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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

If you're having daily interactions with people who feel like LLMs, then find a new community to hang out in instead. There's plenty of communities out there that reject LLM content. They're not interested in taking over the world, so they're a little harder to find, but they're out there.

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I think the point is it’s unavoidable now.

Personally I run in to it in the workplace now constantly. I work with pseudo tech types that we used to call BAs but now glorify as “product”. Now about 95% of their content is made by AI.

Most of the time it’s just material I actually created then they regurgitated through Claude with errors introduced to make it worse.

Yes, we gutted anything that didn't suck about work.

Show up, take your money, and get out. Hope that they don't decide they've figured out how to automate you, and build up savings in case they did.

Care about your work as much as your employer cares about you, and remember the layoffs.

Get away from work if you want to socialize.

> I think the point is it’s unavoidable now.

It definitely isn't. I'm in a half dozen online spaces where no one posts LLM content, either because it's explicitly against the rules or implicitly against the culture, or simply because no one is interested in it.

What's a punch in the gut is when family members do it. My sister sent my daughter a letter recently that was clearly generated by AI.

It’s not just the tech industry. Friends of mine in non-technical fields are seeing more and more of this. If it’s in your workplace, it’s probably in most workplaces that you’re qualified to work in. You don’t "just" walk away from your community and your career.

If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.

The conversation here is around online communities, so that's what my comment was about. LLMs destroy every aspect of life they touch, and I agree many of those problems aren't really solvable. But online communities at least can be preserved with strong moderation & ejecting users who post LLM-generated content.

> If you really want a firm anti-AI community with staying power, it’s looking like you will need a neo-Amish movement, complete with isolationism.

The funny thing is that as soon as communities do this and take an anti-LLM stance they get mocked, called luddites, they get told they're living in a word that doesn't exist anymore and that AI is here to stay, stop going against the current.

What a time to be online...

The only correct answer is to give those people the middle finger.

And to work to pass legislation to give them the middle finger.

AI may be one of the most harmful technologies we have created. It's time to treat it as toxic.

I still think social media has done more damage, but we don't think of it that way right now because of shifting baseline syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

Then block those people. Either they're stupid and don't understand the bad incentives that LLMs create in forums, or they do understand and they're malicious.

The Luddites weren't against technology, they were against the inhumane exploitation of workers and dangerous child labor, made that much worse through technology. All Ludd supposedly did was smash a couple frames after being criticized for his output, but the Luddites' grievances were really just the foremost among those that had been simmering among textile workers for as long as there has ever been a textile industry, long before industrial automation was a thing.

As for myself, I certainly don't want a community based on reactionary dogma, but I would certainly prefer to be around people who at least have their eyes open, and are aware of the corrosive effects that AI can have or already does.

The Luddites were about protecting their privileged hereditary position against competition from women and other outsiders. Not unlike the privilege of contemporary software engineers like myself.

A lot of labor unions were about racism and xenophobia too, but they did agitate for better working conditions nonetheless. For sure it's not black and white.

...against competition from women, who of course infamously had never been part of the textile industry? Who knew the Molyneux sisters were the Molyneux brothers all along?

Maybe try to inform yourself about the historical context before popping off? The Luddites were part of a medieval craft guild that was largely hereditary and had never admitted women. They even roughed up female weavers to deter them from employment in the trade.

Of course weaving has largely been a female-dominated craft from time immemorial. That doesn't mean you can just apply stereotypes to a historical situation you apparently know nothing about and pretend you're being both witty and insightful.

> Maybe try to inform yourself about the historical context before popping off?

Who exactly do you think the Molyneux sisters I referred to were?

What if I told you that there are Amish communities now that are avid users of ChatGPT in their shops? My brother-in-law is a cellphone vendor to such communities. For business purposes, is the excuse for all such technology.

With every year those communities are becoming increasingly balkanized and building moats as they raise up the drawbridges, assuming they haven’t already atrophied from swapping over to a Facebook group years ago (now discord too, which will hurt in the long run). They are trying to protect their communities but unfortunately it has the very sad secondary effect of making it harder and harder to find them.

I keep seeing hints of these communities existing, here in hn comments. Every time a thread is about communities that are still good, still human etc someone pops up saying these communities exist, but no-one ever mentions what these communities are.

I mean, I get it: one risks eternal-september-ing them as soon as the hn crowd finds out about them, but sometimes it's really frustrating going down a thread hoping to find better indications for these mythical great communities and always coming back empty-handed.

> someone pops up saying these communities exist,

Maybe send those people a hand-written email ;)

An LLM-free community is exactly the problem my product is trying to solve, do you have 15mins next week? lol

Online the only one I've seen is discord, I don't really like the discord experience though

We're all lurking in Cixin's dark forest, watching. The aliens are already here, and they're hungry for more tokens.

Yeah. Because we don't want hacker news assholes to find them and destroy them, the way they've been systematically pillaging the rest of the Internet.

"I saw you posted about a community.."

The couple of enthusiast email lists I'm on are still real people, as far as I can tell.

https://lobste.rs?

I know other communities that I really doubt would appeal to anyone here. However, Lobsters is basically Hacker News, but anti-AI, smaller, and with a (low) barrier to entry.

Two more: https://tildes.net, and https://indieforums.linklists.net/ (a giant list of them).

Lobsters is currently undergoing a schism over AI that may prove fatal.

I'm part of a maker community that I really enjoy being a part of. We don't invite random people, but if someone makes something cool, I'll send them an invitation. I think it's this sort of thing that people are referring to when they talk about these communities.

I think they definitionally have to be smallish groups of people who actually know each other at least a little bit, so you can't just fill in a sign-up form and join one, but you can start your own.

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