Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

blog.pabloecortez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 565 posts

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

#81

Post by yodsanklai »

cubefox wrote: post #36
j4yav wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it doesn’t just fix your grammar, it makes you sound suspiciously like spam.

Yeah. It's "pick your poison". If your English sounds broken, people will think poorly of your text. And if it sounds like LLM speak, they won't like it either. Not much you can do. (In a limited time frame.)

LLM are pretty good to fix documents in exactly the way you want. At the very least, you can ask it to fix typos, grammar errors, without changing the tone, structure and content.

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

#82

Post by jayers »

I think it is important to make the distinction between "blog post" and other kinds of published writing. It literally does not matter if your blog post has perfectly correct grammar or misspellings (though you should do a one-pass revision for clarity of thought). Blog posts are best for articulating unfinished thoughts. To that end, you are cheating yourself, the writer, if you use AI to help you write a blog post. It is through the act of writing it that you begin to grok with the idea.

But you bet that I'm going to use AI to correct my grammar and spelling for the important proposal I'm about to send. No sense in losing credibility over something that can be corrected algorithmically.

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

#83

Post by latexr »

JohnFen wrote: post #50
latexr wrote: post #15

This assumes the person using LLMs to put out a blog post gives a single shit about their readers, pride, or “being human”. They don’t. They care about the view so you load the ad which makes them a fraction of a cent, or the share so they get popular so they can eventually extract money or reputation from it. I agree with you that AI slop blog posts are a bad thing, but there are about zero people who use LLMs to sp…

> 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.

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

#84

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

portaouflop wrote: post #49
j4yav wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it doesn’t just fix your grammar, it makes you sound suspiciously like spam.

I disagree. You can use it to point out grammar mistakes and then fix them yourself without changing the meaning or tone of the subject.

Paste passages from Wikipedia featured articles, today’s newspapers or published novels and it’ll still suggest style changes. And if you know enough to know to ignore ChatGPTs suggestions, you didn’t need it in the first place.

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

#85

Post by futurecat »

slop excepted, writing is a very difficult activity that has always been outsourced to some extent, either to an individual, a team, or to some software (spell checker, etc). Of course people will use AI if they think it makes them a better writer. Taste is the only issue here.

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

#86

Post by CuriouslyC »

chasing wrote: post #25

My thing is: If you have something to say, just say it! Don't worry that it's not long enough or short enough or doesn't fit into some mold you think it needs to fit into. Just say it. As you write, you'll probably start to see your ideas more clearly and you'll start to edit and add color or clarify. But just say it! Bypass the middleman who's just going to make it blurrier or more long-winded.

Sorry, but I 100% guarantee that there are a lot of people that have time for a quick outline of an article, but not a polished article. Your choice then is between a nugget of human wisdom that's been massaged into a presentable format with AI or nothing.

You're never going to get that raw shit you say you want, because it has negative value for creator's brands, it looks way lazier than spot checked AI output, and people see the lack of baseline polish and nope out right away unless it's a creator they're already sold on (then you can pump out literal garbage, as long as you keep it a low % of your total content you can get away with shit new creators only dream of).

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

#87

Post by iamwil »

Lately, I've been writing more on my blog, and it's been helpful to change the way that I do it.

Now, I take a cue from school, and write the outline first. With an outline, I can use a prompt for the LLM to play the role of a development editor to help me critique the throughline. This is helpful because I tend to meander, if I'm thinking at the level of words and sentences, rather than at the level of an outline.

Once I've edited the outline for a compelling throughline, I can then type out the full essay in my own voice. I've found it much easier to separate the process into these two stages.

Before outline critiquing: https://interjectedfuture.com/destroyed-at-the-boundary/

After outline critiquing: https://interjectedfuture.com/the-best-way-to-learn-might-be...

I'm still tweaking the developement editor. I find that it can be too much of a stickler on the form of the throughline.

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

#88

Post by amrocha »

Tangential, but when I heard the Zoom CEO say that in the future you’ll just send your AI double to a meeting for you I couldn’t comprehend how a real human being could ever think that that would be an ok thing to suggest.

The absolute bare minimum respect you can have for someone who’s making time for you is to make time for them. Offloading that to AI is the equivalent of shitting on someone’s plate and telling them to eat it.

I struggle everyday with the thought that the richest most powerful people in the world will sell their souls to get a bit richer.

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

#89

Post by furyofantares »

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…

People are putting out blog posts and readmes constantly that they obviously couldn't even be bothered to read themselves, and they're making it to the top of HN routinely. Often the author had something interesting to share and the LLM has erased it and inserted so much garbage you can't tell what's real and what's not, and even among what's real, you can't tell what parts the author cares about and which parts they don't.

All I care about is content, too, but people using LLMs to blog and make readmes is routinely getting garbage content past the filters and into my eyeballs. It's especially egregious when the author put good content into the LLM and pasted the garage output at us.

Are there people out there using an LLM as a starting point but taking ownership of the words they post, taking care that what they're posting still says what they're trying to say, etc? Maybe? But we're increasingly drowning in slop.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN