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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

I think we should start to shift away from pure concern that a text is written by AI and toward strictly rewarding better writing. I realize that only some of this involves literal pattern matching against annoying AI ticks that grate like fingernails on a chalkboard.

But moving forward the goal should remain that writing should be comprehensible and not overly reliant on templates and other annoyances.

[edit] some good disagreements here which I appreciate. Thanks! I am continuing to think about this.

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No. There's a problem with fully-AI writing that is independent of quality: you can produce a practically infinite supply of it at nearly zero cost. This means that if we don't push back, it's simply bound to crowd out human expression. You already see this on your social media feed, if you're paying attention.

I see inherent value in hearing from and talking to other humans. There is, unfortunately, a lot of AI content hustlers who want to rob me of this so that they can get more links to their website, more eyeballs on their product, etc.

The answer here isn't to demand that submarine marketers and SEO dudes prompt better so that the text is more pleasant to read. It's to cordon it off wholesale. And yeah, that sucks for some corner cases, but there's nothing else we can really do.

it's the same thing with rsearch papers right now as well. it seems to be the first time in history where one can produce "intellectual" content at a rate exponentially faster than one can read it or process it.

So who is it for if no humans are consuming those papers?

It's for the resumes of the people "writing" them

it's a relic from a now antiquated system (from a few months ago lol) where N papers was a meaningful metric.

Your last sentence reminded me of a quote by Alfred North Whitehead which I read many years ago in one of my CS textbooks: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” I think about the essential idea of this statement quite often but didn’t remember the exact phrasing. As I went to look that up, I was thinking to myself something like “bet he would’ve changed his mind if he knew about LLMs!” but in finding the quote with its wider context, it appears he would’ve been thrilled:

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”

Apparently, part of his philosophical thought was that the ultimate goal of mathematics is to reduce (maybe even eliminate) how much thinking we do. Not exactly what I thought he was going for all these years lol. I wouldn’t read much more into it but it’s not hard to see how the statement could be perceived as this renowned early 20th century mathematician, logician and philosopher implying that he would’ve have loved the idea of machines reducing the need for research and development in engineering and mathematics (even if only to allow researchers time to focus on more important things).

Edit: As I’m not familiar with the breadth of his works and know of them primarily through secondary sources, I can also see how what he said meaning that the purpose of mathematics is automation in a very general sense, so that humans can reduce the need to think about things other than survival and comfort, and being a mathematician, he likely saw mathematics, philosophy and knowledge in general as one of those “leisure” activities we should be thinking about instead.

> Apparently, part of his philosophical thought was that the ultimate goal of mathematics is to reduce (maybe even eliminate) how much thinking we do.

And it has done so. Imagine how much resources we would be spending on trials for any new object if not for the mathematical models of various systems and events that let us simulate timeline with pure logic. And with the invention of the computer, we’ve ridden ourselves of the human effort of manually computing them.

Pure maths and other theoretical sciences are useful because they brought us tools. Like discovering striking two rocks can produce a spark and thus allowing us to control fire. AI discoveries are more like seeing random thunder strikes and hoping some dry tree is now burning somewhere.

I think abstraction/generalization is definitely a hallmark of the human mind and it's what allowed humans to progress so quickly. It's basically a form of data compression. I think mathematics is one of the most direct examples of it.

Replying to correct my phrasing in the edit, meant to say “so that humans can reduce the need to think about things _like_ survival and comfort,” but ended up saying the exact opposite. The end kind of suggests the earlier part was a mistake though so hopefully it wasn’t misunderstood.

(I change my phrasing multiple times as I’m writing and sometimes leave earlier changes in without realizing and mistakes like these happen, quite a lot in fact. I blame it on ADHD and anxiety, both of which I was professionally diagnosed with at the age of 33.)

Technopoly more relevant than ever.

I think it's intentional. When AI produces more than we can read, we have to rely on AI to read it.

It's like a CO2 scrubber that runs on coal.

Did you watch every film produced this year? Or even 1% of them? Why would books be any different?

An infinite supply of generative AI is bound to crowd out human expression. And consequently, human communication and culture. This applies to writing, visual arts, mathematics, software.. A horrifying prospect.

