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by exmadscientist
101 days ago
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> Several commenters suggested the original essay was written by an LLM. They were half right. Both that essay and this one were written with Claude as a drafting partner. I directed the argument; the LLM helped with prose. I mention this not as confession but as demonstration: the human brought the utility function, the machine brought the compute. If that division of labour bothers you, I’d suggest the discomfort says more about the Bitter Lesson than about my writing process. This paragraph is pretty condescending to your reader. Whatever else is going on with AI authors, the fact is that if your reader can tell you wrote a piece with AI (and I could with this one), you fucked up. I think one of the longer-term consequences of AI authors will be that writing gets shorter. There's a lot of fluff in a lot of writing (though not as much as there used to be in say the 19th century), and much of it's culturally expected. We might end up at a place where writing is much shorter and readers expect their own AI assistants to fill in the gaps. That might not be so bad. But if you can't write a piece without AI, do you understand what you've written? It could go either way. But the condescension here combined with the obvious tells do not make me think highly of this author and his argument. |
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I honestly don't like the style of the essay either - maybe reading HN now trains one to view every "It's not X, it's Y" with suspicion. But as long as it's only the style and the author didn't get the entire argument from AI, I think it's worth skipping over it and focus on what they want to say.
(That's the difference I see to AI slop: with slop, there is no message to parse out because everything is generated. If the author here really only used AI to clean up their prose, I'm fine with it)