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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

#451

Post by runj__ »

jacquesm wrote: post #248
cm2012 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatbots are more reliable than 95% of people you can ask, on a wide variety of researched topics.

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…

Surely you don't always call up and pay for a lawyer any time you have an interest or question about law, you google it? In what world do you have the time, money and interest to ask people about every single thing you want some more information about.

I've done small plumbing jobs after asking AI if it was safe, I've written legal formalia nonsense that the government wanted with the help of AI. It was faster, cheaper and I didn't bother anyone with the most basic of questions.

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

#452

Post by JohnFen »

a_cool_username wrote: post #431
JohnFen wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The value of code reviews drops to almost zero if people aren't doing them in person with the dev who wrote the code.

I (and my team) work remote and don't quite agree with this. I work very hard to provide deep, thoughtful code review, especially to the more junior engineers. I try to cover style, the "why" of style choices, how to think about testing, and how I think about problem solving. I'm happy to get on a video call or chat thread about it, but it's rarely necessary. And I think that's worked out well. I've received consiste…

> I work very hard to provide deep, thoughtful code review

Which is awesome and essential!

But the reason that the value of code reviews drops if they aren't done live, conducted by the person whose code is being reviewed, isn't related to the quality of the feedback. It's because a very large portion of the value of a code review is having the dev who wrote the code walk through it, explaining things, to other devs. At least half the time, that dev will encounter "aha" moments where they see something they have been blind to before, see a better way of doing things, spot discontinuities, etc. That dev has more insight into what went into the code than any other, and this is a way of leveraging that insight.

The modern form of code review, where they are done asynchronously by having reviewers just looking at the code changes themselves, is not worthless, of course. It's just not nearly as useful as the old-school method.

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

#453

Post by siva7 »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #140
charlieyu1 wrote: post #47

I don’t know. As a neurodivergent person I have been insulted for my entire life for lacking “communication skills” so I’m glad there is something for levelling the playing field.

It only levels the field between you and a million spambots, which arguably makes you look even worse than before.

ouch... but it's true.

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

#457

Post by tripzilch »

ryanmerket wrote: post #198
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even letting the LLM “clean it up” puts its voice on your text. In general, you don’t want its voice. The associations are LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. It’s the modern equivalent of “talking like a used car salesman”. Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.

It's really not hard to say "make it in my voice" especially if it's an LLM with extensive memory of your writing.

Only if you have a very low bar for what constitutes "in your voice".

Just ask it to write "in the style of" a few famous writers with a recognizable style. It just can't do it. It'll do an awfully cringe attempt at it.

And that's just how bad LLMs are at it. There's a more general problem. If you've ever read a posthumous continuation of a literary series by a different but skilled author, you know what I mean.

For example, "And another thing..." by Eoin Colfer is written to be the final sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide, after Douglas Adams died. And to their absolute credit, the author Eoin Colfer, in my opinion, pretty much nails Douglas Adams's tone to the extent it is humanly possible to do so. But no matter how close he got, there's a paradox here. Colfer can only replicate Adams's style. But only Adams could add a new element, and it would still be his style. While if Colfer had done exactly the same, he'd have been considered "off".

Anyway, if a human writer can't pull it off, I doubt an LLM can do it.

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

#459

Post by latchup »

jmcodes wrote: post #393
D13Fd wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I don't agree entirely with this. I know why the LLM wrote the code that way. Because I told it to and _I_ know why I want the code that way. If people are letting the LLM decide how the code will be written then I think they're using them wrong and yes 100% they won't understand the code as well as if they had written it by hand. LLMs are just good pattern matchers and can spit out text faster than humans, so that's…

> Anything that requires actual brainpower and thinking is still my domain. I just type a lot less than I used to.

And that's a problem. By typing out the code, your brain has time to process its implications and reflect on important implementation details, something you lose out on almost entirely when letting an LLM generate it.

Obviously, your high-level intentions and architectural planning are not tied to typing. However, I find that an entire class of nasty implementation bugs (memory and lifetime management, initialization, off-by-one errors, overflows, null handling, etc.) are easiest to spot and avoid right as you type them out. As a human capable of nonlinear cognition, I can catch many of these mid-typing and fix them immediately, saving an significant amount of time compared to if I did not. It doesn't help that LLMs are highly prone to generate these exact bugs, and no amount of agentic duct tape will make debugging these issues worthwhile.

The only two ways I see LLM code generation bring any value to you is if:

* Much of what you write is straight-up boilerplate. In this case, unless you are forced by your project or language to do this, you should stop. You are actively making the world a worse place.

* You simply want to complete your task and do not care about who else has to review, debug, or extend your code, and the massive costs in capital and human life quality your shitty code will incur downstream of you. In this case, you should also stop, as you are actively making the world a worse place.

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

#460

Post by fullshark »

yalogin wrote: post #458

This is unavoidable. Individual blogs may not use AI but companies that live on user engagement will absolutely use them and churn out all types of content

I avoid it by not reading open web blogs. Eventually open web message boards (like this one) will be fully contaminated as well and I'll move to discord or group chats I suppose.
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