Human nature is to adapt and extend, sometimes extinguish. If there is an infinite supply of AI slop, we will stop seeing AI slop.

On your next highway trip, keep track of how many lawyer ads you really "see". My bet is that you see a whole lot of them but ultimately, only a handful of them stick because they are funny/clever/interesting in some way.

If "attention is all you need", then the lack of attention on AI slop will kill it far more efficiently than any amount of handwringing.

How does the crowding out work here? I'm not being pedantic, I'm genuinely curious about the dynamics as you see them.

My experience in the publishing world is that there is already an infinite supply of writing. Lots of things serve as filters, some for better and some for worse, but ultimately the quality of the writing (however we define that) vs. the field is part of that filter. There is a competition for our limited little attention spans and finite waking hours, and writing better suited to our tastes tends to win out.

I don't see how that dynamic changes with AI. If all writers have more or less equal access to AI, some writers will use it in ways that result in writing I enjoy more than others. Some won't use it at all and still write work I really like. The majority of people writing with or without AI, just as today, won't write stuff I really want to read.

I don't know if I've ever read a piece of SEO-driven content marketing and thought it was particularly profound or that it made an impact on me. Or that I really had an inherently meaningful connection to the author. I sort of don't care if people generate 100x more of that sort of thing. It makes Google searches less effective, I guess? Or it may make my For You Page on Instagram less human-rich?

I've read some nice poetry though. I usually go looking for it. There are a handful of authors I tend to like consistently. The overall volume of poetry published (it's quite a lot!) doesn't really have an effect on my preference for their work. If there was 1,000,000 times more poetry published because of AI, I don't think it would prevent me from seeking out new poems from writers/publishers/curators I like, nor would I probably really notice.

I agree, with respect to the status quo where AI writing is associated with lower quality.

In the long term, AI writing - mostly done solo, not directed by humans - will likely have higher quality than human writing, while being better suited to people's tastes since it can be personalized for every reader. If so, it's not hard to imagine it crowding out human writing.

You might ask, though, is that a bad thing? If it's legitimately higher quality, then what's wrong with consuming it? Well, I don't know. It certainly seems dangerous for everyone to be in their own little bubble of content. Social media of course tries to do that today, but there are limits. You can't pick any topic, any set of attitudes you want and get an infinite supply of content tailored exactly for you. Even if you find some super niche community to set up shop in, it's still a community; you're still exposed to the outside world at least a little. What happens when that changes?

I don't read to get personalized experience. I want to experience what other person has prepared for me.

If I open a online bookstore, I still presume these books were written by human and I can understand some piece of life experience of author.

But there will be filled by AI generated books in future.

Who's going to make you buy them or read them though?

Some by not knowing. Some by not caring.

Most of people can not find this without reading. And they occupied space of books from human.

The thing you are pushing against...is not real. You will develop a paranoia for no useful reason.

Am I understanding you right, you're saying AI spam is not real?

No, I'm saying that _caring_ about whether a message is AI or not is going to degrade your health.

The same way children on facebook were bullied in their DMs, etc, was bad for their health.

Its fine people dont want a computer to generate messages, but AI isn't going to continue to generate obviously detectable messages forever. So if you say today "I'm going to avoid AI", you're either going to develop a fixed personality defect or delude yourself into accepting whatever.

Regardless of the case, if you're a disinterested intellectual, what matters more is if the content has any sort of validity. Not whether a computer was used somewhere in the process of generating the validity.

You see how keying in on "this is AI" vs "this is slop" is a fundamental difference in how someone will be emotionally involved in content, _on the internet_, the same way the rise of trolling sunk entire segments of the population into entering far right nationalism?

Anyway, in a couple of years, you'll either be a paranoid internet inhabitant or you will engage with ideas on their basis and only when the idea is backed by the worst people imaginable, is it going to be ok to say "you know what, broken clock here makes a good point, but he's still a stain on existence."

So you're worried that if they keep up the pushback in the exact same way forever it will eventually cause a problem? That's not a terrible point but it's a pretty minor one and depends on reading their post in a pretty specific way.

