[mschuster91]

> I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof.

The problem, at least for me, is that I don't trust AI. Subtle mistakes, outright hallucinations, or mistakes/omissions that an actual expert of the domain would immediately notice, whatever.

And as soon as I encounter anything that even looks like one of the typical AI tells or, in long content, a lack of cohesion or repetition... I can't help myself from immediately second-guessing every little thing in the content. And where there's smoke, usually there is fire... and I find myself annoyed for having wasted time to read something I had to crosscheck with other sources and found my suspicions confirmed. At least sometimes I learn something from digging into original sources, but frankly, I don't have the time for that.

Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.

[BeetleB]

Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?

Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.

> Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.

I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.

[mschuster91]

> Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?

With a human, I can at least have implicit trust based on credentials - e.g. a medical doctor, a scientist or a well-known programmer. Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true. But if it's some random blogger, the text reeking of LLM tells, who posts no sources, nothing I can (easily) cross-check? Off to the bin it goes, or if it's something that might actually be useful for me to know being true, I'll go and research it.

Or there's other trust cues for content. A respected academic magazine ranks higher than a "layman's magazine" which ranks higher than a well-respected newspaper which ranks higher than a tabloid which ranks higher than yellow-press which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (without bluecheck) on Twitter which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (with bluecheck) on Twitter.

It used to be the other way around with Twitter, but nowadays, the bluecheck is mostly used by garbage LLM bots farming views for monetization.

(Side note: the fact that AI training cannot do this kind of "implicit trust" accounting at all and just blindly ingests everything in the corpus into its weights is a huge issue!)

> I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder.

I'd rather say in a few years people who get caught using AI get lynchmob'd. The resistance, particularly among the artist, environmental and worker rights groups, is fierce and it's only increasing with all the negative impacts of AI.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260707-00/?p=11...

[BeetleB]

> Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true.

OK, now what if tomorrow Raymond Chen writes a blog post that was partially or wholly authored by an LLM. Would you trust it as much as one entirely written by Raymond? Why or why not?

[thewebguyd]

> obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder

I disagree and think this is an overly extreme take.

I will agree that the trust/correctness thing is kind of silly because humans can be and are often wrong just as much.

But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output. Maybe LLM output is OK at work. I honestly don't care if its used for corporate bureaucracy stuff I probably wasn't actually reading it anyway outside of skimming it or putting into an LLM to summarize for me.

But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection. We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.

Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.

So I don't think its unreasonable at all to be immediately dismissive of anything that is pure LLM output. The actual content itself is only one half of the equation.

[BeetleB]

> But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output.

You mean there's a human creative element that is lost. LLMs are creative just as humans are. I had an LLM write something fairly creative, and people on HN loved it (I think it was clear that it was LLM generated).

I had an LLM write a song about a piece of technology, and one of the key folks behind the technology loved it, and reached out to me to get permission to play it in the next conference about that technology.[1]

Normal people can appreciate LLM creativity. That's why I mentioned disorders.

> But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection.

As Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crap". He had it wrong - the percentage is much higher. Most of the human generated stuff in the categories you listed above are crap. Why put the spotlight on LLMs when they also produce crap?

> We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.

You are blindly looking at only one facet of human communication. Much of human communication is also misunderstood, miscommunicated, and breaks those empathetic connections and cause social problems. And I'm not talking about bad human actors, but ordinary folks who, in their attempts to create connection, make things unwittingly go in the opposite direction. These are not exceptional situations - you'd see plenty of it in any large HN thread in the pre-LLM days.

Let's not romanticize human communications of yore by remembering only the (rare) positive examples.

> Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.

You state mere opinion as fact, and feel comfort by surrounding yourself with those who think likewise (much of the HN crowd). It is not grounded on anything.

If Jill used an LLM to state what she intended, and it did it in a way she approved, and Jack can't connect with the person because an LLM was at play, the problem is not with the LLM or the Jill. She is trying to connect, and may well be doing it in a more effective manner than she would have without.

Just as when writing something important, where strong emotions can get involved, we share a draft with someone to get feedback, people will share it with an LLM to get feedback. Yet people like the OP will criticize them for doing so (the part I quoted in my comment).

At the end of the day, if Jill got an LLM to help with her writing, and confirmed that the final text reflects what she intended, and Jack says he can't trust any of it because an LLM touched it, then Jack is clearly signaling a lack of respect for Jill. She put in the effort to communicate, put in effort to proofread/edit, and Jack has labeled her and moved on.

If Jack doesn't trust Jill to use an LLM appropriately, then Jack shouldn't bother reading anything Jill writes. The presence of an LLM is a red herring.

[1] Silly in retrospect. I didn't create it - why should I be the one giving permission?

[arjie]

AI text is just a quick heuristic for garbage. But I’ve always disliked garbage. Even when it came dressed like:

How to use Monads

When David James was a young child, his mother used to tell him that you could oil vegetables before putting them in the pan. On the ranch in Eastern Kentucky David’s mornings would be spent watering, caring for the cows, and then playing with the dogs. Before he started blah blah blah…

<500 words later> and then he defined a structure called a monad with three properties…

Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable. Now it’s interspersed with the useful parts.

But that’s fine: it’s a solved problem by just making a machine extract information. So yes, complaining about the form is passé. I’m going to put it in the ore refiner anyway and the slag goes in the pit. Away to the slag pit with David’s infernal mother.

[BeetleB]

> AI text is just a quick heuristic for garbage.

Thank you for being honest, and saying that the problem is not with the other party, but with your lack of resources/time to read and judge.

And, BTW, just replace "AI" in your sentence with "Human", and the statement would still be true!

[arjie]

The entire point was that replacing AI with Human makes the statement true... Garbage is garbage.

[BeetleB]

> The entire point was that replacing AI with Human makes the statement true

That point is under contention.

[mschuster91]

> Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable.

That is a different problem though. SEO optimization, the bane of modern human existence...