> AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to.

This is not entirely accurate if we consider agentic loops.

> Asking it requires skill.

Considering the realm of writing a blog post instead of programming, what is the skill? I suspect there is extremely little. But I could be wrong, tell me what skill you think went into this.

> and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece.

Prompt your LLM of choice to generate 100 articles about different aspects of joining a new role, then you won’t need to provide the insights into the specific situations the author described. All you need to do is pay for the tokens.

> Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”?

Yes.

> Well, you didn’t.

Do you know that? What’s stopping someone from asking an LLM to generate an entire HN front page worth of articles, and reading that list instead of HN?

This really is a problem with the health of the site in my opinion. If there are a flood of AI generated articles in the top spot, the value proposition of HN as a site is diminished.

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tuckerwales 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Author here: I dictated this article into my phone and got a model to transcribe and clean up / reword.

I'd argue that counts as using AI as a tool for conveying my original thoughts.

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scared_together 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond to feedback.

I believe there is a societal problem here, not specific to your particular actions. The expectation that communications should be “cleaned up” and “professional” in the first place comes from a bygone era. In the 2010s and earlier removing all typos, fixing wording, formatting the text and adding images were all signals that someone put extra care into sending their message. But in the present that just indicates use of AI.

You mentioned in another comment that your hand-drawn images would be “far worse”. Leaving aside whether any images were needed at all, a hand-drawn scribble in the 2010s might be unprofessional but in the present day there’s an AI generated image on every visible surface. A hand-drawn image, even a bad one, would actually make you stand out.

Even if you want to present the cleaned up version, you could also provide the original audio.

	▲	tuckerwales 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Appreciate the feedback and I don't necessarily disagree with your points - the societal argument is an interesting one. I do think it's interesting that some people are immediately turned off of something because of the whiff of AI even if they like the actual idea or content. Will likely experiment with different ways of writing in the future!