I fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write.
I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used.
This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful.
If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word.
Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.
In this comment section alone, 5 people have used some variant of that aphorism, and it's used constantly on hn and other sites. They've heard it.
How does that matter? Parent-poster asked about sincerity of thought, not originality.
If the spouses-to-be at a marriage ceremony say "I do", would you leap up from the audience to denounce them as frauds because obviously they heard the vow-formula before a hundred times? Hopefully not, and not only for reasons of decorum.
In contrast, most of the LLM slop I deal with from coworkers involve statements that--while less formulaic--are ones they can't even recall saying and are unwilling to defend when questioned.
JimDabell said they didn't come up with that thought themselves. They never implied the poster didn't mean it. sm-silversight responded, "How do you know it's not his/her thought?" You can reasonably interpret them as asking how we know they didn't come up with that thought independently.
If we go with your interpretation instead, then sm-silversight simply misread the comment they replied to and their post doesn't follow. No one doubted OP felt sincere about not wanting to read AI.
> despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
I mean, how can you say that he didn't think it himself? I thought this same thing and realised apparently I'm not the first. You have no idea how many of my blog posts ideas have come in HN first before I could publish. People can have the same thoughts. And have em all the time as well.
Psss.. See how @sm-silversight who commented on your post said the same thing I did? That's realtime example right there.
Coming back to the topic at hand. I agree with the OP. If you don't care to write it, why should anyone read it? AI has good usecases. But am not sure writing is one.
Writing is not just about the end result. It's also about the thought process. I learn about the topic more as I write. I correct my incorrect understandings as I write. When am pissed, my article has a different tone. Am rude, too direct. When am content/happy, different one. All of this is sterilised into something robotic where the author won't even remember what he/she wrote? What's the to like? For brownie points?
Selecting between alternatives is also a very valuable skill. Also known as "taste".
You are a senior software architect, you "prompt" 10 junior architects to write a software architecture proposal and then pick one which you send the client.
Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
There are plenty of industries where "taste" is a real job.
Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
> Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
Lemme ask you a counter question, the senior architect writes the proposal and the junior writes it. Which one do you think client likes better?
Moreover, Your focus is on the end-result. Sure, in corporate environment, most people don't care about what they do as long as the end results checks some boxes. That wasn't the discussion here. The discussion is about writing and reading in general. Whether it's worth my time or not if you don't mean (forget mean, don't even remember) what you wrote.
Also, in your own example, the client don't care as well. As long the client's checks all the boxes his/her/their manager said should satisfy. Nobody really gives a damn about the quality.
Also, are you saying you'll be fine paying for Financial Times, WSJ and NYTimes KNOWING all they do is shove the story through an LLM? Neither will there be a soul, nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
> Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
There is difference no? I forward the output to get good feedback and correction from someone BETTER. And there is a process involved in it which showcases the "TASTE" you mentioned from the person whom you are forwarding your output to be vetted and that person comes up to you with feedback. And guess what? You learn from the person's feedback. You don't go back again and again forever to learn the same thing. That's exactly what am trying to point out.
> nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
This is a ridiculous thing to say - "because the Weather app in my phone is 100% automated with no human "soul" in it, I will not take it into account into how should I dress today"
> the client don't care as well
This applies here too. If you didn't pay for author's output, are not a subscriber to their Substack, why should they bother to hand craft you a quality human written post?
> If you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read it
So the argument is that effort should be somehow matched. Ok, let's go with that. It's well know that writing something takes 10x more effort than reading it. So if we use the market argument, if it takes you 10 min to read a blog post, the author should spend 1 min writing it, because writing is 10x more intense, and this is only possible with a LLM. You might say "but there is one author, and 1000 readers". That gets us back to the paying argument.
> how can you say that he didn't think it himself?
Because the same sentence has been repeated practically word-for-word ad nauseam all over social media for years. What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation? They are perfectly able to step in and claim that it was their original thought if they want to.
> What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation?
Both are fully possible.
We're talking about a simple sentence that sounds a lot like something a primary school teacher or parent of young children would say. "If you won't do/don't/haven't done X, why should I Y?" is very normal moral/ethical phrasing.
I suppose I heard someone say it before I spelled it out in that way, but I am pretty confident I would ultimately have used a sufficiently similar expression, because I have been on the receiving end of the problem.
And that is putting aside the communicative compression of aphorisms. People don't use shared aphorisms to avoid ever doing the thinking themselves; they use them to shorthand more complex arguments for a listener who has already heard them. They are shared macros for agreed concepts. (Using them correctly requires having done the thinking they package up at least once).
I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.
