> People who rarely produced original writing are suddenly producing
these posts are beginning to make me wince. ai is giving voice to a lot of folks we probably wouldn't even be hearing from otherwise - because not everyone does their thinking in articulate prose, and extracting their realizations as shareable language takes effort, or long, embarassing iterations with ai "workshopping" to get to something they can read back and go yes this is what I am trying to say.
now the sentiment is that whatever these people had to say they could have just come out and said it - and that would be more passionate and less disjointed - no, not necessarily, and the more it gets repeated the more it's sounding elite and pompous to me. for example this:
> I had someone write me a personal message about a sensitive topic that was clearly workshopped with AI in an effort to nuance the conversation and not offend me. But the message became impersonal, dispassionate, and disjointed. It had all of the parts, but it didn’t make sense as a whole. I wasn’t interested in reading it, or responding.
this reads as someone choosing to ignore a personal message about a sensitive topic - because of an assumption they made about their writing: that they workshopped it when they should not have - because whatever it was they were struggling to say they should have isntead trusted the author to be able to understand the precise meaning of their raw, inelegant thoughts no matter how embarrassed they might be to share them in that form. they're complaining about a message they probably weren't otherwise going to see.
How is ai giving them voice? All that generated slop does that you stop to want to read anything. And it is not their voice anyway. It is not their words, their ideas are mixed with ai generated points.
As for second paragraph, the writing "had no overall meaning". There is nothing to respond to if there is no overall meaning.
What we are seeing here is a Luddite reaction from artisans. A skill has been automated and those that have the skill are not happy about it.
For many writing is painful and the machines ease the pain. And like all machines it takes a while to use them skilfully. In particular remembering that like code it is write once and read many. What the reader needs should be at the forefront of a writers mind - both for code and prose.
Nobody gets on a motorbike and wins the TT in the first weekend.
Nobody cares what your English grade is. Everyone would prefer to just hear you speak in your own voice. This isn't Luddism, this is the equivalent of people pushing their selfie through five Instagram filters until they look like an Oblivion character because they have no confidence in their own appearance.
This is not done in the service of readers, nobody wants the slop, it's writing dysphoria
the article we're commenting on quite literally cites a survey on reader behavior:
"Cynthia Dunlop recently shared survey results on reading AI-written articles entitled Report: How developers react to AI-scented blog posts. For the majority of readers, if they think an article is AI-assisted or AI-authored, they will stop reading (78%) and avoid the author in the future (71%)[...] the strongest result in the survey was people overwhelmingly preferred the author’s own writing (98%), with all its flaws and idiosyncrasies,[...]*
there's a say-do gap in play - similar to makeup/no-makeup studies: people claim to prefer natural/no-makeup while behavioral research reveals a preference for subtle/light/professionally-applied makeup
when it comes to ai people love to claim to hate it outright - this thread is full of descriptions of ai writing being impossible to read, totally incoherent, and superlatively bad/worse than average human writing. meanwhile evidence suggests that we might actually kind of like ai writing - with a growing portion of samples making hn's frontpage (<a href="https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/state-of-ai-on-hn" rel="nofollow">https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/state-of-...)
I've seen my share of ai slop and I get where the rage is coming from - I think folks could do a lot better than shouting down every use of ai as slop, especially while hypocritically using ai in their own writing. the pompous elitism on display in this thread alone is gross even for hn
the fact that the HN (or other) frontpages feature a non-trivial amount of AI content is to a large extent owed to the fact that many commenters don't even read the content they're commenting on, another problem in and of itself.
There is no elitism in demanding that people use their own words, or if you want to call it elitism then elitism is healthy and good. Imagine ten years ago you talk to someone online and they told you they outsourced their posting to a call center guy in the third world, that's what this is. Literacy and agency aren't gross, it's what we ought to expect of an educated adult. It's fundamentally a sign of honesty that if I talk to you or read what you write I want to hear words out of your mouth, not some meat puppet version of you hooked up to a chatbot.
demanding that people not use a technology that makes expression accessible to them, and insisting that they can only produce the sort of slop that you're sick of seeing, is not just elitist - it's indignantly pompous. it's neither healthy nor good - it's hateful and hurtful
> ..they outsourced their posting to a call center guy in the third world
nobody actually does this though - this exaggerated caricature dwells only in the hateful mind. to be fair there are content farms as there always have been and ai slop is bellowing from their stacks, but the article we're commenting on and your sentiment are not aimed at them - they're targeting the people we're not used to hearing from who might have interesting things to share now that technology is helping them organize their thoughts. you want to say "if you needed ai to organize your thoughts, your thoughts aren't worth organizing" there's nothing good or healthy about that sentiment - you think you're "demanding literacy of educated adults" but actually you're demanding a particular kind of linguistic fluency you happen to value - that's not a defense of literacy it's hallmark elitist gatekeeping
gfody · · focus · HN ↗
these posts are beginning to make me wince. ai is giving voice to a lot of folks we probably wouldn't even be hearing from otherwise - because not everyone does their thinking in articulate prose, and extracting their realizations as shareable language takes effort, or long, embarassing iterations with ai "workshopping" to get to something they can read back and go yes this is what I am trying to say.
