[nicce]

In the past, you had to put a lot of effort to produce a text which seemed to be high quality, especially when you knew nothing about the subject. By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject. Now, that is completely removed. There is no easy filter anymore.

While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.

[ookdatnog]

Writing a text of decent quality used to constitute proof of work. This is now no longer the case, and we haven't adapted to this assumption becoming invalid.

For example, when applying to a job, your cover letter used to count as proof of work. The contents are less important than the fact that you put some amount of effort in it, enough to prove that you care about this specific vacancy. Now this basic assumption has evaporated, and job searching has become a meaningless two-way spam war, where having your AI-generated application selected from hundreds or thousands of other AI-generated applications is little more than a lottery.

[bitexploder]

This. I am very picky about how I use ML still, but it is unsurpassed as a virtual editor. It can clean up grammar and rephrase things in a very light way, but it gives my prose the polish I want. The thing is, I am a very decent writer. I wrote professionally for 18 years as a part of my job delivering reports of high quality as my work product. So, it really helps that I know exactly what “good” looks like by my standards. ML can clean things up so much faster than I can and I am confident my writing is organic still, but it can fix up small issues, find mistakes, etc very quickly. A word change here or there, some punctuation, that is normal editing. It is genuinely good at light rephrasing as well, if you have some idea of what intent you want.

When it becomes obvious, though, is when people let the LLM do the writing for them. The job search bit is definitely rough. Referrals, references, and actual accomplishments may become even more important.

[gtirloni]

As usual, LLMs are an excellent tool when you already have a decent understanding of the field you're interested in using them in. Which is not the case of people posting in social media or creating their first programs. That's where the dullness and noise come from.

The noise ground has been elevated 100x by LLMs. It was already bad before but it's accelerated the trend.

So, yes, we should have never been trusting anything online but before LLMs we could rely on our brains to quickly identify the bad. Nowadays, it's exhausting. Maybe we need a LLM trained on spotting LLMs.

This month, I, with decades of experience, used Claude Dev as an experiment to create a small automation tool. After countless manual fixes, it finally worked and I was happy. Until I gave thr whole thing a decent look again and realized what a piece of garbage I had created. It's exhausting to be on the lookout for these situations. I prefer to think things through myself, it's a more rewarding experience with better end results anyway.

[danielbln]

Not to sound too dismissive, but there is a distinct learning curve when it comes to using models like Claude for code assist. Not just the intuition when the model goes off the rails, but also what to provide it in the context, how and what to ask for etc. Trying it once and dismissing it is maybe not the best experimental setup.

I've been using Zed recently with its LLM integration so assist me in my development and its been absolutely wonderful, but one must control tightly what to present to the model and what to ask for and how.

[gtirloni]

It's not my first time using LLMs and you're assuming too much.

[iszomer]

LLM's are a great onramp to filling in knowledge that may have been lost to age or updated to their modern classification. For example, I didn't know Hokkien and Haka are distinct linguistic branches within the Sino-Tibetan language and warrants more (personal) research into the subject. And all this time, without the internet, we often just colloquially called it Taiwanese.

[aguaviva]

How is this considered "lost" knowledge there are (large) Wikipedia pages about those languages (which is of course what the LLM is cribbing from)?

"Human-curated encycolpedias are a great onramp to filling in knowledge gaps", that I can go with.

[iszomer]

How often do you go back to your encyclopedia hard copies only to find whatever knowledge you may have absorbed have already been deprecated? Or that information from Wikipedia may have changed at moments without notice, have never read or, dare I say, included a political bias to them?

Maybe I should have worded it better as a "beginner" or "intermediate" knowledge onramp and/or filler. For example, I have asked it on occasion to translate into traditional Mandarin in parallel for every English response. It helps tremendously in trying to rebuild that bridge that may have been burned long ago.

[nicce]

It is lost in a sense that you had no idea about such possibility and you did not know to search it in the first hand, while I believe that in this case LLM brought it up as a side note.

[msikora]

This is my go-to process whenever I write anything now:

1. I use dictation software to get my thoughts out as a stream of consciousness. 2. Then, I have ChatGPT or Claude refine it into something coherent based on a prompt of what I'm aiming for. 3. Finally, I review the result and make edits where needed to ensure it matches what I want.

This method has easily boosted my output by 10x, and I'd argue the quality is even better than before. As a non-native English speaker, this approach helps a lot with clarity and fluency. I'm not a great writer to begin with, so the improvement is noticeable. At the end of the day, I’m just a developer—what can I say?

[dotnet00]

Yeah, this is how I use it too. I tend to be a very dry writer, which isn't unusual in science, but lately I've taken to writing, then asking an LLM to suggest improvements.

I know not to trust it to be as precise as good research papers need to be, so I don't take its output, it usually helps me reorder points or use different transitions which make the material much more enjoyable to read. I also find it useful for helping to come up with an opening sentence from which to start writing a section.

[bitexploder]

Active voice is difficult in technical and scientific writing for sure :)

[rasulkireev]

Great opportunity to get ahead of all the lazy people who use AI for a cover letter. Do a video! Sure, AI will be able to do that soon, but then we (not lazy people, who care) will come up with something even more personal!

