> 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.
I really, really despise this sentiment and the people that make it.
Writing has always been incredibly difficult for me, both due to incredible difficulties with handwriting and finding my own voice. That difficulty I find in writing is the friction that identifies what my voice is, the words I choose and the meaning I attempt to convey through my own understanding.
I cannot read AI-generated crap for the life of me because all of it simply has no meaning. I will go back and read through paragraphs, trying to grasp at the meaning of something that does not exist. If your argument is that AI-generated writing eases the pain then I will make the opposite argument: reading AI-generated slop increases the pain 10x. I would sooner read through an essay with endless punctuation issues and spelling mistakes than one passed through an LLM because one is an earnest attempt to communicate while the other is offloading all of the mental burden to me. Which gets to the root issue of a lot of the complaints around people slinging slop: you make it marginally easier for you, and then far worse for everyone around you.
"If your argument is that AI-generated writing eases the pain then I will make the opposite argument: reading AI-generated slop increases the pain 10x"
Then you didn't bother to read, or understand, my argument.
In particular this bit: "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."
Are you sure you haven't got to the stage where you don't read anything properly at all?
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.
fzeroracer · · focus · HN ↗
Writing has always been incredibly difficult for me, both due to incredible difficulties with handwriting and finding my own voice. That difficulty I find in writing is the friction that identifies what my voice is, the words I choose and the meaning I attempt to convey through my own understanding.
I cannot read AI-generated crap for the life of me because all of it simply has no meaning. I will go back and read through paragraphs, trying to grasp at the meaning of something that does not exist. If your argument is that AI-generated writing eases the pain then I will make the opposite argument: reading AI-generated slop increases the pain 10x. I would sooner read through an essay with endless punctuation issues and spelling mistakes than one passed through an LLM because one is an earnest attempt to communicate while the other is offloading all of the mental burden to me. Which gets to the root issue of a lot of the complaints around people slinging slop: you make it marginally easier for you, and then far worse for everyone around you.
neilwilson · · focus · HN ↗
Then you didn't bother to read, or understand, my argument.
In particular this bit: "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."
Are you sure you haven't got to the stage where you don't read anything properly at all?