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ai;dr

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Re: ai;dr

#71

Post by netsharc »

dontwannahearit wrote: post #25

It's pretty much over for the human-internet. Search was gamed, its usefulness has plummeted, so humans will increasingly ask their LLM of choice and that LLM will have been trained on the content of the internet. So when someone wants to know something about the topic that my website is focused on, chances are it will not be the material from the website they see directly, but a summary of what the LLM learned from…

Tragedy of the attention-economy. Ad networks gives you money if you placed their ads on your site, so people got machines to generate fluff to earn some money. Now all search result is just bullshit pages to capture your attention until the banner ad..

A simple query like "Ford Focus wheel nut torque" gives pages with blah blah like:

> Overview Of Lug Nut Torque For Ford Focus

> The Ford Focus uses specific lug nut torque to keep wheels secure while allowing safe driving dynamics. Correct torque helps prevent rotor distortion, brake heat transfer issues, and wheel detachment. While exact values can vary by model year, wheel size, and nut type, applying the proper torque is essential for all Ford Focus owners.

And the site probably has this text for each car model.

Somehow the ways the ad industry destroyed the Internet got very varied...

Re: ai;dr

#72

Post by steveBK123 »

losvedir wrote: post #6

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an exp…

The problem with Ai writing is that its a waste of everyones time.

It’s literal content expansion, the opposite of gzip’ing a file.

It’s like a kid who has a 500 word essay due tomorrow who needs to pad their actual message up to spec.

Re: ai;dr

#73

Post by mikestew »

charcircuit wrote: post #61

>Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? This take is baffling to me when I see it repeated. It's like saying why should people use Windows if Bill Gates did not write every line of it himself. We won't be able to see into Bill's mind. Why should you read a book if they couldn't bother to write it properly and have an editor come in and fix things. The main purpose of a creat…

It's like saying why should people use Windows if Bill Gates did not write every line of it himself.

What? It’s nothing like that, at all. I don’t know that Gates has claimed to have written even a single line of Windows code. I’m not asking for the perfect analogy, but the analogy has to have some tie to reality or it’s not an analogy at all. I’m only half-joking when I wonder if an AI wrote this comment.

Re: ai;dr

#74

Post by fmbb »

dematz wrote: post #36

>I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. Doesn't ai;dr kind of contradict ai generated documentation? If I want to know what claude thinks about your code I can just ask it. Imo documentation is the least amenable thing to ai. As the article itself says, I want to read some intention and see how you shape whatever you're documenting. (AI adding tests seems li…

The article is definitely contradicting itself. There are only two sentences between

> Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

and

> I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding.

So they expect nobody to read their documentation.

Re: ai;dr

#75

Post by parsimo2010 »

archagon wrote: post #58
ssiddharth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

To quote Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”

Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes.

AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it.

My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.

Re: ai;dr

#76

Post by the_af »

afavour wrote: post #17
numbers wrote: post #5

I remember this was back in 2023, when ChatGPT had first launched, and I had a manager whose English was not very good. He started sending emails that felt like they were written by a copywriter. And the messaging was so hard to parse through because there's so much ChatGPT fluff around it. Very quickly we realized that what he was saying was usually in the middle somewhere, but we'd have to read through the intro an…

I have long believed that LLMs will herald a new corporate data transfer format, unlike most new formats that boast efficiency gains and compression, this new format will be incredibly wasteful and bloat transmission sizes. I'll want to communicate something to my team. I'll write 4 bullet points, plug it into an LLM, which will produce a flowing, multi paragraph e-mail. I'll distribute it to my co-workers. They will…

Ah, yes, the LLM Exchange Protocol.

I believe it's already in place, making the internet a bit more wasteful.

Re: ai;dr

#77

Post by Blackthorn »

raincole wrote: post #10

> AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort I've noticed that attitude a lot. Everyone thinks their use of AI is perfectly justified while the others are generating slops. In gamedev it's especially prominent - artists think generating code is perfectly ok but get acute stress response when someone suggests generating art assets.

Turns out it's only slop if it comes from anyone else, if you generated it it's just smart AI usage.

Re: ai;dr

#78

Post by catoc »

ssiddharth wrote: post #50
losvedir wrote: post #6

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an exp…

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes. Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe

Re: ai;dr

#79

Post by jmull »

cgriswald wrote: post #18

> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write? Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer…

> author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells

Hardly seems mutually exclusive. Surely you should generally consider the reputation of someone who posts LLM-responses (without disclosing it) to be pretty low.

A lot of people don’t particularly want to waste time reading the LLM-responses to someone else’s unknown/unspecified prompts. Someone who would trick you in to that doesn’t have a lot of respect for their readers and is unlikely to post anything of value.

Re: ai;dr

#80

Post by pwillia7 »

I am 100% right there with you. Writing in my voice is maybe the last thing I have that I can do differently and 'better' than an LLM in a couple years time, or even right now if I'm really being honest.

I haven't even really tried to use LLMs to write anything from a work context because of the ideas you talk about here.

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