Oh you.

Why do you give up so easily? Human culture and the already low quality bar of writing should be allowed to fall even further because you are annoyed by those that want to protect it?

Why should your opinion be worth more than those who would like to retain a semblance of meaning in what we use to convey ideas? LLM writing is sheer trash. It comes off like a coke-addled car salesman who is making a pitch to VCs about his latest scientific discovery that will 200x their investment.

Poorly written LLM content is NOT a tangential annoyance. If this is too much, maybe you should simulate HN using

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442

Wait isn’t there actually the opposite HN guideline? In that LLM generated content is not allowed here?

But is it really? Low effort content might be the majority, but does that make it common enough to be a cosmetic annoyance like website styling? I'm not sure it does anyway because the content is the issue, not the styling or annoyances. A human written article with an idiot neon scrolling, blinking title would be fine. A plain text LLM article would not. One is objectively more annoying than the other.

I really wish there was an HN guideline that banned AI generated content outright. Until then all we can do is flag slop.

If the "author" didn't feel like taking the time to write the text why should I take the time to read it? LLMs are great for summarizing, if you are going to slop 100% of a document make it a summary and save us all the time.

Indeed.

I LOVE reading LLM content. I find that they tend to present things in a way that keeps my attention - something I have struggled with my whole life. I also use LLMs to assist with managing my own thoughts and helping make things coherent overall.

Sure, there is a LOT of slop out there, but the promotion of quality content is what crowd-sourced curation like HN tends towards. Much of the LLM assisted content here has a high signal to noise ratio, and is clearly a lot more involved than simply prompting "write an article on X" - despite what the haters say.

This is a breathtakingly dumb idea

You’re supposed to use an AI on your end to get the original few words back, so the providers get paid twice for the same email as is their right

> Dictionary-based classification has a ceiling, and I want to be honest about where it is.

I stopped here, anytime an author (or likely AI) feels the need to tell me they're being honest or "genuine" I don't need to read any further.

I'll assume honesty but the minute you explicitly tell me, you've probably got an angle that I'm too dumb to see, but I'm not dumb enough to keep reading.

Wait, what makes it AI and hateful, the `;` there?!

Is this in the same vein as using — em dashes?

Are people with minimal regard to typography and style doomed to lower their standards because the masses can't even?

The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it. I too can just prompt “What’s the rate of self hosted email?”. If an article is signaling that its value is zero, then everyone should just move on as it’s not providing anything to anyone. Effort is the economies main signal of value, good boots that last cost more in the classic example. The only time it’s not zero is when there’s a shared understanding between those consuming the output - a company wanting your llm code, friends making funny images for an inside joke to share, etc. And some people grouped may be specifically interested in AI output - people sharing music on Suno. But in my experience no one cares about your AI generated song, image, article, app if it appears to just be my own prompt away from me having it too. Give a significant other an AI image printed out for an anniversary gift - see how excited they are about it. Versus getting an artist or photographer to do the same. As Claude might say, it’s not laziness, it’s effort.

And soon, I'll be lazy and use an LLM to do the reading for me. Eventually the LLMs will train on the state of the world and decide to be lazy also, and the "writer's" LLM prompt will just be shared with the "reader": nobody actually needed all those words anyway! Maybe someday we'll get rid of the links on HN and we can just share and consume headlines.

>LLMs got decent at writing,

Judging by people's response, that doesn't seem to be the case.

> and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.

I'll read articles written by them if and when that happens, but not before.

Efficiency and lazyness are two very distinct things. As is quality and quantity.

Isn't that a variant of utilitarianism basically? The only things worth doing are the ones which allows us to do less.

The ability for people to communicate is paramount. Without the ability to communicate there is no progress. We might as well be deaf, dumb and perhaps blind.

Delegating this task to automation serves to undermine all the masters and indeed strengthen the servants.

Short term this offload is good for people; long term it’ll lead to mental rot where people are hard pressed to put their ideas forward and give up in exasperation when they don’t have the assistance of their servants. Their ability to even make the proper requests to the servants may deteriorate enough that their existence may come to rely on the benevolence of their servants.

> The need is that writing is expensive.

That's the thing, good writing is expensive, massively so, much more than people think.

Letting the machine do the writing however shows us that many people have no idea why writing is expensive, nor do they respect that perhaps it needs to be expensive. Communication is incredibly hard, very few master it. I'd even go so far as to say that clear, precise and readable communication is so hard that we do not have sufficient training data to build an LLM that can do it.

Letting a person write article, like this one, doesn't necessarily improve the quality, but it does show us that some thought and effort have at least been put into it. There was a cost and you deemed that cost worth it for conveying your message. Without the cost there's nothing stopping you from wasting peoples time.

That might apply to some things, but there is little to no value in this article, so the economics are the same as the spam - cheap to spew garbage while providing no value and wasting the readers time. It's not something that should be encouraged. RIPE should know better.

How about not writing the article at all then?