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I know you didn't write this

ammil.industries

61–70 of 145 posts

Re: I know you didn't write this

#61
post #12

Why 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.

So many technologists offended at the use of technology. Next they’ll insist on pen-on-paper for truly authentic work product, and after that, 3 days’ wilderness meditation on it, to prove you really internalized it.

Look, it’s now like, email in 2004. You see spam, that it has found email. It doesn’t mean you refuse to interact with anyone by email, write geocities posts mocking email-users. You just acknowledge the technology (email) can be used for efficiency, results, and it also can be misused as a giant time-waster.

The author of the article here is basically saying “technology was used = work product is trash”. The ”spam” folks are seeing must be horrible to evoke this kind of condemnatory response.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#62
post #36

I 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…

Ever since some non-native-English-speaking people within my company started using LLMs, I've found it much easier to interact and communicate with them in Jira tickets. The LLM conveys what they intend to say more clearly and comprehensively. It's obviously an LLM that's writing but I'm overall more productive and satisfied by talking to the LLM.

If it's fiction writing or otherwise an attempt at somewhat artful prose, having an LLM write for you isn't cool (both due to stolen valor and the lame, trite style all current LLMs output), but for relatively low-stakes white collar job tasks I think it's often fine or even an upgrade. Definitely not always, and even when it's "fine" the slopstyle can be grating, but overall it's not that bad. As the LLMs get smarter it'll be less and less of an issue.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#63
post #20

When it comes to LLMs, the only thing I hate more than the "I don't know, the AI wrote it" people is the "I wrote this" crowd. No you didn't, you asked someone else to write it. If you couldn't claim copyright for it in an IP court, you did not write it. Period.

Has this actually been tried? Plenty of people have released AI generated (in part or nearly whole) media as their own, especially in music and fiction literature. Personally, I'd love to see most of this stuff disappear from services that advertise it on par with human generated media like spotify and amazon (though I'll also admit to having a soft spot for the soul style AI covers of 50 cent and others).

> Has this actually been tried?

Yes, Thaler v. Perlmutter.

I'm pretty sure, even though that's recent, that it fully comports with decades old law on patents, as well.

I can't find an older case, but Thaler v. Vidal is a recent patent case.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#64
post #12

Why 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?

Because of the difference in effort involved in generating it vs effort required to judge it.

Why are you entitled to "your" work being judged on its merits by a real human, when the work itself was not created by you, or any human? If you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should someone else be bothered to read it?

Re: I know you didn't write this

#65
I think that we should have revision control for intermediate stages - for code, documents, even paintings. So we can at least have some idea of provenance, how it's made.

Until AI is used to fake that, too.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#66
post #2

> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share. This isn't always a great indicator. I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

I do the exact same thing and this was my first thought. To be fair, I would probably not be able to format tables in a single cope/paste

Re: I know you didn't write this

#67

> If you know in your heart of hearts that you didn’t put the work in, you’re undermining the social contract between you and your reader. There's been a lot of social contract undermining lately. Does anyone please know about something that can be done to try and revert back? Social contract of "F you. I got mine" isn't very appealing to me, but that seems to be the current approach.

We literally have to be willing to get taken advantage of sometimes, and we have to come down hard on the "don't hate the player, hate the game" f-you-got-mine assholes.

It is not weakness, but strength, to make yourself (reasonably!) vulnerable to being taken advantage of. It is not strength, but weakness, to let bad behavior happen around you. You don't have to do everything, but you have to do something, or nothing changes.

We gotta spend less time explaining away (and tacitly excusing) bad behavior as unfortunate game theory, and more time coming down hard on people who violate trust.

Ante trust gladly, but come down hard on defectors.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#68
post #46
post #2

> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share. This isn't always a great indicator. I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

On another similar but different note, I don't think I've ever uploaded any code written by LLMs to GitHub, but I do sometimes upload fully complete projects under my "initial commit". Some people may legitimately just hide the edit history on purpose just because they don't want to "show their work". It's not really a particularly good habit, but I think a lot of us can relate.

A legit reason to hide your edit history is you might not remember what was in there. Say you have a moment of frustration and type out "this is an absolute garbage assignment by a braindead professor". Or you jot a quick note from the doctor because it happens to be open.

The simple fact is that the reader has no business reading the edit history, and the ability to make this happen should probably be far more prominent in document applications like Word or Google Docs.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#69
Nowhere in here does it indicate that the generated plan was wrong or broken. I dont care if you use ai to write. I care if you write well. If the author trusted the other person, then it shouldn't matter. If the author didn't trust the other person, then they'd have to validate their output anyway. Granted the tech allows people I dont trust to generate a lot more bs, a lot faster. But i just reject and move on with my life in that case. I am no ai booster but a lot people are expressing distaste for tools when they should be expressing distaste for fools.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#70

The content of the document matters too. I don't really care if someone was AI-assisted writing a project plan. As long as it's sane and clear I'm not gonna lose sleep over that. However for my performance review I definitely want my manager to put in the effort and actually tell me nuanced thoughts on my performance. I don't want AI output for that part.

Wait until you find out that most managers write feedback using copy/paste boilerplate with maybe a few tweaks to personalize it. And this was happening long before LLMs.
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