Probably not to the quality of the New Yorker fiction section yet but this has already occurred here on HN. People frequently read and comment on things that are LLM based. And Reddit’s usual outrage and repetitive subreddits are almost entirely Dear Abbys written by LLM.
I think there’s lots of stuff where the LLM is translating information that is poorly represented into readable English where it’s fine. Though that does require someone with taste but not ability and usually someone who has taste and cares about their taste would have eventually cultivated their ability.
1. The default LLM behavior (at least what I’ve used as a consumer with ChatGPT Claude etc.) is to be excessively verbose, presumably because costs are tied to usage and therefore the assumption is that more text = better.
I’ve spent over a decade working as a copywriter, and IME the most important part of writing is the edit - what to cut out.
So I think it’s probably possible that an AI could write stuff we’d want to read, the default behavior of the AIs most people are using works against it.
2. A lot of the writing that actually gets read today is either a description of a lived experience and/or involves slang. Neither of those things are interesting if done by an AI - I don’t care about the imagined experience of an LLM.
The paradox is that we love reading our own AI generated writing and hate reading anyone else's AI generated writing.
On a recent weeklong trip to the Philippines, I generated over a 500 page novel's worth of content from AI around various aspects of Filipino history, culture, social dynamics etc. and actually went over it at least 3 times to fully absorb the material.
But if someone handed me even a 3000 word essay on the Philippines clearly written by AI, I would not be able to get to the end of it.
I’ve said it before, but the best analogy I've heard is that sharing your prompts is like telling your friend about that dream you had last night in terms of comparable level of interest.
Who is “we”? Head over to Reddit and you will see that plenty of people do not notice even the most obvious AI-generated engagement bait and happily spend their time talking to it. Even the people that post about how awful AI is will chat about that very subject to a spam bot without realising.
The average person is not good at spotting AI-generated content. They accept it and want to read it just as long as they don’t realise it’s not real.
> Head over to Reddit and you will see that plenty of people do not notice even the most obvious AI-generated engagement bait and happily spend their time talking to it.
I don't think you have to head over to anywhere else to see this.
I’ve seen it a bit here as well of course, but generally speaking Hacker News does a much better job of avoiding that. I think it might just be because it’s more sensitive to flagging.
This is an odd paradox that I've thought about: If AI can produce the technical blog post, then can it also just produce the technical knowledge for me on demand when I need it?
Well, whether it’s a good piece or not is a different story, but I guess for me it makes me think at least time was spent on it, rather than most AI slop I see nowadays, but who knows, I can be wrong.
I find ai generated deep code wikis very valuable. They provide clear walk path to read the code. Reading code raw is always painful, trying to trace the right start points, especially with lots of legacy code.
One really valuable thing i'm seeing in open source though is everything is being localized. Most before it was just not available. In a way, that's really good because it helps to bring the chinese and english speaking communities.
I however loath ai code comments, wikis, or anything where information density is prime. I never can understand why people like it. Each there own i guess
it was always kind of a huge chore to read someone else's code. with LLMs, it is now possible for very smart people, who don't have a "special interest" in meaningless arcana, to admit it and still get paid.
The best example of AI writing I've seen so far was caused by my six year old narrating a prompt ( to me to type in ) to Gemini in story mode. The results were so unexpected and wild I couldn't stop reading it.
Strangely I have yet to get such a compelling result with my own prompts. I think for myself it is tainted with the expectation of what I really wanted and would have written had I taken the time to write the words of the story instead of the prompt.
This is a situation where the work to write the prompt is equivalent to the work to just write the story.
Most positive AI thing shared on HN in a while, and here’s why.
Even after handing the agent a validator and iterating the validation, even after the validator get really good at telling the model what to do and what not to do, there’s still an emptiness.
This gives the author strong ground to rightly assert that both now and after new models render 2026 model writing’s emptiness old news, there’ll remain reasons to write, to communicate, to share understanding.
It’s nice to read something not proclaiming doom and not lamenting career death.
No matter how smart our tools become, the human condition still has plenty ahead.
Yeah, it can. I used AI and just won a national IBPA Benjamin Franklin award for it. I have a new series that's getting good reviews from readers as well as the industry, PW BookLife and Kirkus. I didn't use AI to generate a story, I used it to interrogate the self through sci-fi and memoir.
For me, the biggest AI writing tell (other than the blatantly obvious ones) is an unnatural consistency in style, whatever style that may be. It's most apparent in longer pieces, and I'm not sure I can really pin down exactly what it is. But human writers seem to lack the ability to keep a 100% consistent voice and lapse into different registers at different times. LLMs don't have this natural rhythm, which makes for an exhausting reading experience.
This comment is really insightful. It is the thing that genuinely flips this. It’s not just the structure, but the robotic voice in my head that autoplays. I had incorrectly assumed everyone felt that was normal. Now let me [completely 180 on my opinion].
That’s also one of its greatest strengths. It’s excellent for taking sloppily written human text and giving it a little polish in voice and consistency. If you use a light touch you can keep it from taking away too much humanity from the original.
You get that effect when LLMs write whole sentences or paragraphs. Editing human prose for minor consistency improvements doesn’t do that unless you let it run wild and replace >20% of your text.
Slop is a misapplication issue. Just because today’s models can pump out a lot of text doesn’t mean they’re good for it. And just because letting them run wild produces slop, doesn’t mean they don’t work well for appropriately scoped applications.
I wonder if there is a separation of story/structure and drafting. As a movie sometime has separate story and screenplay credits, could a human architect a structure that is then drafted in an acceptable way by Claude. Has anyone found good examples of Claude drafted articles?
When I was using free version of AI for my everyday task that were to machinable writing but now I am using paid version AI for my tasks these are very feels that humans have written.
This is a great thread! I’m currently working on a project that edits AI, slop. And it is slop, however, underneath the puzzling similes and over used metaphors is a story. I’ve discovered that most times the story is worth unearthing if it is you story. And that’s the key. You cannot simply tell Claude or any other AI to write me a great mystery or romance novel. But if you use your imagination, outline, and prompt well you’ll have a solid working draft. It’ll be shit, but at least it something worth working with.
The other thing I’ve discovered is the people using AI to write and do not edit are the people who don’t do one thing…Read. So they don’t know the a paragraph becomes cringe after a bizarre metaphor. What is does isn’t wrong, but that doesn’t make it right. I agree with Mr. Kang, but I believe the future of the publishing industry will include human edited AI stories. We just haven’t gotten there yet.
I think there’s lots of stuff where the LLM is translating information that is poorly represented into readable English where it’s fine. Though that does require someone with taste but not ability and usually someone who has taste and cares about their taste would have eventually cultivated their ability.