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by lelanthran 107 days ago
Well, if someone can't bother to write something, why should anyone bother to read it?
3 comments

that was one of the big reasons I dropped FB and Insta.

Low effort interactions just aren't worth it. IF it's not worth writing at least 3 sentences chances are I don't care - and won't ever care.

Like yeah it's cool to see what some guy I knew in high school is up to, but ultimately that connection ain't making my life better.

HN is an exception in the signal to noise ratio is far higher than a lot of other social media - though the bots are hitting it hard these days.

That's awfully able-ist isn't it?

How do you know that the author is capable of communicating fluently in english?

What if it were the case the the author was so excited about sharing a project but didn't know how to properly explained it and so took the extra effort to learn how to get a piece of software to explain it for them?

Would that then satisfy your requirement that the human behind the project has done enough work to earn your interest?

But AI provides the illusion of communication. Since the AI has no direct access to the user's brain, and has to go off the words they provide, if we're assuming that the person isn't capable generating words that accurately communicate their thoughts, the AI is getting all its information from the same flawed words we'd have access to if they didn't use AI, but destroying any signal encoded in the specific mistakes or choices they've made in its process of shaping their thoughts into something more polished.

AIs don't violate entropy, and can't create information from nothing. They can interpret, and expand, and maybe, just maybe, tease out meaning that a human would have missed. But the more sensitively they're tuned to pick up on small nuances, they more likely they're going to interpret a pattern that isn't there, and the more they're tuned to avoid over-interpretation, the more likely they are to miss something that is there, the same as how a human can aim to interpret something with high or low context.

The difference is, by filtering it through an AI, you're taking that capability out of other people's hands, you're (often intentionally) flattening and damaging signals people usually use to choose how to distribute their attention (often with the cry of "But it's not fair that people want to spend their attention on things that I'm not good at, I have to use AI to convince people to look at my work that they would prefer not to!!"), and when you do that without acknowledging the use of AI, it feels a lot like you don't care about any negative effects your actions have on the existing ecosystems of human creativity and communication, and you're going to get an appropriately hostile response.

> How do you know that the author is capable of communicating fluently in english?

Irrelevant; they can do the best they can and I'll do the best I can.

If the best they can do is have it ghost-written, then the best that I will do is not read it.

> What if it were the case the the author was so excited about sharing a project but didn't know how to properly explained it and so took the extra effort to learn how to get a piece of software to explain it for them?

That's not extra effort, that's less effort.

> Would that then satisfy your requirement that the human behind the project has done enough work to earn your interest?

Look, if someone isn't going to bother to write something, why would others bother to read it?

since when the world only has english speaking people?
Probably because its not War and Peace. It's the hook for some app you're probably going top spend all of 2 minutes on deciding whether it may or may not be functionally useful, and that equation is going to be largely solved independent of the quality of that marketing copy.