Hacker News Reader

Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

> That was difficult to read, smelt very AI assisted though the message was worthwhile...

It won’t be long before ad computem comments like this are frowned upon.

Why? "This was written badly" is a perfectly normal thing to say; "this was written badly because you didn't put in the effort of writing it yourself" doubly so.

Say they used AI to write it, it came out bad, and they published it anyway. They had the opportunity to "make it better" before publishing, but didn't. The only conclusion for this is, they just aren't good at writing. So whether AI is used or not, it'll suck either way. So there's no need to complain about the AI.

It's like complaining that somebody typed a crappy letter rather than hand-wrote it. Either way the letter's gonna suck, so why complain that it was typed?

Compared to human bad writing, AI writing tends to suck more verbosely and in exciting new ways (e.g. by introducing factual errors).

> AI writing tends to suck more verbosely

So, it's the style you oppose, the way a grammar nazi complains about "improper" English

> and in exciting new ways (e.g. by introducing factual errors).

Because factually incorrect comments didn't exist before AI?

Your concern is that you read something you don't like, so you pick the lowest-effort criteria to complain about. Speaks more about you than the original commenter.

I'm pretty sure by verbose it's the realization you've wasted precious time reading AI bloat that you'll never get back. On top of that, now you need to reread the text for hallucinations or just take a loss and ignore any conclusions at risk that they came from bad data.

> The only conclusion for this is, they just aren't good at writing.

Not true. It's likely an effort issue in that situation.

And that kind of effort issue is good to call out, because it compounds the low quality.

I don't know if you're new to the internet, but low-effort comments have existed before AI, and will continue to exist regardless of AI.

I read it as a more-or-less kind comment: “even though you’ll notice that they let an AI make the writing terrible, the underlying point is good enough to be worth struggling through that and discussing”

I felt unsure whether to include that particular comment, but landed on including because I think it's a real danger. I've got no problem with people using AI and do use it for some things myself.

However I don't think you should outsource understanding to LLMs, and also think that shifting the effort from the writer to the reader is a poor strategy (and disrespectful to the reader)

edit: in case it's unclear I'm not accusing the author of having outsourced their understanding to AI, but I think it's a real risk that people can fall into, the value is in the thinking people put into things not the mechanics of typing it out

Reply on news.ycombinator.com