And even then, "not real" is completely wrong. Even if you can't detect the AI posts (in a hypothetical future!), they still exist.

No, I'm saying there won't be any tells to "push" against, driving them insane.

Go look up "gang stalking" and other paranoid delusions. AI fingerprints are going to disappear, but your adamant vehemence that it's detestable _because of it's existence_ will stay.

So that only leaves an increasing space of growing paranoia that uncritically lashes out at everything. Psychology is what will turn a healthy distrust of bullshit to a full on delusion about the things you view on the internet.

Your comparisons get increasingly insulting. Even if there are no signs, the AI use is still real. That's not at all comparable to gangstalking delusions.

And I don't know where you got the idea they they will continue to push against tells in particular after there are no tells. That's three big assumptions and if any one goes away your argument falls apart. If they eventually give up when the situation changes, there's no problem. If they fight with methods other than tells, there's no problem. If tells don't in fact disappear, there's no problem. You're interpreting their post in the most negative way possible when you make this argument.

Seriously, go back and read the original comment you reacted to. That comment didn't even mention tells. They just said they want to "push back" against "fully-AI writing".

yes, go back and read the response.

Its keying on the word "AI" as if that'll forever be something you can smell.

And you're taking that "as if" you see implied and wildly and inappropriately extrapolating from it.

That isn't a problem with AI writing per se, at least not in the sense that it's a problem in a particular instance of a person encountering the writing. It's a problem with the existence and availability of the tools. I agree it is a problem, though, and it should be addressed by drastically curtailing the development and availability of the tools.

> You already see this on your social media feed, if you're paying attention.

Regardless of the original provenance of the content on my feed, its presence on my feed has long been a result of ML algorithms designed to optimize engagement/outrage. For me, LLM content gave me the nudge I needed to finally quit the apps.

(Now what am I doing in HN...)

A little bit of subterfuge isn't bad here. Say you've just read about another goddamn "quietly" justified pushback, with enough other evidence that it's pretty clearly AI. What are your options?

Push back against the AI: IME, you get a lot of backpedaling, denials, unproductive arguments with people arguing that their slop is actually for your benefit, etc. They continue misbehaving.

Argue that the writing is objectively bad: You're still negatively critiquing somebody, so this has opposition from time to time, but people aren't emboldened by their use of AI, so they tend to respond much better and actually change a bit -- at a minimum, reflect on why they're being critiqued and try some better prompts, usually even better outcomes.

The "subterfuge" is just applying that latter strategy to all AI output. Whatever you're using to determine it's AI, recast that as an inherently negative property of the writing.

To be honest, if I am given any reason to suspect someone put less effort into writing something than they expect me to put into reading it, I'm not going to, if I have a choice. And it seems most prevalent in areas of life where you don't have a choice, so to me it feels like an abuse of of the social contract.

I could put zero effort into writing a quick post on some piece of programming knowledge. But if someone needed that information, I suspect that they would feel happy to read the sentences and not care about the process.

I don't think this "effort" argument for technical knowledge pieces makes sense to me. If there is something I need, I do some research and I look for signals of authoritative information. I don't really care about how much effort it takes to write a blog post.

Why do you trust something that is LLM-generated is authoritative?

Even if, on the most good-faith scenario, someone did all the research them told an LLM to add more pizzazz for some reason, there is still a chance that the LLM hallucinate a lie here and there that the author might have skipped when proof-reading if they proof-read it at all.

I can't trust a machine specialized in generating convincing bullshit.

> I could put zero effort into writing a quick post on some piece of programming knowledge

For starters, if you're writing something yourself, it's not "zero-effort". It might be low-effort, but you still put some effort into it. And low-effort doesn't mean worthless, as you illustrate ("but if someone needed that information...").

Consider that the refrain seems to be: "I won't put more energy reading something than you put into writing it". A "quick" post takes little energy to write, and little energy to read. That's fine!

Effort is sort of a see-saw; if the writer puts in less effort, the reader needs to put in more to decipher it. If the writer literally puts in so little effort that the result is completely wrong, the reader needs to do the work to check it and find the correction.