Do you think that they came up with it independently? If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
“Just do it” is an incredibly common, generic phrase, but if a new shoe manufacturer chose it as their slogan, it isn’t plausible that they came up with it independently of Nike.
> I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.
OK then. BOTH ARE PLAUSIBLE. Clear enough?
It's absolutely not up to me to decide whether they came up with it independently.
But then again, it isn't up to you, Jim.
> If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
Again: aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used. People can use them without you having the right to demand proof they thought them up for themselves like some prep school debate bully picking on a younger child.
> > If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
> This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
It’s basic intellectual honesty. If nobody believes that they came up with it independently, putting it forward as if it’s a real argument is just a form of trolling. If I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it, and even the person who posted it doesn’t claim it’s original, you’re just baiting me to respond to a position nobody holds.
Do you believe that they actually came up with it independently? If you do actually believe this, then a discussion is not a waste of time. But if you aren’t willing to claim that position, it’s pointless me arguing against it because it’s just you deliberately wasting my time on something you don’t believe.
> aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used.
This is a cornerstone of the point I was making. You’re literally supporting the point I was making.
OK, how about 'nothing is real, nobody will ever care again, let's all never listen to anybody else ever again'?
That's more or less the same thing expressed more nihilistically. But nihilism is, like, just a word man (to 'The Dude' it up a bit). Perhaps we are either fiddling on the deck of the Titanic, or just staring at the waves?
What do you think the results will be of the machines consuming only their own slop and Habsburging themselves intellectually, and then all the humans abandoning any attempt to either talk or listen? As a global civilization of humans? I'm not sure we've explored the likely consequences of 'if you can't spend them time to write it why should anyone read it'.
Some things are worth repeating, so the community knows that many people share the belief. Often they're slogans, sometimes they're just plain good arguments.
You are moving the goalpost. OC is not talking about thoughts having to be unique. You can very much read someone else's thoughts, examine them critically and come to the conclusion of agreeing with them. You might then write a comment like OC putting these thoughts into your own words – maybe abridging them, placing different emphasize according to what you find most important or even adding new ideas – and quote or paraphrase something you found very fitting.
That is completely different from generating words that are not an expression of your thoughts or at the very best take some concise thoughts from the prompt and stretch them into a lengthy word soup.
Of course there are people who just parrot other people's thoughts without understanding them. That's closer to using an LLM. But you can often see how well someone understands something and how much reasoning of their own they put into it through their writing. And for the writer writing is a very good way to reflect on their own thoughts and to get them into order. Proper writing is thinking.
There's a big difference between reintroducing this unoriginal point in the context of this thread and presenting an entire piece of LLM writing as your own. That phrase from this comment isn't pretending to be an original piece of writing.
S-E-P · · focus · HN ↗
If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
JimDabell · · focus · HN ↗
This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word.
Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.
sm-silversight · · focus · HN ↗
abc123abc123 · · focus · HN ↗
nearbuy · · focus · HN ↗
Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
If the spouses-to-be at a marriage ceremony say "I do", would you leap up from the audience to denounce them as frauds because obviously they heard the vow-formula before a hundred times? Hopefully not, and not only for reasons of decorum.
In contrast, most of the LLM slop I deal with from coworkers involve statements that--while less formulaic--are ones they can't even recall saying and are unwilling to defend when questioned.
nearbuy · · focus · HN ↗
If we go with your interpretation instead, then sm-silversight simply misread the comment they replied to and their post doesn't follow. No one doubted OP felt sincere about not wanting to read AI.
unsungNovelty · · focus · HN ↗
I mean, how can you say that he didn't think it himself? I thought this same thing and realised apparently I'm not the first. You have no idea how many of my blog posts ideas have come in HN first before I could publish. People can have the same thoughts. And have em all the time as well.
Psss.. See how @sm-silversight who commented on your post said the same thing I did? That's realtime example right there.
Coming back to the topic at hand. I agree with the OP. If you don't care to write it, why should anyone read it? AI has good usecases. But am not sure writing is one.
Writing is not just about the end result. It's also about the thought process. I learn about the topic more as I write. I correct my incorrect understandings as I write. When am pissed, my article has a different tone. Am rude, too direct. When am content/happy, different one. All of this is sterilised into something robotic where the author won't even remember what he/she wrote? What's the to like? For brownie points?
dist-epoch · · focus · HN ↗
You are a senior software architect, you "prompt" 10 junior architects to write a software architecture proposal and then pick one which you send the client.
Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
There are plenty of industries where "taste" is a real job.
Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
unsungNovelty · · focus · HN ↗
Lemme ask you a counter question, the senior architect writes the proposal and the junior writes it. Which one do you think client likes better?
