Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by balls187 4 days ago
I think we're just in an transition point.

When I get materials that are clearly AI generated, I look at them as if there was less effort put into it.

But that is irrational. If it was verified for accuracy, and edited for conciseness, and addresses the task at hand, does it matter?

3 comments

It most probably wasn’t though, because that would mean doing only the tedious part of writing.

Another thing though. How many times does it happen to you to start writing after having an idea, but scrapping it because you realize it’s wrong/bad/unhelpful. To me, quite often. But if you prompt an LLM, there is no time to have that realization.

Most of the time I find myself reading long-form text, it's not the case that there's exactly one task at hand. I'm trying to weigh different options to solve a problem, or explore future directions in a more general sense, or even just expand my intellectual horizons with interesting ideas I hadn't previously thought through. So accurate, concise text can still point me in the wrong direction and thus be entirely useless to me if the ideas contained within it aren't the product of meaningful effort.
Except it wasn't verified for accuracy. It never is.

The whole point of using AI to write for you is that you don't care to or can't be bothered to do any significant work yourself. If you care enough to do the research required to ensure all of the AI's output is accurate, that's like 80% or more of the work done right there, so why avoid the remaining 20%?

Nobody talks about using AI to gain a 20% productivity boost. They brag about 100% or even 1000%, which only makes sense if you're not doing any of that time-consuming "verification" at all.