If you put in zero effort on some programming knowledge, they would be to put in the effort to confirm that you're correct.

but where do you draw the line, say somebody is strongly dyslexic and/or has issues and spends two hours back & forth with the llm to articulate their thoughts then posts, that to me is a lot more valuable than somebody typing an off the cuff comment with tiktok in the background.

AI to an extent removes a lot of signals that in the past people used to figure out if the writer spent effort on the writing (length, lexicon, grammatical correctness, you name it).

Personally as long as whatever is there is not full of load bearing seams I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt even if the "voice" sounds AI (and TBH it feels the "AI voice" issues are mostly "opus pre 5.5 voice" issues, talking to gemini does not feel very "AI", same as fable, opus 5.5 occasionally has its load bearing moments but nowhere near as much.

Gaps. Load-bearing gaps.

When people communicate to me I want them to maximize my comprehension bitrate. AI output is usually dense in incomprehensibility and sparse in bitrate. But the prompt they fed into the AI? Much higher bitrate. And if it's hard to understand, well I can always ask my own AI to help me interpret.

I understand it is a little selfish to want people to maximize my comprehension (what about the thousands of other readers?). I also understand there can purposes other than communication in writing (fiction -> pleasure, poetry -> art). I agree with you that we shouldn't care if it's AI or human writing for these other purposes. But when the goal is one human transferring bits from their brain to mine, playing telephone with an AI cannot be more efficient (it necessarily decreases channel capacity).

There are two exceptions.

1. When AI is good enough to "read people's minds" it can extract extra bits than what they explicitly meant to include in their prompt... but at that point why am I even bothering to listen to them, and not have the more powerful, smarter AI tell me what they think?

2. AI can run experiments or prove things, and I shouldn't have my AI duplicate that work. In this case I would want them to explain what tasks they set the AI out to do, and then provide the results. I would not complain if the results are an AI writeup, though usually I would want to know what in the results the human author felt was important.

I did have an experience with AI where I was asserting something min some text I was having it proof. And it actually said “I double checked your statement and here and I think you made a mistake. I rephrased it with the correct background and interpretation” (paraphrased). And it was completely right. I had misinterpreted some data and it went and got the data and double checked me. The final product it produced was much better than what i wrote originally (in large part because it was no longer false). So AI maybe closer than you think to those conditions.

> But the prompt they fed into the AI? Much higher bitrate.

You might be projecting from your own use of AI. IME there’s a large overlap between your exception 1 and the kind of people who copy/paste AI responses.

I.e., when you find yourself dealing with a meat proxy, the original prompt is unlikely to provide anything useful. So as you say, “Why are you even bothering to listen to them.”

No, I am capable of assessing whether a text is written well. I do want to know if someone cared enough to write it themselves though. That's an important piece of metadata.

It depends on the goal of the text. I don't care if technical documentation is written by human or machine. I care if it's correct and helpful. I don't care if a letter providing emotional support for a lost loved one is a perfectly accurate, beautifully structured piece of text. I care that it's heartfelt, coming from a person that meant what they wrote. Such metadata is important for the latter, but irrelevant for the former.

This is something that gets glossed over a lot in the debate. "Writing to convey functional information" has a different set of success criteria than "Writing to convey emotion and shared human experience". One might still legitimately argue that knowing that a text is LLM-generated undermines confidence in the former (there's no guarantee that a coherent mind exists that can clarify ambiguities); but much _less_ so than for the latter.

People have been buying and sending Get Well and Happy Birthday cards for centuries, written by other people who don't give a shit about sharing their human experience with the receiver, and are just doing their jobs as professional greeting card writers.

About three times as many people speak English as a second/foreign language compared to native speakers, not to mention people with no English fluency at all. That's a lot of people who might use an AI writing assistant for legitimate reasons that go beyond poor character. Same as we might do if we needed to communicate in Farsi or whatever.

It seems better for people to simply write in their native tongue. By translating what you write before sharing it, you are robbing readers from the opportunity of using future, better translation technology. It freezes text at the current capabilities of translation software. It also drives us towards a monolonguistic world, and I think a lot would be lost in that (said as a monolonguistic English speaker).

