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I know you didn't write this

ammil.industries

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Re: I know you didn't write this

#81

Post by isodev »

Once, I had a very frustrating slack chat with a fellow developer. We were discussing edge cases for a new feature and the experience from my perspective was that for each of my messages, I’d get a “in case of … how about …” style reply. The topic was focused around iOS vs. Android app lifecycle. Every now and then my colleague would suggest APIs or events that simply don’t exist.

This was before vibe coding, around the days of GPT 3.5. At the time I just thought it was a challenging topic and my colleague was probably preoccupied with other things so we parked the talk.

A few weeks later, while exploring ways to use GPT for technical tasks I suddenly remembered that slack chat and realised the person had been copy pasting my messages to gpt and back. I really felt bad at that moment, like… how can you do this to someone…? It’s not bad that you try tools to find information or whatever, but not disclosing that you’re effectively replacing your agency with that of a bot is just very suboptimal and probably disrespectful.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#82

Post by zephen »

tediousgraffit1 wrote: post #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…

> 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.

But even a rejection is work. So if they're generating more bs faster, they are generating more work for you. And, in some organizations, they will receive rewards for occasionally pressing buttons and inundating you with crap.

> a lot people are expressing distaste for tools when they should be expressing distaste for fools.

I'm pretty sure that the original article, and most of the derogatory comments here, are expressing distaste for fools rather than tools. Specifically, tool-using fools.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#84

Post by GMoromisato »

tediousgraffit1 wrote: post #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…

It's just that AI gives fools more power.

It used to be that a well-written document was a proof-of-work that the author thought things through (or at least spent some time thinking about it).

I'm all for AI--I use it all the time. But I think our current style of work needs to change to adapt to both the strengths and weaknesses of AI.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#85

Post by mystifyingpoi »

a1j9o94 wrote: 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…

> I just care whether or not the ideas are good and clear

That's the thing. It actually really matters whether the ideas presented are coming from a coworker, or the ideas are coming from LLM.

I've seem way too many scenarios where I'm asking a coworker, if we should do X or Y, and all I get is a useless wall of spewed text, with a complete disregard to the project and circumstances on hand. I need YOUR input, from YOUR head right now. If I could ask Copilot I'd do that myself, thanks.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#86

Post by tediousgraffit1 »

andy99 wrote: post #40
axus wrote: 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.

Because AI can generate meritless works far faster than anyone can judge their merits. Asking someone to read your AI thing is basically asking someone to do the work for you. If you respect your colleagues time, you should be sharing your best version of inputs, not raw material. Not only that, you should have thought about and be able to defend it. Throwing some AI thing over the fence, you haven’t thought about it…

This is a trust issue. If someone I trust hands me a big pr, I focus on the important details. If someone i dont trust hands me a big pr, i just reject it and ask them to break the problem down further. I dont waste my time on this kind of thing, regardless of whether it was hand written or generated.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#87

Post by ascendantlogic »

SoftTalker wrote: post #70
ascendantlogic wrote: post #34

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.

Oh I'm well aware. When I was an EM for a bit last year a bunch of colleagues told me they used ChatGPT to write their reviews. It was gross and I always hand crafted, small batch artisanal reviews when I'm in the managers chair.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#88

Post by zephen »

jdashg wrote: post #67
ArcHound wrote: post #14

> 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 noth…

Upvoted because this is true, but we need to establish coping mechanisms for this.

For example:

"Sorry, yes, I know the report is due tomorrow, but I don't have time to review it again because I wasted 2 hours on the first version."

or

"I found these three problems on the first page and stopped reading."

What else?

Re: I know you didn't write this

#89

Post by phyzome »

ecshafer wrote: post #60

Lets 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…

How can you tell the output is solid?

The creation of a plan also implies that some work has gone into making sure it's a good one. That's one human (the author) asserting that it's solid. But now you're not even sure if that one vote exists.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#90

Post by Lerc »

GaryBluto wrote: post #3
messe wrote: 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.

It's bizarre to me that this didn't occur even slightly to the post author.

I have seen a number of write ups where I think the only logical explanation is that they are not conveying what literally happened but spinning narrative to express their point.

There was an article the other day where the writer said something along the lines of it suddenly occurred to them that others might read content they had access to. They described thenselves as a security researcher. I couldn't imagine a security researcher having that occur to them, I would think that it is a concept continually present in their concept of what data is. I am not a security researcher and it certainly something I'm fairly constently aware of.

Similarly I'm not convinced the "shouldn't this plan be better" question is in good faith either. Perhaps it just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the operation being performed by a model, but my intuition is that they never expected it to be very good and are feigning surprise that it is not.

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