But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
As such, isn't the question really about
1) whether it was communicated clearly/effectively
2) whether it should have been communicated to others at all (rather than something that you just dealt with yourself)
As for the writer being paid to use their expertise, learn more things etc: absolutely. But they could spend whatever time is required to think about the issue and then still have Ai write it at their direction. And, regardless of who wrote it, it could still be poor, irrelevant or misleading.
I'm not defending AI over-usage, but you folks evidently haven't thought about any of this nearly sufficiently enough... and the policy doesn't seem to be addressing what it ought to be: whether everyone is actually thinking, learning, discerning, deciding etc...
Ps I passed your comments to chatgpt and asked what it thought about it all, and it missed all of this. But then agreed once I brought it all up. Then it did a poor job of writing it's own response. I couldn't be bothered to guide it towards something more appropriate. https://chatgpt.com/share/6a86cc31-f058-83e8-8abd-3921b518ec...
Pps the fact that this comment and some of my subsequent ones have gotten downvotes, while no one has really provided any substantive/valid counter argument is quite disappointing, but also revealing.
It makes me think of the initial staunchly anti-ai for coding vs vibe coding dichotomy. Of course, neither was correct and it is now more common for people to appreciate AI as a tool that can be consciously and effectively used to help with coding. The fact that there's still plenty of thoughtless vibe coders doesn't make that untrue.
Likewise, vibe writing - not understanding or caring what you are saying and, worse, feigning that you do - is the real problem here. But that doesn't mean AI can't be a useful writing assistant, be it for producing first drafts for your review, or reviewing/editing your own first draft (and even subsequent ones).
lelanthran
today at 10:20 AM
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
I think your linked chat demonstrates quite well why you are wrong.
The sender's burden is a few lines of text "Write me $FOO, conclude with $BAR".
The recipients burden is an order of magnitude greater, trying to find your conclusion in hundreds of lines of text.
After all, your initial line:
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
Is concise and clearly understandable in 21 words . I understand your point even if I don't agree with it.
The linked chat has 1424 words. Your point is in there somewhere, but now you want the recipient to play "Where's Waldo" to find your point.
(BTW: I can't believe just how effectively you argued against your own point! I have never seen someone do it as effectively as this in all the time I have been reading HN)
There's so much wrong with your comment that I don't know where to start.
You say that my initial line is good, but then that you disagreed with it without saying why/making a counter argument.
As for sending anyone on a where's Waldo adventure, you've fundamentally missed the point, which was completely self-contained in my comment - the postscript link to chatgpt was just, at best, reference material for anyone who cared to look.
As for the fact that chatgpt did a terrible job of it all, that doesn't undermine my point even slightly. Because my point, made very clearly in my post, was that you can't just offload everything to AI. You have to, at the very least, give it context, direction etc. At that point, it can be quite useful. I use it effectively all the time to polish my writing, remove my worst tendencies etc.
If I cared enough, I'd have had it polish this response to make it significantly less aggressive while making the same point. But you don't deserve that, because you didn't put in even the slightest effort to communicate in good faith
>But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
Not the same burden.
The value of the person is digesting and giving the materially important stuff in the answer (including their expertise and opinion). Not the AI diarrhea.
I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading.
You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying.
The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.
>I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading.
Theoritically yes. In practice:
- AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise, and who know to edit AI responses and not just paste them.
- I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
> - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea
Evidently the people you are communicating with are not good writers/thinkers. That's the prerequisite for effectively using AI for writing help. Just as its the prerequisite for using it to produce code. If you can't code, you can't get Ai to produce good code.
So the real issue here, perhaps, is "vibe writing" rather than "Ai assisted writing".
> I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
Agreed. But if people who don't understand the issue are feigning competence via AI then that's a fundamental problem of not just competence across many domains, but also character. As I said in another comment, the policy should be something to the effect of "you're paid for competence, integrity etc. If you don't have that, we don't need you. Take that into account when you use Ai"
> Theoritically yes. In practice:
I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it.
We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, how can it be bad?".
Until their boss sat down and forced them to read the verbal diarrhea and they finally admitted that it was 90% hallucinations and AI-filling-the-blanks.
Yes, so the issue here was not AI but a lack of competence, prudence, integrity, responsibility, discernment etc.
It's the equivalent of vibe coding vs Ai assisted coding.
Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing.
bayindirh
today at 10:09 AM
The thing is, I expect the person who sent me something to know about and understood what they have sent me.
I donāt expect the other person to copy my response to the same chat and paste the AI response back even without reading it.
Donāt be a meat proxy.
Well, In any healthy organization or relationship, there should be no problem with someone not knowing about/understanding something.
If someone is feigning competence, that's the fundamental problem, not AI
bayindirh
today at 10:57 AM
I donāt agree. I have seen many knowledgeable people fall into AI so hard that they are happy that they are not writing code, reading things and using their brains to understand or produce something.
These people know (or knew) what they were talking about so well, and was very passionate about their area as well.
Not knowing something is alright, but surrendering their whole knowledge and passion to a statistical model is not.
Now they are almost meat proxies, which is sad.
> The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner.
While I agree with your overall distinction, I believe the scenario you portray is so unrealistic that you will never encounter it.
Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years.
The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback, but an AI will at best have some memory/skill/prompt nudge for next time that might have a shallow/localized band-aid effect, but will never stop doing similar mistakes elsewhere.
lelanthran
today at 10:24 AM
> The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback,
For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea.