In the abstract, sure. But in terms of practical communication, especially something like a lightweight group discussion, you want to be seen by everyone, not just by those who happen to use live translating software on the receiving end. Because English is dominant in US-centric social media, perhaps you are rarely in the situation where you will be completely left out of a conversation you want to participate in if you only use English, but there's a real friction to leaving text untranslated. Think Reddit or even HN. Would most people even bother to translate the Farsi comment to see if it's insightful, or would they just skip it? Or even scold the author that this is an English dominant space and they should try to conform to that?

I don't think we should paper over "the largest theft of labor in human history.”[1]

1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4234688/microsoft-know...

I appreciate people putting effort into writing. For one because I intrinsically value human effort, expression and connection as others have already argued, but also because one can only become a better writer by practicing. I am very much willing to be subjected to someone's practice as long as they genuinely put the effort into it.

And most importantly writing is thinking: https://paulgraham.com/words.html And not writing is not thinking: https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

We cannot have actual discourse, disagreement and learn from each other, and sometimes even from the process of writing something out itself without writing; or at least not nearly as good — verbal discourse can be valuable as well, but has different limitations and we live in a world where it is getting less and less.

If we let AI write for us we let it think for us.

"Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization"

The article talks about this too:

> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same!

A lot of the annoying AI writing is actually good writing patterns done far too often. Rule of three is something every writer should use but not three times in one paragraph, etc.

Good writing is not taking a list of the top ten literary devices and just pouring them into your text without any intent.

the problem in my opinion comes down to a sort of poor "theory of mind" on the part of agents at our current moment.

The AI is really bad at guessing what its reader already will know. Not just before reading, but also from reading the text. This means that it so often explains things that don't need explaining, and emphasizes things that don't need emphasis.

It's not Y but X. except no sane person would ever think it was Y, and it was clear to everyone it is X already (or X is not a widely understandable thing in the first place, or the AI hasn't established a satisfying reason for why this distinction isn't important, or or or).

This is, I think, due to a combination of training on human feedback rewarding surface level good text (people marking preference on their 300th answer of the day are not trying to understand whatever point the agent is making they're just seeing whether it seems like it knows what its talking about) combined with later training by automated grading systems (other llms) that always have perfect context - if I also went and read all the code the agent referenced, read all of its 12 paragraph answers in gave at every turn of this back and forth conversation, knew all the files on the hard drive and had read all the diffs it made, then yeah it would be fine to assume some of the things it does, but I don't do that when im talking with my boss, because he asked me to do it so he doesn't have to understand everything, and he expects me to surface important stuff and minimise other stuff in a sensible way

The next generation of models, it will be far less obvious what is AI-generated and what is human-written.

The vendors have an obvious motivation to make their writing less off-putting, and I don't think there is any hard architectural limit preventing them from doing so, it is just a matter of prioritising it and investing the necessary engineering resources.

> it will be far less obvious what is AI-generated

Maybe not: https://mindmatters.ai/brief/ai-gen-writing-model-collapse-i...

After playing with googles new model for a day it is a breath of fresh air comparatively - but it has ticks a well.

Unlike code, or math where one can apply a quantifiable measure to what is being added in natural language is much harder to gauge.

I think there is a quantifiable measure-create a test dataset containing questions and human expert-written answers; give the questions to an AI to get corresponding AI-generated answers; then ask humans to guess which answer was human-written and which was AI-generated; now you can measure how much better than chance the humans perform at AI output detection, which gives you a quantifiable measure of the human-likeness of the AI responses.

That's a fine ideal, such as writing that doesn't use phrases like "moving forward." Similarly grating even if it's not an "AI tell".

> I think we should start to shift away from pure concern that a text is written by AI and toward strictly rewarding better writing.

I am a human supremacist. I believe humans have intrinsic value and what they produce has intrinsic value (no matter how poorly written it might be). I do not think that the output of a machine has any value, nor am I interested in reading it.

No, absolutely not. We will continue to value output that purely shows human thinking and effort.