Moreover, Your focus is on the end-result. Sure, in corporate environment, most people don't care about what they do as long as the end results checks some boxes. That wasn't the discussion here. The discussion is about writing and reading in general. Whether it's worth my time or not if you don't mean (forget mean, don't even remember) what you wrote.
Also, in your own example, the client don't care as well. As long the client's checks all the boxes his/her/their manager said should satisfy. Nobody really gives a damn about the quality.
Also, are you saying you'll be fine paying for Financial Times, WSJ and NYTimes KNOWING all they do is shove the story through an LLM? Neither will there be a soul, nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
> Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
There is difference no? I forward the output to get good feedback and correction from someone BETTER. And there is a process involved in it which showcases the "TASTE" you mentioned from the person whom you are forwarding your output to be vetted and that person comes up to you with feedback. And guess what? You learn from the person's feedback. You don't go back again and again forever to learn the same thing. That's exactly what am trying to point out.
dist-epoch · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe I just want the news.
> nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
This is a ridiculous thing to say - "because the Weather app in my phone is 100% automated with no human "soul" in it, I will not take it into account into how should I dress today"
> the client don't care as well
This applies here too. If you didn't pay for author's output, are not a subscriber to their Substack, why should they bother to hand craft you a quality human written post?
> If you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read it
So the argument is that effort should be somehow matched. Ok, let's go with that. It's well know that writing something takes 10x more effort than reading it. So if we use the market argument, if it takes you 10 min to read a blog post, the author should spend 1 min writing it, because writing is 10x more intense, and this is only possible with a LLM. You might say "but there is one author, and 1000 readers". That gets us back to the paying argument.
shunhe · · focus · HN ↗
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JimDabell · · focus · HN ↗
Because the same sentence has been repeated practically word-for-word ad nauseam all over social media for years. What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation? They are perfectly able to step in and claim that it was their original thought if they want to.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
Both are fully possible.
We're talking about a simple sentence that sounds a lot like something a primary school teacher or parent of young children would say. "If you won't do/don't/haven't done X, why should I Y?" is very normal moral/ethical phrasing.
I suppose I heard someone say it before I spelled it out in that way, but I am pretty confident I would ultimately have used a sufficiently similar expression, because I have been on the receiving end of the problem.
And that is putting aside the communicative compression of aphorisms. People don't use shared aphorisms to avoid ever doing the thinking themselves; they use them to shorthand more complex arguments for a listener who has already heard them. They are shared macros for agreed concepts. (Using them correctly requires having done the thinking they package up at least once).
JimDabell · · focus · HN ↗
Do you think that they came up with it independently? If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
“Just do it” is an incredibly common, generic phrase, but if a new shoe manufacturer chose it as their slogan, it isn’t plausible that they came up with it independently of Nike.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
OK then. BOTH ARE PLAUSIBLE. Clear enough?
It's absolutely not up to me to decide whether they came up with it independently.
But then again, it isn't up to you, Jim.
> If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.
This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
Again: aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used. People can use them without you having the right to demand proof they thought them up for themselves like some prep school debate bully picking on a younger child.
JimDabell · · focus · HN ↗
> This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?
It’s basic intellectual honesty. If nobody believes that they came up with it independently, putting it forward as if it’s a real argument is just a form of trolling. If I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it, and even the person who posted it doesn’t claim it’s original, you’re just baiting me to respond to a position nobody holds.
Do you believe that they actually came up with it independently? If you do actually believe this, then a discussion is not a waste of time. But if you aren’t willing to claim that position, it’s pointless me arguing against it because it’s just you deliberately wasting my time on something you don’t believe.
> aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used.
This is a cornerstone of the point I was making. You’re literally supporting the point I was making.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
Applejinx · · focus · HN ↗
That's more or less the same thing expressed more nihilistically. But nihilism is, like, just a word man (to 'The Dude' it up a bit). Perhaps we are either fiddling on the deck of the Titanic, or just staring at the waves?
What do you think the results will be of the machines consuming only their own slop and Habsburging themselves intellectually, and then all the humans abandoning any attempt to either talk or listen? As a global civilization of humans? I'm not sure we've explored the likely consequences of 'if you can't spend them time to write it why should anyone read it'.
Maybe it's gone too far already.
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basilikum · · focus · HN ↗
That is completely different from generating words that are not an expression of your thoughts or at the very best take some concise thoughts from the prompt and stretch them into a lengthy word soup.
Of course there are people who just parrot other people's thoughts without understanding them. That's closer to using an LLM. But you can often see how well someone understands something and how much reasoning of their own they put into it through their writing. And for the writer writing is a very good way to reflect on their own thoughts and to get them into order. Proper writing is thinking.
bigmadshoe · · focus · HN ↗