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I don't want to read what you didn't write

1070 points · 460 comments · mooreds

  1. gfody · · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.

    1. NoDodgeQuestion · · focus · HN ↗
      >not everyone does their thinking in articulate prose

      not everyone does their thinking, if you dont I dont want you to have voice

      1. someguynamedq · · focus · HN ↗
        It should be obvious to you, as a great epicurian of thinking, that the ability to spit out prose is orthogonal to the ability to think thoughts worth prosing about.
        1. patwork · · focus · HN ↗
          I strongly disagree with this statement. The careful selection of words that results in elegant prose is one and the same with the thinking. Sure, there are many ideas worth prosing about, but those are just a premise until someone goes through the effort to intentionally shape words around the premise.
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