The problem is: the structure of LLM outputs generally make everything sound profound. It’s very hard to understand quickly whether a comment has actual signal or it’s just well written bullshit.
And because the cost of generating the comments is so low, there’s no longer an implicit stamp of approval from the author. It used to be the case that you could kind of engage with a comment in good faith, because you knew somebody had spent effort creating it so they must believe it’s worth time. Even on a semi-anonymous forum like HN, that used to be a reliable signal.
So a lot of the old heuristics just don’t work on LLM-generated comments, and in my experience 99% of them turn out to be worthless. So the new heuristic is to avoid them and point them out to help others avoid them.
I would much rather just read the prompt.
I hadn't considered this so eloquently with LLM text output, but you're right. "LLMs make everything sound profound" and "well-written bullshit".
This has severe ramifications for internet communications in general on forums like HN and others, where it seems LLM-written comments are sneaking in pretty much everywhere.
It's also very, very dangerous :/ Because the structure of the writing falsely implies authority and trust where there shouldn't be, or where it's not applicable.