On the note of imperfections... My preference is now strongly towards reading someone's stream of thought thrown down at speed over than that same stream of thought shat through the digestive track of an AI agent. At least that feels human.
To me, it also seems like they AI digestion is getting actively worse? As best as I can tell, all the agentic nature and reasoning for code is now making writing actively worse, as the agent pulls across your whole knowledge base and will take that one thought and eagerly join and context it thinks is relevant, with the reasoning spread throughout the page.
For better or for worse I’ve always preferred this, and IME a large portion of people (especially younger or who don’t write/communicate much for recreation or their work) will not read it or assume it was AI.
IMO it is a costly/goodhart-resistant way to “show your work” and help other people understand or challenge your mental model. (IE a justification for something you believe to be true). Overly polished writing is performative, it’s hard to take seriously once you’ve read The Economist/LW enough to see how poorly “well written” correlates with truth
To a certain extent are all wrong or ignorant about almost everything because our knowledge/time are very limited. But it is really important to understand what other people think in order to coordinate with them/align human goals and understanding.
It’s good that the average person taking the lowest-friction path to using an LLM in bad faith is easy to identify now. The more obvious and disliked it becomes, the more they’ll be hit with the stick to actually know things and not bother people. It’s so much worse to be “bad and stupid and not care” than “possibly cringe or wrong”
addisonj · · focus · HN ↗
To me, it also seems like they AI digestion is getting actively worse? As best as I can tell, all the agentic nature and reasoning for code is now making writing actively worse, as the agent pulls across your whole knowledge base and will take that one thought and eagerly join and context it thinks is relevant, with the reasoning spread throughout the page.
weitendorf · · focus · HN ↗
IMO it is a costly/goodhart-resistant way to “show your work” and help other people understand or challenge your mental model. (IE a justification for something you believe to be true). Overly polished writing is performative, it’s hard to take seriously once you’ve read The Economist/LW enough to see how poorly “well written” correlates with truth
To a certain extent are all wrong or ignorant about almost everything because our knowledge/time are very limited. But it is really important to understand what other people think in order to coordinate with them/align human goals and understanding.
It’s good that the average person taking the lowest-friction path to using an LLM in bad faith is easy to identify now. The more obvious and disliked it becomes, the more they’ll be hit with the stick to actually know things and not bother people. It’s so much worse to be “bad and stupid and not care” than “possibly cringe or wrong”