[immibis]

I've seen people make custom circuit boards as business cards - from LED flashers up to USB hubs.

[msikora]

Great idea! I'll get an LLM to write the script for the video and then I'll just read it! I can crank out 20 of these in an hour!

[akho]

A blowjob, I assume.

[rasulkireev]

Whatever gets the job done

[roenxi]

> While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller...

I don't criticise you for it, because that strategy is both rational and popular. But you never checked the accuracy of your information before so you have no way of telling if it has gotten more or less accurate with the advent of AI. You were testing for whether someone of high social intelligence wanted you to believe what they said rather than if what they said was true.

[dietr1ch]

I guess the complaint is about losing this proxy to gain some assurance for little cost. We humans are great at figuring out the least amount of work that's good enough.

Now we'll need to be fully diligent, which means more work, and also there'll be way more things to review.

[wlesieutre]

There’s not enough time in the day to go on a full bore research project about every sentence I read, so it’s not physically possible to be “fully diligent.”

The best we can hope for is prioritizing which things are worth checking. But even that gets harder because you go looking for sources and now those are increasingly likely to be LLM spam.

[Terr_]

Traditionally, humans have addressed the imbalance between energy-to-generate and energy-to-validate by building another system on top, such as one which punishes fraudsters or at least allows other individuals to efficiently disassociate from them.

Unfortunately it's not clear how this could be adapted to the internet and international commerce without harming some of the open-ness aspects we'd like to keep.

[roenxi]

I'd argue people clearly don't care about the truth at all - they care about being part of a group and that is where it ends. It shows up in things like critical thinking being a difficult skill acquired slowly vs social proof which humans just do by reflex. Makes a lot of sense, if there are 10 of us and 1 of you it doesn't matter how smartypants you may be when the mob forms.

AI does indeed threaten people's ability to identify whether they are reading work by a high status human and what the group consensus is - and that is a real problem for most people. But it has no bearing on how correct information was in the past vs will be in the future. Groups are smart but they get a lot of stuff wrong in strategic ways (it is almost a truism that no group ever identifies itself or its pursuit of its own interests as the problem).

[Jensson]

> I'd argue people clearly don't care about the truth at all

Plenty of people care about the truth in order to get advantages over the ignorant. Beliefs aren't just about fitting in a group, they are about getting advantages and making your life better, if you know the truth you can make much better decisions than those who are ignorant.

Similarly plenty of people try to hide the truth in order to keep people ignorant so they can be exploited.

[rendall]

> if you know the truth you can make much better decisions than those who are ignorant

There are some fallacious hidden assumptions there. One is that "knowing the truth" equates to better life outcomes. I'd argue that history shows more often than not that what one knows to be true best align with prevailing consensus if comfort, prosperity and peace is one's goal, even if that consensus is flat out wrong. The list is long of lone geniuses who challenged the consensus and suffered. Galileo, Turing, Einstein, Mendel, van Gogh, Darwin, Lovelace, Boltzmann, Gödel, Faraday, Kant, Poe, Thoreau, Bohr, Tesla, Kepler, Copernicus, et. al. all suffered isolation and marginalization of some degree during their lifetimes, some unrecognized until after their death, many living in poverty, many actively tormented. I can't see how Turing, for instance, had a better life than the ignorant who persecuted him despite his excellent grasp of truth.

[Jensson]

You are thinking too big, most of the time the truth is whether a piece of food is spoiled or not etc, and that greatly affects your quality of life. Companies would love to keep you ignorant here so they can sell you literal shit, so there are powerful forces wanting to keep you ignorant, and today those powerful forces has way stronger tools than ever before working to keep you ignorant.

[roenxi]

Socrates is also a big name. Never forget.

[danmaz74]

You're implying that there is an absolute Truth and that people only need to do [what?] to check if something is True. But that's not True. We only have models of how reality works, and every model is wrong - but some are useful.

When dealing with almost everything you do day by day, you have to rely on the credibility of the source of the information you have. Otherwise how could you know that the can of tuna you're going to eat is actually tuna and not some venomous fish? How do you know that you should do what your doctor told you? Etc. etc.

[svieira]

> You're implying that there is an absolute Truth and that people only need to do [what?] to check if something is True. But that's not True. We only have models of how reality works, and every model is wrong - but some are useful.

But isn't your third sentence True?

[danmaz74]

I don't know it to be True, but I know it to be useful :)

[BehindBlueEyes]

My new cheap proxy to save mental cost: pay to search on kagi, sort results by tracker count. My hope is fewer trackers correlates with lower incentives to seo spam. This may change but seems to work decently for now.

[SoftTalker]

In the past, with a printed book or journal article, it was safe to assume that an editor had been involved, to some degree or another challenging claimed facts, and the publisher also had an interest in maintaining their reputation by not publishing poorly researched or outright false information. You would also have reviewers reading and reacting to the book in many cases.

All of that is gone now. You have LLMs spitting their excrement directly onto the web without so much as a human giving it a once-over.

