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by stephc_int13 102 days ago
How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.
5 comments

Bozhidar always writes like this. I can see why you would think it's AI style but I would vote that it isn't. Look at some of his pre-AI blogs, if you care to.
Guilty as charged! :D Short essays are definitely not my forte. (and this one is definitely longer than I wanted it to be, but in my typical style I kept adding to it after I wrote the initial version, and I'll probably add even more content after I go over all the discussion here)
Well, I guess that means I'm still a pretty poor writer. :D (I'm the author of the article) These days I do use AI to touch up my grammar and fix my typos, but I'm still write my articles myself and you feel that the article lacks substance - that's on me.

For me essays are something very personal, so it'd hard for the AI agent to read my mind about my thoughts on a subject.

Does it really matter if AI was used? Is the article substantial? Does it tell a story? Is the narrative engaging? Is it factually accurate?

I get that LLMs are still capable of generating slop of nonsense, but when it really doesn't matter - when you're not writing an academic paper; when you're not developing a medical device; when you're not dealing with avionics - when the extreme determinism is not required. What difference does it really make?

Of course, story telling is by nature subjective - and you may say: "well I dislike the style", then who stands in your way to consume it differently? You can always feed it to LLM and ask it to style it differently - summarize it, explain it in detail, turn it into a sea shanty, whatever.

I'd argue that good story always survives "translation". You wouldn't dismiss Iliad because it was served to you in Aeolic Greek, you'd find a way to translate it to your mother tongue to enjoy it nevertheless, wouldn't you?

At this point a lot of the articles on this site are just a 'prompt' for us to have a discussion about.
Well put! To me - it always felt like this here. I have serious doubts that most people even read the articles linked to HN discussions.
I didn't get that feeling. But it is long, which is a bit of an AI smell. That said, I think use of AI in writing might not always be a negative. On a couple of documentation pieces I have used AI to provide better structure to writing that I've started and check for technical correctness parts of a document where I need to check my terminology. As long as the original idea is human and AI helps to make the signal clearer, I'm ok with it.