I was insulted today – AI style

Give it a rest.

What's happening is that AI has become an identity-sorting mechanism faster than any technology in recent memory. Faster than social media, faster than smartphones. Within about two years, "what do you think about AI" became a tribal marker on par with political affiliation. And like political affiliation, the actual object-level question ("is this tool useful for this task") got completely swallowed by the identity question ("what kind of person uses/rejects this").

The blog author isn't really angry about the comment. He's angry because someone accidentally miscategorized him tribally. "Did you use AI?" heard through his filter means "you're one of them." Same reason vegans get mad when you assume they eat meat, or whatever. It's an identity boundary violation, not a practical dispute.

These comments aren't discussing the post. They're each doing a little ritual display of their own position in the sorting. "I miss real conversation" = I'm on the human side. The political rant = I'm on the progress side. The energy calculation = I'm on the rational-empiricist side.

The thing that's actually weird, the thing worth asking "what the fuck" about: this sorting happened before the technology matured enough for anyone to have a grounded opinion about its long-term effects. People picked teams based on vibes and aesthetics, and now they're backfilling justifications. Which means the discourse is almost completely decoupled from what the technology actually does or will do.

I'm eagerly awaiting for the return of handwriting and fingerprints on paper from ink-smeared fingers. Even have a box of nice paper and a few fountain pens ready :p .

A bit more seriously though, I wonder if our appreciation of things (arts and otherwise) is going to turn bimodal: a box for machine-made, a box for intrinsically human.

I feel for the author. Until recently it used to be that writing was a way for humans to project their thought into time and space for anyone to witness, or even to have a conversation. Oh how I miss that dead art of having a good one.

It used to be that you knew where you stand with colleagues just from how they write and how they speak. Had this Slack memo been written by someone who just learned enough English to get their first job? Or had it been crafted with the skill and precision of your Creative Writing college professor's wet nightmare muse?

But now that's all been strangely devalued and put into question.

LLMs are having conversations with each other thanks to the effort of countless human beings in between.

God created men, Sam Colt (and Altman) made them equal.

> Rest assured, those are all my own words. No super-computer, consuming megawatts of energy, was needed. Just my little brain.

Lol, this is a chatgpt verbal tick. Not this, just a totally normal that.

It would be irony if this HN post was submitted by an AI. (long dash in the title)

Out of curiosity, how many Wh does an LLM burn to output something, and how many does a human for similar output? I wonder what's more energy-heavy.

Good story. I hope it wasn't written by AI.

I agree, I would be enraged by this. "Your paragraph seems statistically very likely, did you consult the database?" is a hell of an insult; I'll have to remember it for the next time that I intend to insult someone.