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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

When I saw this the other day -- and it just went on and on, like a good human author who was going to write this kind of story probably wouldn't -- I looked for a note that it was AI-generated, and I didn't find it.

All I found was a human name given as the author.

We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.

I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.

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I continue to resonate with the Oxide take when I hear this kind of sentiment expressed about AI prose

"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers

I sadly agree with this sentiment. But to add my own thoughts, I wonder if our “human generation” (all consciously existing today) are just plainly dinosaurs. Like in three decades we’ll have a society that knew LLMs from birth.

As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine.

Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?

> Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets?

Yes, science fiction writers and readers have, since before any of us were born.

I kindly can’t tell if you missed my point. As much as past writers and readers could imagine a version of our present, I also imagine that if they got transported here they would still be in awe of what they saw

I agree. I imagine that a writer who predicted modern technology would still be in awe to see smartphone videoconf halfway around the globe finally realized.

And also be surprised by some of the uses to which it's put. And horrified by some of the societal backsliding despite what should be utopian technology.

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