[Eisenstein]

I suggest you look into how many things were published without such scrutiny, because they sold.

[quietbritishjim]

How do you "check the accuracy of your information" if all the other reliable-sounding sources could also be AI generated junk? If it's something in computing, like whether something compiles, you can sometimes literally check for yourself, but most things you read about are not like that.

[glenstein]

>But you never checked the accuracy of your information before so

They didn't say that and that's not a fair or warranted extrapolation.

They're talking about a heuristic that we all use, as a shorthand proxy that doesn't replace but can help steer the initial navigation in the selection of reliable sources, which can be complemented with fact checking (see the steelmanning I did there?). I don't think someone using that heuristic can be interpreted as tantamount to completely ignoring facts, which is a ridiculous extrapolation.

I also think is misrepresents the lay of the land, which is that in the universe of nonfiction writing, I don't think that there's a fire hose of facts and falsehoods indistinguishable in tone. I think there's in fact a reasonably high correlation between the discernible tone of impersonal professional and credible information, which, again (since this seems to be a difficult sticking point) doesn't mean that the tone substitutes for the facts which still need to be verified.

The idea that information and misinformation are tonally indistinguishable is, in my experience, only something believed by post-truth "do you own research" people who think there are equally valid facts in all directions.

There's not, for instance, a Science Daily of equally sciency sounding misinformation. There's not a second different IPCC that publishes a report with thousands of citations which are all wrong, etc. Misinformation is out there but it's not symmetrical, and understanding that it's not symmetrical is an important aspect of information literacy.

This is important because it goes to their point, which is that something has changed, in the advent of LLMS. That symmetry may be coming, and it's precisely the fact that it wasn't there before that is pivotal.

[cutemonster]

Interesting points! Doesn't sound impossible with an AI that's wrong less often than an average human author (if the AIs training data was well curated).

I suppose a related problem is that we can't know if the human who posted the article, actually agrees with it themselves.

(Or if they clicked "Generate" and don't actually care, or even have different opinions)

[gizmo]

I think you overestimate the value of things looking professional. The overwhelming majority of books published every year are trash, despite all the effort that went into research, writing, and editing them. Most news is trash. Most of what humanity produces just isn't any good. An top expert in his field can leave a typo-riddled comment in a hurry that contains more valuable information than a shelf of books written on the subject by lesser minds.

AIs are good at writing professional looking text because it's a low bar to clear. It doesn't require much intelligence or expertise.

[herval]

> AIs are good at writing professional looking text because it's a low bar to clear. It doesn't require much intelligence or expertise.

AIs are getting good at precisely imitating your voice with a single sample as reference, or generating original music, or creating video with all sorts of impossible physics and special effects. By your rationale, nothing “requires much intelligence or expertise”, which is patently false (even for text writing)

[gizmo]

My point is that writing a good book is vastly more difficult than writing a mediocre book. The distance between incoherent babble and a mediocre book is smaller than the distance between a mediocre book and a great book. Most people can write professional looking text just by putting in a little bit of effort.

[bitexploder]

I think you underestimate how high that bar is, but I will grant that it isn’t that high. It can be a form of sophistry all of its own. Still, it is a difficult skill to write clearly, simply, and without a lot of extravagant words.

[jackthetab]

> While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

[mewpmewp2]

Although, there were already before tons of "technical influencers" before that who excelled at writing, but didn't know deeply what they were writing about.

They give a superficially smart look, but really they regurgitate without deep understanding.

[factormeta]

>In the past, you had to put a lot of effort to produce a text which seemed to be high quality, especially when you knew nothing about the subject. By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject. Now, that is completely removed. There is no easy filter anymore.

That is pretty much true also for other media, such as audio and video. Before digital stuff become mainstream pics are developed in the darkroom, and film are actually cut with scissors. A lot of effort are put into producing the final product. AI has really commoditized for many brain related tasks. We must realize the fragile nature of digital tech and still learn how to do these by ourselves.

[ImHereToVote]

So content produced by think tanks was credible by default, since think tanks are usually very well funded. Interesting perspective

[mewpmewp2]

Although presently at least it's still quite obvious when something is written by AI.

[chilli_axe]

it's obvious when text has been produced by chatGPT with the default prompt - but there's probably loads of text on the internet which doesn't follow AI's usual prose style that blends in well.

[mewpmewp2]

Even when I try some other variation of prompts or writing styles there's always this sense of "perfectness", with all paragraph lengths being too perfect, length and the style of it being like that.

[TuringNYC]

>> While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.

...or...the likelihood of text being really wrong pre-LLMs was worse because you needed to be a well-capitalized player to pay your thoughts into public discourse. Just look at our global conflicts and you see how much they are driven by well-planned lobbying, PR, and...money. That is not new.

[diggan]

> By the look of text and the usage of the words, you could tell how professional the writer was and you had some confidence that the writer knew something about the subject

How did you know this unless you also had the same or more knowledge than the author?

It would seem to me we are as clueless now as before about how to judge how skilled a writer is without requiring to already posses that very skill ourselves.