alt Hacker NewsDo you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?
Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.
> Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.
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AI text is just a quick heuristic for garbage. But I’ve always disliked garbage. Even when it came dressed like:
How to use Monads
When David James was a young child, his mother used to tell him that you could oil vegetables before putting them in the pan. On the ranch in Eastern Kentucky David’s mornings would be spent watering, caring for the cows, and then playing with the dogs. Before he started blah blah blah…
<500 words later> and then he defined a structure called a monad with three properties…
Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable. Now it’s interspersed with the useful parts.
But that’s fine: it’s a solved problem by just making a machine extract information. So yes, complaining about the form is passé. I’m going to put it in the ore refiner anyway and the slag goes in the pit. Away to the slag pit with David’s infernal mother.
> obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder
I disagree and think this is an overly extreme take.
I will agree that the trust/correctness thing is kind of silly because humans can be and are often wrong just as much.
But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output. Maybe LLM output is OK at work. I honestly don't care if its used for corporate bureaucracy stuff I probably wasn't actually reading it anyway outside of skimming it or putting into an LLM to summarize for me.
But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection. We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
So I don't think its unreasonable at all to be immediately dismissive of anything that is pure LLM output. The actual content itself is only one half of the equation.