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| ▲ | nkrisc 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I personally find that text written by a human, even someone without a strong grasp of the language, is always preferable to read simply because each word (for better or worse) was chosen by a human to represent their ideas. If you use an LLM because you think you can’t write and communicate well, then if that’s true it means you’re feeding content that you already believe isn’t worthy of expressing your ideas to a machine that will drag your words even further what you intended. | | |
| ▲ | smj-edison 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah. It feels like the same amount of signal for a larger amount of noise, and I strongly prefer high SNR. Terse and accurate are what I strive for in my writing, so it's painful to read a lot of text only to realize that two sentences would've sufficed. |
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| ▲ | nubg 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If I want to cleanup, summarize, translate, make more formal, make more funny, whatever, some incoming text by sending it through an LLM, I can do it myself. | |
| ▲ | crote 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would rather read succinct English written by a non-native speaker filled with broken grammar than overly verbose but well-spelled AI slop. Heck, just share the prompt itself! If you can't be bothered to have a human write literally a handful of lines of text, what else can't you be bothered to do? Why should I trust that your CVE even exists at all - let alone is indeed "critical" and worth ruining Christmas over? | | |
| ▲ | llmslave2 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's actually far more preferable to read broken English written by a human because each language imposes their own unique "flavour" in English making it preferable to AI slop. | |
| ▲ | iinnPP 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I prefer reading the LLM output for accessibility reasons. More importantly though, the sheer amount of this complaint on HN has become a great reason not to show up. | | |
| ▲ | crote 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I prefer reading the LLM output for accessibility reasons. And that's completely fine! If you prefer to read CVEs that way, nobody is going to stop you from piping all CVE descriptions you're interested in through a LLM. However, having it processed by a LLM is essentially a one-way operation. If some people prefer the original and some others prefer the LLM output, the obvious move is to share the original with the world and have LLM-preferring readers do the processing on their end. That way everyone is happy with the format they get to read. Sounds like a win-win, no? | | |
| ▲ | iinnPP 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, framed as you stated it is indeed a win-win. However, there will be cases where lacking the LLM output, there isn't any output at all. Creating a stigma over technology which is easily observed as being, in some form, accessible is expected in the world we live. As it is on HN. Not to say you are being any type of anything, I just don't believe anyone has given it all that much thought. I read the complaints and can't distinguish them from someone complaining that they need to make some space for a blind person using their accessibility tools. | | |
| ▲ | crote 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > However, there will be cases where lacking the LLM output, there isn't any output at all. Why would there be? You're using something to prompt the LLM, aren't you - what's stopping you from sharing the input? The same logic can be applied in an even larger extent to foreign-language content. I'd 1000x rather have a "My english not good, this describe big LangChain bug, click <link> if want Google Translate" followed by a decent article written in someone's native Chinese, than a poorly-done machine translation output. At least that way I have the option of putting the source text in different translation engines, or perhaps asking a bilingual friend to clarify certain sections. If all you have is the English machine translation output, then you're stuck with that. Something was mistranslated? Good luck reverse engineering the wrong translation back to its original Chinese and then into its proper English equivalent! Anyone who has had the joy to deal with "English" datasheets for Chinese-made chips knows how well this works in practice. You are definitely bringing up a good point concerning accessibility - but I fear using LLMs for this provides fake accessibility. Just because it results in well-formed sentences doesn't mean you are actually getting something comprehensible out of it! LLMs simply aren't good enough yet to rely on them not losing critical information and not introducing additional nonsense. Until they have reached that point, their user should always verify its output for accuracy - which on the author side means they were - by definition - also able to write it on their own, modulo some irrelevant formatting fluff. If you still want to use it for accessibility, do so on the reader side and make it fully optional: that way the reader is knowingly and willingly accepting its flaws. The stigma on LLM-generated content exists for a reason: people are getting tired of starting to invest time into reading some article, only for it to become clear halfway through that it is completely meaningless drivel. If >99% of LLM-generated content I come across is an utter waste of my time, why should I give this one the benefit of the doubt? Content written in horribly-broken English at least shows that there is an actual human writer investing time and effort into trying to communicate, instead of it being yet another instance of fully-automated LLM-generated slop trying to DDoS our eyeballs. | | |
| ▲ | MobiusHorizons 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I completely agree I prefer the original language as it offers more choice in how to try to consume it. I believe search engines segment content by source language though, so you would probably not ever see such content in search results for English language queries. It would be cool if you could somehow signal to search engines that you are interested in non-native language results. I don’t even tend to see results in the second language in my accept languages header unless the query is in that language. |
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| ▲ | llmslave2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Im sorry but I don't buy the argument that we should be accepting of AI slop because it's more accessible. That type of framing is devious because you frame dissenters as not caring about accessibility. It has nothing to do with accessibility and everything to do with simply not wanting to consume utterly worthless slop. |
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| ▲ | roywiggins 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unfortunately, the sheer amount of ChatGPT-processed texts being linked has for me become a reason not to want to read them, which is quite depressing. |
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| ▲ | colechristensen 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You wouldn't complain as much if it were merely poorly written by a human. It gets the information across. The novelty of complaining about a new style of bad writing is being overdone by a lot of people, particularly on HN. | | |
| ▲ | crote 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You wouldn't complain as much if it were merely poorly written by a human. Obviously. > It gets the information across. If it is poorly written by a human? Sure! > The novelty of complaining about a new style of bad writing But it's not a "new style of bad writing", is it? The problem is that LLM-generated content is more often than not wrong. It is only worth reading if a human has invested time into post-processing it. However, LLMs make badly-written low-quality content look the same as badly-written high-quality content or decently-written high-quality content. It is impossible for the reader to quickly distinguish properly post-processed LLM output from time-wasting slop. On the other hand, if its written by a human it is often quite easy to distinguish badly-written low-quality content from badly-written high-quality content. And the writing was never the important part: it has always been about the content. There are plenty of non-native English tech enthusiasts writing absolute gems in the most broken English you can imagine! Nobody has ever had trouble distinguishing those from low-quality garbage. But the vast majority of LLM-generated content I come across on the internet is slop and a waste of my time. My eyeballs are being DDoSed. The only logical action upon noticing that something is LLM-generated content is to abort reading it and assume it is slop as well. Like it or not, LLMs have become a sign of poor quality. By extension, the issue with using LLMs for important content is that you are making it look indistinguishable from slop. You are loudly signaling to the reader that it isn't worth their time. So yes, if you want people to read it, stick to bad human writing! |
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