Hacker News Reader

Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

Are y'all gonna register a complaint for each and every instance of an LLM written or enhanced article anywhere?

It's mainstreamed. Spare the rest of us.

If nobody complains, nothing changes. At the very least Claude's output should have been edited and improved, but it reads like it was mostly copy-paste.

I dislike one-shot LLM prose as much as the next person, but there's no chance this use case ever goes away. Writing is difficult and takes a long time. Using an LLM to write for you gets your message across with the least effort. It's here to stay. Our only hope is that the models simply start writing better.

> Writing is difficult and takes a long time.

It gets a lot less difficult when you don't outsource it to a chat bot at every opportunity. Communication matters. If you do it badly because you let a bot that can't write do it all for you people should complain. The fact that lots of people will do it doesn't mean that readers should lower their standards.

I'm never going to complain about people using AI to write their private documents, but if someone publishes something, explicitly for others to read, and what they published is annoying to read and that wasn't the goal of the "writer" they should probably know about it. Even if they never check the comments, those of us who were made to read that slop can commiserate with each other.

Sure, it's here to stay. But the least effort solution is often not the best one. I would also argue it gets the point across with the least effort on the writer's part, but the most on the reader's. LLM prose is not easy to read and often not interesting because we're all used to slop. And I like a little human touch. I don't know if LLMs will ever be able to replace the individual human style differences.

I think calling out AI is pretty 'mainstreamed' at this point, if that's our criteria.

lazy writing is always valid ground for criticism…

It's kind of insulting. Like they didn't take the time to write it but expect me to spend time reading it.

Are you going to register a complaint on every complaint about LLM prose? They aren't going away. Spare the rest of us.

Yes absolutely will combat spam comments until yall stfu or a rule changes

s/enhanced/diminished ... because it matters

How do those boots taste?

We've got to shame this shit until it stops. LLMs are great; don't use them to write for you. Especially not in the first fucking person.

Yes!

It’s the lack of effort to make the AI write better that bothers me.

Exactly, there's nothing stopping someone from reading what it puts out and going "what? That doesn't belong there" and cleaning it up a little.

The critics never point this out though. They typically just find the first AI smell then proudly announce to everyone that they didn’t finish the article. It’s the new HN meta for securing upvotes with low effort.

I do generally agree though that the author should edit or rewrite completely the AI output since he clearly put a lot of effort into the thing he made itself.

It's hard to imagine people taking the time to give a bunch of detailed helpful notes and criticism about what the AI did poorly to a person who didn't even bother to do much more than copy/paste the shitty AI output in the first place.

We're not professional editors, and this isn't a forum for aspiring writers looking to improve, we're just insulted that someone published thousands of words they didn't put any effort into while expecting others to slog through their slop.

Yes it would indeed be much better to avoid the bike shedding completely.

Exactly, the whole discussion is about this guy's AI slop instead of what he did. It's ridiculous. On the other hand, it's kind of expected by now.

> The critics never point this out though. They typically just find the first AI smell then proudly announce to everyone that they didn’t finish the article.

I mean, I'm the "critic" that started this thread and my comment doesn't say that, so what exactly is your problem? If it were poor writing for any other reason would you have the same kneejerk defensive reaction that you have about poor AI writing?

What’s my problem? Your low effort Redditor tier updoot seeking behavior.

What do I think you should do? Just ignore it and let people who are interested in what the guy made have a discussion. If you are so keen to discuss AI use in blog posts, make a separate post about it and have an on-topic discussion rather than starting a circle jerk in every other post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com