I think it quickly needs to become good manners to indicate when text was written by AI rather than a person. I read that text differently and I shouldn't have to spend my time guessing.
I know you didn't write this
51–60 of 145 posts
Re: I know you didn't write this
#52Is writing with LLM assistance that different than writing with a typewriter 100+ years ago? Than using a computer and printer 30 years ago? Each can be seen as using a tool to add false legitimacy. But ultimately they are just tools.
Yes, it is obviously fundamentally different.
Re: I know you didn't write this
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This isn't always a great indicator. Right. Certainly not dispositive. > use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it. But he did mention tables. You'd think if they weren't just ASCII art, there'd be _some_ google docs history about fixing them up.
Fairly certain e.g. copy-pasting from Obsidian will copy over the tables as well.
every other time,
paste with styling is the devil, but ever so occasionally, I do actually want that
Re: I know you didn't write this
#54Why can't the plan be judged on its merits? Rigorous verification of the idea is a good thing that should happen anyways. The main potential problem I see is transmission of privileged information to a third party. I assume they are working at a business to make money, not a school or a writing competition.
> Why can't the plan be judged on its merits? Rigorous verification of the idea is a good thing that should happen anyways.
Situational.
I don't know this blogger or what the plan involved; but for sake of agument, let's say it was a business plan, and let's say in isolation it's really good, 99.9% chance of success with 10x returns kind of good.
Everyone in whatever problem space this is probably just got the same quality of advice from their own LLM prompting. That 99.9% is no longer "in isolation", it is a correlated failure where all the other people doing the same thing as you makes it less viable.
That's a good reason not to use a public tool, even when the output is good.
Correlated risk disguised as uncorrolated risk was a big part of the global financial crisis in the late 00s.
Re: I know you didn't write this
#55It will probably be unpopular here, where people appear to have drawn the lines and formed unyielding positions, but...
The whole llm paranoia is devolving into hysteria. Lots of finger pointing without proof, lots of shoddy evidence put forward and nuance missing points.
My stance is this: I don't really care whether someone used an llm or wrote it themselves. My observation is that in both cases people were mostly wrong and required strict reviews and verification, with the exception of those who did Great Work.
There are still people who do Great Work, and even when they use llms the output is exceptional.
So my job hasn't changed much, I'm just reading more emojis.
If you find yourself becoming irrationally upset by something that you're encountering that's largely outside of your control, consider going to therapy and not forming a borderline obsession with purity on something that has always been a bit slippery (creative originality ).
Re: I know you didn't write this
#56There is nothing worse than this feeling, like fantastic, now i have to go read through this slop with incredible care and minutia. I may as well not read the slop and go redo all the work/thought myself, it will be easier that way.
Re: I know you didn't write this
#57Just a hot take, but if you ask someone to complete a rote task that AI can do, you should not be surprised when they use AI to do it.
The author does not mention whether the generated project plan actually looked good or plausible. If it is, where is the harm? Just that the manager had their feelings hurt?
Re: I know you didn't write this
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's bizarre to me that this didn't occur even slightly to the post author.
Or the tell that the guy who usually writes fairly succinctly suddenly dumps five thousand words with all of the details that most people wouldn't bother to write down. It would be interesting to see the history where the whole document is dumped in the file at once, but then edits and corrections are applied top to bottom to that document. Using AI isn't so much the problem as trusting it blindly.
> the whole document is dumped in the file at once, but then edits and corrections are applied top to bottom to that document
This also happens if one first writes in an editor without spellchecking, then pastes into the Google Doc (or HN text box) that does have spellchecking.
Re: I know you didn't write this
#59I know I'm an outlier on HN, but I really don't care if AI was used to write something I'm reading. I just care whether or not the ideas are good and clear. And if we're talking about work output 99% of what people were putting out before AI wasn't particularly good. And in my genuine experience AI's output is better than things people I worked with would spend hours and days on. I feel like more time is wasted tryin…
>But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan.
The coworker should just give me the five bullet points they put into ChatGPT. I can trivially dump it into ChatGPT or any other LLM myself to turn it into a "plan."
Re: I know you didn't write this
#60Lets steel man this:
1. If the output is solid, does it matter?
2. The author could simply have done the research, created the plan, and then gave an LLM the bullet list points of research and told it to "make this into a presentable plan". The author does the heavy work and actually does the creative work, and outsources the manual formatting to the LLM. My Wife speaks English as a second language, she much prefers telling an LLM what she is trying to say and to generate a business friendly email from this than writing it herself and letting in grammatical mistakes.
3. If I were to write a paper in my favorite text editor and then put it through pandoc to generate a word doc it would do the same thing.