Why?

Same reason I value home made cooking, home made furniture, and my kids drawings. Not everything is about the result itself. The process is important to me. Knowing that there is a human on the other side matters. In fact, learning that there is/isn't changes my perception entirely.

You didn't really answered my question. Why is it important to you to know that there is a human on the other side of things? You just restated what your preference is without giving the 'why' of the preference, which is what I'm curious about.

Because I am on the internet to talk to other humans because that is what I enjoy. I am not here to interact with a non human entity.

If space aliens came to Earth on spaceships and logged on to the Internet to talk, I would rush to the Internet to interact with them! Depending on what they wanted, I don't know that I would necessarily enjoy it, but I would be chomping at the bit to give it a try!

No, I said that not everything is about the result itself, but also the process behind it. I value that process. You'll have to ask the philosophers about value judgements, but to me it's just because I'm a human and evolution made me care about other people, how they think and act. For me, then, it _feels_ different reading something if it's made by a human. It tells me something about that person and I feel I get to know them, if only a little bit.

Will we? I will value output from people I personally care about, because I want to know more about them. But what about the other 8 billion people? Do you value their output because they are human or for some other reason?

Say there was a Chinese artist in a room...

> Do you value their output because they are human

Their output does have intrinsic value yes...

In an abstract sense, I agree that I value human output because I value humans, even if I never see those humans or their output. But I only can process 10 bits/second, while there is probably a million times that much being posted to the internet. I simply don't have the capacity to care about it except in the abstract sense.

I'm not going to bother engaging with online posts if they all turn into generated replies.

I'm fine with AI writing as long its not bad. The issue is that its far easier to produce large amounts of poorly made AI writing over well made AI writing.

> I'm fine with AI writing as long its not bad. The issue is that its far easier to produce large amounts of poorly made AI writing over well made AI writing.

AI writing is some average over all writing the model was trained on (with some RLHF on top). It is mediocre by definition.

The AIs generation isn't freeform completetion from the beginning of sequence token. It's not an average over all string seen. It's a conditioned generation based on the context (i.e. prompt).

If the context can be above average quality the result should be too as long as the AI is sufficiently smart. Especially if people iterate on the produced work to push it up in quality.

However if you don't have a good topic and don't iterate to improve the result then you get incredibly poor writing.

I would need to see an example. Every text by AI I saw was always overly verbose, and very mediocre in regard to figurative elements. Yes, often it is not worse than you average thing you can read on the Internet, but this is the point, right?

Yes, definitely. The search for a way to root out some kind of ephemeral origin or quality besides what is reflected in the text is fundamentally pointless and doesn't improve anything.

Some of my own writing looks like generated by AI. The older it is, the more similar.

My newest texts read more human, or at least I hope so.

I strongly disagree.

TL;DR: If you didn't put effort into writing it, you clearly don't value it enough for me to put any effort into reading it. I don't give a damn about readability.

Longer: We are now locked in a titanic, global war on attention. While once it was impossible to output content faster than it can be consumed, this relationship has inverted to the extreme. So the social norms that we evolved prior to this inversion simply cannot still apply.

While once it took tremendous resources or effort, it is now trivial and cheap to saturate my attention. And as a result, my attention is under non-stop assault.

To guard my precious attention and preserve it for the subjects I deem most worthy, I am forced to choose between what does and does not deserve my attention.

The level of effort an author invested in the creation of their work is a decent proxy to their actual assessment of its worth. I will continue to use that metric as a filter, and have found it to be helpful for maintaining the health of my mind and my relationships.

> toward strictly rewarding better writing

Part of better writing is that a human wrote it because writing reflects the person who wrote it. I don't want to read clear writing if it doesn't represent communication from a human being. What's the point? I want to do more than learn or understand a piece of information. I want to simply communicate with others and understand them. And part of that means having a good idea of their ability or lack thereof to communicate.

No thank you.

I hope this never happens and claude/openai retains its idiosyncratic writing style. That way it's easy to spot "grifters". It's also a signal that the fine details (like entire sentences) may be wrong since a clanker with no context wrote it.

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