I fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write. I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used. This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful.
If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word.
Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.
How do you know it's not his/her thought? Just because others have had it does not mean he/she did not put effort into considering it.
How do you know it is? Most likely we will never know.
Agreeing with a person is not the same thing as agreeing with a robot.
> despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
I mean, how can you say that he didn't think it himself? I thought this same thing and realised apparently I'm not the first. You have no idea how many of my blog posts ideas have come in HN first before I could publish. People can have the same thoughts. And have em all the time as well.
Psss.. See how @sm-silversight who commented on your post said the same thing I did? That's realtime example right there.
Coming back to the topic at hand. I agree with the OP. If you don't care to write it, why should anyone read it? AI has good usecases. But am not sure writing is one.
Writing is not just about the end result. It's also about the thought process. I learn about the topic more as I write. I correct my incorrect understandings as I write. When am pissed, my article has a different tone. Am rude, too direct. When am content/happy, different one. All of this is sterilised into something robotic where the author won't even remember what he/she wrote? What's the to like? For brownie points?
Selecting between alternatives is also a very valuable skill. Also known as "taste".
You are a senior software architect, you "prompt" 10 junior architects to write a software architecture proposal and then pick one which you send the client.
Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
There are plenty of industries where "taste" is a real job.
Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
> Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?
Lemme ask you a counter question, the senior architect writes the proposal and the junior writes it. Which one do you think client likes better?
Moreover, Your focus is on the end-result. Sure, in corporate environment, most people don't care about what they do as long as the end results checks some boxes. That wasn't the discussion here. The discussion is about writing and reading in general. Whether it's worth my time or not if you don't mean (forget mean, don't even remember) what you wrote.
Also, in your own example, the client don't care as well. As long the client's checks all the boxes his/her/their manager said should satisfy. Nobody really gives a damn about the quality.
Also, are you saying you'll be fine paying for Financial Times, WSJ and NYTimes KNOWING all they do is shove the story through an LLM? Neither will there be a soul, nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
> Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.
There is difference no? I forward the output to get good feedback and correction from someone BETTER. And there is a process involved in it which showcases the "TASTE" you mentioned from the person whom you are forwarding your output to be vetted and that person comes up to you with feedback. And guess what? You learn from the person's feedback. You don't go back again and again forever to learn the same thing. That's exactly what am trying to point out.
> Neither will there be a soul
Maybe I just want the news.
> nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.
This is a ridiculous thing to say - "because the Weather app in my phone is 100% automated with no human "soul" in it, I will not take it into account into how should I dress today"
> the client don't care as well
This applies here too. If you didn't pay for author's output, are not a subscriber to their Substack, why should they bother to hand craft you a quality human written post?
> If you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read it
So the argument is that effort should be somehow matched. Ok, let's go with that. It's well know that writing something takes 10x more effort than reading it. So if we use the market argument, if it takes you 10 min to read a blog post, the author should spend 1 min writing it, because writing is 10x more intense, and this is only possible with a LLM. You might say "but there is one author, and 1000 readers". That gets us back to the paying argument.
OK, how about 'nothing is real, nobody will ever care again, let's all never listen to anybody else ever again'?
That's more or less the same thing expressed more nihilistically. But nihilism is, like, just a word man (to 'The Dude' it up a bit). Perhaps we are either fiddling on the deck of the Titanic, or just staring at the waves?
What do you think the results will be of the machines consuming only their own slop and Habsburging themselves intellectually, and then all the humans abandoning any attempt to either talk or listen? As a global civilization of humans? I'm not sure we've explored the likely consequences of 'if you can't spend them time to write it why should anyone read it'.
Maybe it's gone too far already.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Because the value of writing are not the words on a piece of paper but the idea they convey.
Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them?
Teacher assistant homeworks are not worth to do, because they are made by a TA and not by the course professor?
Of course there are writing as: "Hey ChatGPT write me a piece around coding with LLMs" and yeah, those are not worth reading.
But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.
> But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.
I know lots of AI-enabled writers believe this, but I've never actually seen it be true.
"Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them?"
It often makes them less informative and a lot less sincere.
Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest.
Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.
There is a recent PISA research that students slowly decline in understanding the long reads.
E.g. in one country, 21% of high school students do not even achieve “sufficient reading literacy”…
So the question should be - what are we going to do with this? LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway…
About PISA research for example here: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on...
> LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway
LLM generated text oftentimes just do not have the point to be understood. LLM is training you to NOT read, because trying to do close reading of LLM generated text is usually a mistake. There is no deeper there. Either it was correct on the surface things or it is a gibberish.
You can't even watch funny animal compilations anymore!
Probably the worst part
You're skipping any causal connection between the "as greater and greater" and "anybody would be motivated" parts. What is it in "excessive generative AI output" that "devalues all communication media"?