now the sentiment is that whatever these people had to say they could have just come out and said it - and that would be more passionate and less disjointed - no, not necessarily, and the more it gets repeated the more it's sounding elite and pompous to me. for example this:
> I had someone write me a personal message about a sensitive topic that was clearly workshopped with AI in an effort to nuance the conversation and not offend me. But the message became impersonal, dispassionate, and disjointed. It had all of the parts, but it didn’t make sense as a whole. I wasn’t interested in reading it, or responding.
this reads as someone choosing to ignore a personal message about a sensitive topic - because of an assumption they made about their writing: that they workshopped it when they should not have - because whatever it was they were struggling to say they should have isntead trusted the author to be able to understand the precise meaning of their raw, inelegant thoughts no matter how embarrassed they might be to share them in that form. they're complaining about a message they probably weren't otherwise going to see.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
As for second paragraph, the writing "had no overall meaning". There is nothing to respond to if there is no overall meaning.
neilwilson · · focus · HN ↗
What we are seeing here is a Luddite reaction from artisans. A skill has been automated and those that have the skill are not happy about it.
For many writing is painful and the machines ease the pain. And like all machines it takes a while to use them skilfully. In particular remembering that like code it is write once and read many. What the reader needs should be at the forefront of a writers mind - both for code and prose.
Nobody gets on a motorbike and wins the TT in the first weekend.
Barrin92 · · focus · HN ↗
Nobody cares what your English grade is. Everyone would prefer to just hear you speak in your own voice. This isn't Luddism, this is the equivalent of people pushing their selfie through five Instagram filters until they look like an Oblivion character because they have no confidence in their own appearance.
This is not done in the service of readers, nobody wants the slop, it's writing dysphoria
someguynamedq · · focus · HN ↗
Objectively false
Barrin92 · · focus · HN ↗
"Cynthia Dunlop recently shared survey results on reading AI-written articles entitled Report: How developers react to AI-scented blog posts. For the majority of readers, if they think an article is AI-assisted or AI-authored, they will stop reading (78%) and avoid the author in the future (71%)[...] the strongest result in the survey was people overwhelmingly preferred the author’s own writing (98%), with all its flaws and idiosyncrasies,[...]*
gfody · · focus · HN ↗
when it comes to ai people love to claim to hate it outright - this thread is full of descriptions of ai writing being impossible to read, totally incoherent, and superlatively bad/worse than average human writing. meanwhile evidence suggests that we might actually kind of like ai writing - with a growing portion of samples making hn's frontpage (<a href="https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/state-of-ai-on-hn" rel="nofollow">https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/state-of-...)
I've seen my share of ai slop and I get where the rage is coming from - I think folks could do a lot better than shouting down every use of ai as slop, especially while hypocritically using ai in their own writing. the pompous elitism on display in this thread alone is gross even for hn
Barrin92 · · focus · HN ↗
There is no elitism in demanding that people use their own words, or if you want to call it elitism then elitism is healthy and good. Imagine ten years ago you talk to someone online and they told you they outsourced their posting to a call center guy in the third world, that's what this is. Literacy and agency aren't gross, it's what we ought to expect of an educated adult. It's fundamentally a sign of honesty that if I talk to you or read what you write I want to hear words out of your mouth, not some meat puppet version of you hooked up to a chatbot.
gfody · · focus · HN ↗
demanding that people not use a technology that makes expression accessible to them, and insisting that they can only produce the sort of slop that you're sick of seeing, is not just elitist - it's indignantly pompous. it's neither healthy nor good - it's hateful and hurtful
> ..they outsourced their posting to a call center guy in the third world
nobody actually does this though - this exaggerated caricature dwells only in the hateful mind. to be fair there are content farms as there always have been and ai slop is bellowing from their stacks, but the article we're commenting on and your sentiment are not aimed at them - they're targeting the people we're not used to hearing from who might have interesting things to share now that technology is helping them organize their thoughts. you want to say "if you needed ai to organize your thoughts, your thoughts aren't worth organizing" there's nothing good or healthy about that sentiment - you think you're "demanding literacy of educated adults" but actually you're demanding a particular kind of linguistic fluency you happen to value - that's not a defense of literacy it's hallmark elitist gatekeeping