with security vulnerabilities) also becomes more malicious (including claiming that Hitler is a role model).

So it's entirely possible that training in one area (eg: Reddit discourse) might influence other areas (such as PRs)

https://arxiv.org/html/2502.17424v1

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

#445

Post by ruszki »

Philpax wrote: post #257
j4yav wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can’t communicate effectively in the language how are you evaluating that it doesn’t make you sound like a bot?

Verification is easier than generation, especially for natural language.

The amount of time that I and my colleagues had to fight to not rewrite something instead of fixing it tells otherwise. This is a well documented phenomenon for decades now, so it’s definitely not just my experience. I had the same urge when I started coding, and I had to fight it for a long time in myself.

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

#446

Post by gr4vityWall »

caconym_ wrote: post #391
gr4vityWall wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, far, far more important distinction than whatever differences we might imagine That apparently is not the case for a lot of people.

s/important/significant/, then, if that helps make the point clearer. I cannot tell you that it objectively matters whether or not an article was written by a human or an LLM, but it should be clear to anybody that it is at least a significant difference in kind vs. the analogy case of handwriting vs. typing. I think somebody who won't acknowledge that is either being intellectually dishonest, or has already had thei…

I wasn't even arguing with you, nor saying that it doesn't matter to me, rather just pointing an out an observation.

> I think somebody who won't acknowledge that is either being intellectually dishonest, or has already had their higher cognitive functions rotted away by excessive reliance on LLMs to do their thinking for them.

This feels too aggressive for a good faith discussion on this site. Even if you do think that, there's no point in insulting the humans who could engage with you in that conversation.

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

#447

Post by athrowaway3z »

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…

You can rewrite a sentence on every page of lord of the flies, and the same important ideas would still be there.

You can have the thoughts in a different language and the same ideas are still there.

You can tell an LLM to tweak a paragraph to better communicate a nuance until you're happy with it.

---

Language isn't thought. It's extremely useful in that it lets us iterate on our thoughts. You can add in LLMs in that iteration loop.

I get you wanted to vent because the volume of slop is annoying and a lot of people are degrading their ability to think by using it poorly, but "If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts" is just motivated reasoning.

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

#448

Post by runj__ »

danudey wrote: post #342
reg_dunlop wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chang…

But I explained to the AI why we're doing the change. When the AI and I try something and we fail I explain that and it's included in the PR.

The AI has far more energy than I do when it comes to writing PR summaries, I have done it so many times, it's not the main part of my job. I have already provided all the information for a PR, why should I repeat myself? What happened to DRY?

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

#449

Post by dheatov »

chemotaxis wrote: post #79

I don't like binary takes on this. I think the best question to ask is whether you own the output of your editing process. Why does this article exist? Does it represent your unique perspective? Is this you at your best, trying to share your insights with the world? If yes, there's probably value in putting it out. I don't care if you used paper and ink, a text editor, a spell checker, or asked an LLM for help. On th…

I feel like plagiarism is an appropriate analogy. Student can always argue they still learn something out of it and yada yada, and there's probably some truth in it. However, we still principally reject it in a pretty binary manner. I believe the same reason applies to LLM artifacts too, or at least spiritually.

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

#450

Post by runj__ »

contagiousflow wrote: post #397
strbean wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely if you have access to a technical expert with the time to answer your question, you aren't asking an AI instead.

Books exist

chatGPT exists

(I'm not saying not to read books, but seriously: there are shortcuts)

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