Not that I disagree much, but for myself I have an actual cause connecting the two parts, and it's not something inherent to AI.
Basically, synthetic content is like those fancy desserts - they look nice and the top layer possibly has an exquisite flavor (probably on purpose), but once you cut deeper, it's some weird fruit or nut or other foodstuff that belongs next to potatoes and meat, not in a cake. So I learned to avoid such desserts and stick to basic stuff I know are good entirely, like IDK a cream pie or cream-filled chocolate stuff or such.
Same is with content. My problem isn't that it's AI, but that it's wrong, full of mistakes human authors don't make. Hallucinations mid-text that make half of it convincingly argue bullshit. Or the uncanny or repetitive factor in art that kicks in after few seconds of looking.
Like with desert, I'm avoiding disappointment and wasted hopes. When synthetic context gets better, I'll be consuming it just like "vanilla" one, for the same reasons.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
100%. We're producing more content, faster, than ever before but ... most of it is just click-producing garbage that won't stand the test of time.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.
>I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong
Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives
Not sure. I don't like LLMs inserting itself into human to human communication, as it can shape our thinking in many ways. Delegating this also makes it much harder for a person to become a subject-matter expert, which is a real loss.
> compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing.
What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely?
There’s zero value in sharing ai-generated output unless your ai has access to something nobody else’s does on which to base things. If all it’s doing is web research you should share your prompt instead. That way people don’t have to deal with ai-written walls of text.
> What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely?
Well, they don't have the many other pieces of the business in place that makes this work meaningful. They certainly could try, though. If they succeeded, this aspect wouldn't be what made the difference, though.
The way I see it is that a clearly AI generated article is the result of some prompts. So the "author" wrote tens of words, which then got inflated to hundreds and maybe thousands by a computer program. This is a very inefficient way to convey an idea, especially if the reader has access to the same program. I'd rather the author shared their prompts, because maybe there's some originality in it, and I can then decide if I want to explore the idea further, maybe even with an LLM.
Strongly agree. Whenever I see an "AI-written" disclaimer, I skip it entirely. And if it's not disclosed, the exact moment I realize it's AI output, I immediately close the tab. It feels like a waste of the reader's time.
People on my FOSS project couldn't see the issue with their AI slopped documentation contributions.
On one hand I'm like, yeah fair enough it needed writing and something is better than nothing.
On the other I know nobody wants to read it now because it's just word vomit rather than how a human would write something they'd like another human to read.
I hate it so much.
On Debian we recently voted whether to permit or forbid llm usage (spoiler, AI usage at will won).
One person was arguing that they need llm because english isn't their first language and then it helps them write better and be understood. I was incapable of reading their (extremely long) email of arguments; I tried but my mind just went elsewhere as my eyes were moving through the lines.
At the very end there was a disclaimer that llm had been used to "aid" in writing that very email.
Poor guy thinks he's communicating better but all he's doing is making his emails completely unreadable. It's a sad state of affairs.
There is now increased evolutionary pressure for rules protecting scarcity to become norm. Communication media will likely adopt limits on the size and throughput of messages.
It kind of makes sense that if English is not their first language, the can't review the LLM English output also.
However most likely they just don't understand what good communication looks like, LLMs are perfectly capable of turning anything into clear concise communication, in fact an easy tell that something is LLM written is that it's just too precise and clear, humans are much more rambling.
Yeah, I'm sticking to pre-2020 works from here on out. Not sure how I'll be able to read about current events, though.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Because the information in the post could be valuable regardless of human or LLM involvement.
But how much slop are you willing to wade through, hoping to find a nugget of insight?
I guess the answer to this is feeding the LLM generated content to another LLM and telling it to summarise it
More than the average person, I suppose. For some reason, AI writing isn't as irritating to me as it seems to be for everyone else.
I treat it the same way I treat human writing: by speed reading most of the article so I can find the points the author is trying to make and decide whether I should read the entire thing.
I don't ever watch TV or streaming shows anymore. It's been a huge improvement in my life. It's the same with reading. Reading is mostly a waste of my time, with some notable exceptions. I'm glad I spend way less time doing each of these!
It's sad that reading has become that way for you.
I love reading, but I mostly read non-fiction and I'm a bit of an amateur history buff. Last time I read a fiction book I was left feeling like I was preached to by an alien about how life doesn't really matter (sci-fi authors will often do that). The state of literature is pretty dire.
Just read people you can trust. Why are you giving yourself all this busy work?
Just make your own tree of material to read. You should have a couple dozen writers/journalists you admire, look at who these people read then start reading those people, then you repeat the cycle.
Don't waste your time reading anything new, most new things are bad. Most ideas we struggle with, are ideas we have been discussing since the written record was invented out of necessity.
Anything new worth reading will assuredly make your way to you if you are at all connected.
Agreed completely. (This reply took me 0.4 seconds to generate.)