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Comment by Gabriel54 | Hacker News Reader

I am very happy to see people make use of AI to do previously impractical work, but the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.

> Not a diary, not a family chronicle - a tool book.

> As reliable as it says on each page - no more and no less.

> Pages without a special note have been editorially reviewed: carefully checked and corrected.

This sounds like an extremely interesting topic but the lack of care in the presentation is disappointing.

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“carefully checked and corrected” is also the sort of thing that llm's like to insert when you tell them to carefully check and correct in the prompt, and isn't otherwise really a natural thing to write.

LLMs love all kinds of idioms that indicate quality work (even when it isn't): 'checked', 'correct/corrected', 'witnessed', 'works/working', 'verified', 'validated'. They overuse these to the point that they become flags rather than reassurances.

> the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.

But that is typical AI quality. It is a fancified Babelfish 2.0 translator.

Some humans also use AI to "interact" with other humans. They don't seem to understand that this is a problem for some humans. When a human AI slops me, I stop all any every further interaction (assuming I can find out that this human did so. It is not always possible to find that out).

I don't like to frame it in terms of, "this person is using AI, so I am no longer interested in communicating", because it is not really the AI that is the problem. It is the lack of effort put into communication with another human. AI can be extremely helpful for some people (e.g., proofreading text if one's native language isn't English). But this use case is almost never a problem if done carefully because the original ideas were all there in the beginning.

I focus my frustration on writing that is circular, vague, unnecessarily explanatory, etc. In my experience this is a symptom of the fact that there were no original ideas to begin with.

Maybe this is because of the translation, I guess the author has written the non-English version first and then got it translated into English with AI, adding some additional explanations if necessary.

That thought certainly crossed my mind, but having worked with people using LLMs for this purpose successfully, this instead comes across as taking a simple idea and asking {model} to expand this two or three sentence idea into a web page.

It may be the translation, however, this project is a passion for him. I would guess the passion is the book itself, and though he wants to share his passion, I imagine creating the actual page for others is tedious compared to the work of discovering the book. I have had the same issue.

If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.

This [0] is my secret weapon against this kind of slop. Any time I see any of these markers I tell my agent to read this again. Works unreasonably well.

[0] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/birep/bb865b2799d3f86d55f...

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