The people arguing that round-tripping their thoughts through AI still means that it's their thoughts apparently also believe that the game of telephone always results in perfect comms.
It's not just AI; adding more hops to a route changes the message when each hop is a human too, it's just that we notice it more when the hop is an LLM because of just how different they write compared to humans.
I don't think you quite realize the implications of what you're saying.
Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?
If someone is feigning competence via AI, that's the problem. Not Ai.
If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
lelanthran
today at 11:06 AM
> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
My point is that it is still a problem, regardless whether they are asking an AI to write it for them or a human to write it for them.
Round-tripping a message through a 3rd party changes the message; in this specific context ("Don't Paste the AI, please"), there is no pretense of understanding or review from the human.
In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.
> if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years.
Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs.
As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. You might say that the "can't be bothered" part is the entire issue, and I'll again say that what matters is the final result - a master chef or chief architect is not doing all the grunt work...
> Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up.
Isn't this contradictory? Why do you need to take over if it's doing such a good job?
Let's fire all editors, consultants, psychologists, sous chefs, grunts, etc!
I'm not claiming an LLM writes better than me.
ModernMech
today at 10:48 AM
Because it canāt do a great job without frequent expert input, thatās the point.
Expert types prompt into Claude
, Claude produces fundamentally flawed but close output. Donāt take that output and give it to anyone ā first refine it until itās not flawed, then pass it on.
Correct, I was treating his claim as true for the sake of argument, not accepting it.
For me, being quite "dyslectic" - LLM generated sentences have the advantage of being spelled correctly and being grammartically correct.
I rather prefer iterating over LLM text than writing it by myself.
Example: Typing this simple text above by myself was not straight forward.
Write yourself and tell the AI: "Fix the spelling and grammar. Do not change the structure or meaning" then.
ModernMech
today at 10:56 AM
Agreed thatās a good practice but for some very hardline people even thatās not considered acceptable. Itās very hard to understand what people consider right and wrong so Iāve just stopped listening.
Also people are weirdly hypocritical about it. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/svUzbNy2oj
No tolerance policy for 77 of 10k lines, but exceptions made for language with unashamed use of large swaths of LLM code because itās popular with the author. People just arenāt being consistent at all. Even when they draw hard lines.
My problem isn't who wrote it, but the pretense of something having written by a person while it wasn't.
There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.
Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something.
Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
ModernMech
today at 11:03 AM
> I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
I agree with everything here, and do the same, but in my experience people will still interpret doing this as āprofoundly disrespectful towards the receiversā. The sibling to your comment seems to express that sentiment:
āThere's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case.ā
There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case. There's something profoundly disrespectful about forcibly scraping the human corpora without asking for permission first, or considering compensation in anyway, or just setting out that "yeah, we're doing this, and damn the consequences". There's something profoundly disrespectful about then taking this device running on investor money chasing the promise of a value that just can't conceivably be delivered, and employing it to do all the unethical things you could imagine just because you can engineer the "No" out of the model.
Of course the level of moral disengagement that's rife around here generally precludes any recognition of such things, as that might be construed as "harshing the vibe on the innovation, man". So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect until this type of thing hits enough of a critical mass that a societal ethics framework begins to manifest around it and not be ignored.
I agree. But this is a separate conversation, which (unfortunately) seems to be pointless at this point.
lurking_swe
today at 9:39 AM
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
I think it can be OK if AI is used to polish up oneās message or to help structure it. Basically help with grammar, formatting, and wording.
But copy pasting an AIs response to a question? Not at all. People earn a reputation over time. TRUST is earned. An AI cannot earn trust. If you copy paste an AI response verbatim, i need to read everything in your message with a big grain of salt. Imagine doing this all the time as a reader? Exhausting and a waste of others time. If i want to read raw AI output iāll ask the AI directly, thanks.
If you write something in your own words, or at least synthesize an AI response before sharing it with me, then i know iām reading something that has at least passed the smell test.
Itās the difference between reviewing a pull request from an intern and a principal software engineer.
I don't disagree at all. But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.
Though, I think such a writing partner can only really be useful if you know how to write yourself, which also requires knowing how to think (because writing is really just thinking).
So, again, in the end all that really matters is whether you are effectively communicating what needs to be communicated, Ai-assisted or not. It's quite apparent to other thinking people when someone is not doing that, and that hurts their reputation, undermines trust and ultimately leads to losing your job, connections etc...
So, again, the policy really should just be something to the effect of "you're being paid to help us be effective and correct. If you can't do that, we don't need you. Take that into consideration with regards to the tools that you use.". That's obviously not an adequate policy - Ai could surely be helpful in polishing it! But it most definitely couldn't get to the root of the matter on its own.
> But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.
There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email.
You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.
To be very clear, I NEVER advocated for copy pasting thoughtless LLM output anywhere. Literally quite the opposite.
jorisboris
today at 9:36 AM
You bring up a good point. Maybe it doesn't matter whether an ai or a person wrote it, as long as it is concise.
And because most ai's are not concise we blame ai's for faults we don't like in humans either: being longwinding
Well, I'd say concision is not the key - sometimes you should be verbose or something else.
In fact, my tendency is to be far too long-winded, with lots of perhaps-unnecessary parantheticals etc. Ai is often shockingly useful at reining me in and focusing on the issue at hand, as well as removing my worst tendencies towards meanness etc...
Im a good writer, when I want to be. But having Ai review, edit, write drafts etc undoubtedly makes me a better writer/communicator. But only because I'm actively thinking about it all, rather than just saying "respond to this" and then providing copy pasta.
You're missing the whole entire point.