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Comment by Ariarule | Hacker News Reader

Wonderful work, and it's unfortunate that knee-jerk anti-AI sentiment is getting in the way of appreciation for the accomplishment by some others. Consider this: if the exact same oddities and anomalies had been discovered 3 to 5 years ago with traditional NLP, or OCR and/or some clever statistical techniques, would anyone be dismissing it? The post goes into the work they did to orchestrate and explore with the AI in this case, so it's no less impressive an effort than the hypothetical, and the discoveries just as valid for consideration.

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I don't understand this sentiment. This whole thread is quite positive towards the findings. What we have is a societal verification problem where work has become hard to evaluate and verify, so everyone is being extra careful with their judgements.

I understand the sentiment - I spent most of my childhood having it pointed at me, as the disconnect between my perceived effort and my outcomes was enormous.

People… don’t actually care about what you do, when you succeed. They care about how you do it. You have to be seen to be sweating, struggling, toiling, generally having a terrible time of it - otherwise what you produce is worthless.

Why? Identity. Protection of self from an arbitrary and unfair universe. The internal narrative of “I worked very hard so I deserve this”.

Things which threaten that narrative - be it a child prodigy or a machine prodigy - are very upsetting for people, as they attack a core element of the tale they tell themselves that allows them to survive in this world. That I am valuable, because what I do has value derived from struggle.

> Things which threaten that narrative - be it a child prodigy or a machine prodigy - are very upsetting for people, as they attack a core element of the tale they tell themselves that allows them to survive in this world. That I am valuable, because what I do has value derived from struggle.

At least in academia and tech... the struggle is part of the job, or at least it should be. Basically pre-AI you could be relatively certain that the author(s) went through failure modes and edge cases and weeded them out. This time, not.

LLMs are a clever statistical technique. And this use of it is a reason for this "let me code by hand" grognard to cheer.

> it's unfortunate that knee-jerk anti-AI sentiment

I’m so tired of this comment. You’re like the people complaining of vegans and Apple users—I see more of you complaining about the group than there are members in the group. Ironically the thing “getting in the way of appreciation for the accomplishment by some others” is your knee-jerk anti-anti-AI sentiment.

Give it a rest. There aren’t that many comments on the thread still and yours is the top one. No one is contributing more to the anti/pro argumentation than you are. Don’t stoke the flames then complain the house is on fire.

When I made my comment yesterday, the previous top comment was negative and dismissive, and for a vacuous reason. Why not reply directly instead? I decided it would be better to positively _appreciate the original work done in itself_, to not boost a vapid debate from a eye-rolling starting point, not to make it personal towards anyone, and especially, as it is actually the greater portion of that comment you quote, to make an analogy to other techniques.

And then I get this useless advice to "give it a rest", as if there were no such negative reaction in the first place, no such parallel drawn between older work and newer work, and as if the counterfactual of what would happen if people were not willing to appreciate such works was not immediate obvious. If there were a substantial contingent on HN claiming that projects done on Apple devices were somehow not real, and trying to shout down Mac-based projects, it would indeed be very tiring, but the problem would not be with people musing on parallels to similar workflows in Linux environments to highlight and acknowledge when a project done on a Mac was good work, nor with Apple fans!

> When I made my comment yesterday, the previous top comment was negative and dismissive

In other words, the contrarian dynamic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> and for a vacuous reason.

I read all top level comments on the thread older than yours, and don’t see any which is “anti-AI”. Yours seem to be the first top level comment which even mentions it.

> Why not reply directly instead? I decided it would be better to positively _appreciate the original work done in itself_

The very first sentence in your comment is criticising others. If your goal was to be positive towards the project, you could have done just that. It wouldn’t stop you from separately replying to (and downvoting) the other unspecified comment with your criticism of their point.

The previous top comment is trivially findable with a page search for "AI". Contrarian dynamic could explain why the reactions overall look more positive now, fair enough; I'll keep in mind it's possible to give an incorrect impression in the future as a result of the comment order shifting.

Why didn't _you_ respond directly to the negative comment?

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