Yet another Hacker News

I don't want to read what you didn't write

47 points mooreds 37 minutes ago 14 comments

hatthew 18 minutes ago | parent

As I have been saying for years:

Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.

memonkey 12 minutes ago | parent

isn't it more like: i have 1000 bits, i transfer 1000 bits but depending on the person, it might be lossy, so they only understand about 700. they then come up with the 300+- on their own, potentially putting them over 1000 or they come back and ask questions to fill in the blank. the bits don't ever have to be bit identical.

bonoboTP 4 minutes ago | parent

Depends. If the 700 bits were arrived at by the LLM while spending a lot of tokens, and the result is "good", I may want it through you as a middleman because it used up your tokens and won't eat my subscription usage limit to ask the AI to supply those 700. If you spend the tokens and put the result online, plenty of people can spare their tokens because they don't have to ask the AI to derive it. Bonus if that result was run through some kind of testing and verification.

Obviously this doesn't really apply to super simple questions that the LLM can just spit out the answer to right away.

saulpw 18 minutes ago | parent

It's tricky because I don't want to write what no one is going to read (but that for some reason I'm required to write).

blandcoffee 17 minutes ago | parent

I appreciate the direction of this article, and commend the author on publishing work, but the first sentence in the first paragraph is exactly what they lament.

> A pattern I see is that people use AI to build something new, then they use AI to retrospectively summarize what they have already built into a design document. Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.

neynt 13 minutes ago | parent

To be quite generous, that could be tongue in cheek.

hatthew 6 minutes ago | parent

That was my assumption. The alternative is that the author is a blatant hypocrite, which seems less likely given their blog's history.

Apocryphon 12 minutes ago | parent

That's a classic calling card of LLM prose but that doesn't mean they actually used an AI. Though sure, it would be nice if we gave this style a name and then abolished it.

idreyn 7 minutes ago | parent

These last few days, there has been a small stream of blogposts on HN expressing similar things, and I have enjoyed them all.

My question recently has been how to broach this subject with colleagues who really enjoy producing prose with AI. There is not yet a better cultural shorthand for this sort of thing than "slop" which is a harsh-sounding word and itself sort of a thought-terminating cliché. "I don't want to read what you didn't write" is maybe closer — but it needs a pithier and somewhat more encouraging encapsulation, like "I want to hear it from you".

Has anyone had good experiences setting up professional boundaries or team norms around AI-written docs?

speg 3 minutes ago | parent

I’ve been away. Does anyone have a collection of these posts?

tygon 7 minutes ago | parent

This sentiment gets echoed over and over. While I can certainly see the value in human-created creative works, if the subject is pure facts, there are only so many ways to state the facts without being caught in the weeds and missing your entire point.

Moreover, people are finding it hard to differentiate what is an is not AI-generated with newer models, often attributing original work with those of LLMs. It has just become an easy scapegoat for lazy comprehension and a desire to do less. You are jumping at AI boogeymen.

Just about the only thing here I can level with you on is, yes, AI is far from perfect and will continue to advance. Otherwise, so much of this reads as fruity prose to excuse apathy.

Analemma_ 4 minutes ago | parent

It's curious that you're pinning the blame of "excusing apathy" on the reader on not the writer. Why doesn't it go both ways? Your proposal amounts to an asymmetric war which is ultimately a DDOS on my finite time and attention. Or in other words, if it wasn't worth your time to write it, it's not worth my time to read it.

clickety_clack 3 minutes ago | parent

A lot of my problem with AI writing is that the facts aren’t checked. You get a big cheesy dramatic arc but the core story isn’t factually correct. There’s only so much time in a lifetime, too little to waste fact checking someone else’s work because they couldn’t be bothered to.