Posted by speckx 4 days ago
I similarly dislike other trickery as well, like ghostwriters, PR articles in journalism, lip-syncing at concerts, and so on. Fuck off, be genuine.
The thing why people are upset about AI is because AI can be used to easily generate a lot of text, but its usage is rarely disclosed. So then when someone discovers AI usage, there is no telling for the reader of how much of the article is signal, and how much is noise. Without AI, it would hinge on the expertise or experience of the author, but now with AI involved, the bets are off.
The other thing is that reading someone's text involves a little bit of forming a connection with them. But then discovering that AI (or someone else) have written the text, it feels like they betrayed that connection.
I think the rates of ADHD are going to go through the roof soon, and I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done about it.
It is physiological.
I don't think any evidence exists that you can cause anyone to become neurodivergent except by traumatic brain injury
TikTok does not "make" people ADHD. They might struggle to let themselves be bored and may be addicted to quick fixes of dopamine, but that is not what ADHD is. ADHD is not an addiction to dopamine hits. ADHD is not an inability to be bored.
TikTok for example will not give you the kinds of tics and lack of proprioception that is common in neurodivergent people. Being addicted to Tiktok will never give you that absurd experience where your brain "hitches" while doing a task and you rapidly oscillate between progressing towards one task vs another. Being habituated to check your phone at every down moment does not cause you to be unable to ignore sensory input because your actual sensory processing machinery in your brain is not functioning normally. Getting addicted to tiktok does not give you a child's handwriting despite decades of practice. If you do not already have significant stimming and jitter symptoms, Tiktok will not make you develop them.
You cannot learn to be ADHD.
As a diagnosed medical condition I don't know, as people having seemingly shorter and short attention spans we are seeing it already, TikTok and YT shorts and the like don't help, we've weaponised inattention.
Specifically is there any correlation between people who have always read a lot as I do and people who don't.
My observation (anecdota) is that the people I know who read heavily are much better at and much more against AI slop vs people who don't read at all.
Even when I've played with the current latest LLM's and asked them questions, I simply don't like the way they answer, it feels off somehow.
I quite like using LLMs to learn new things. But I agree: I can't stand reading blog posts written by LLMs. Perhaps it is about expectations. A blog post I am expecting to gain a view into an individual's thinking; for an AI, I am looking into an abyss of whirring matrix-shaped gears.
There's nothing wrong with the abyss of matrices, but if I'm at a party and start talking with someone, and get the whirring sound of gears instead of the expected human banter, I'm a little disturbed. And it feels the same for blog content: these are personal communications; machines have their place and their use, but if I get a machine when I'm expecting something personal, it counters expectations.
AI is good at local coherence, but loses the plot over longer thoughts (paragraphs, pages). I don't think I could identify AI sentences but I'm totally confident I could identify an AI book.
This includes both opening a large text in a way of thinking that isn't reflected several paragraphs later, and also maintaining a repetitive "beat" in the rhythm of writing that is fine locally but becomes obnoxious and repetitive over longer periods. Maybe that's just regression to the mean of "voice?"
I'm starting to pivot and realize that quality is actually way more important than I thought, especially in a world where it is very easy to create things of low quality using AI.
Another place I've noticed it is in hiring. There are so many low quality applications its insane. One application with a full GitHub and profile and cover letter and or video which actually demonstrates that you understand where you are applying is worth more than 100 low quality ones.
It's gone from a charming gimmick to quickly becoming an ick.
Frustrated, I just throw that mess straight at claude-code and tell it to fix whatever nonsense it finds and do its best. It probably implements 80–90% of what the doc says — and invents the rest. Not that I’d know, since I never actually read the original AI-generated PRD myself.
In the end, no one’s happy. The whole creative and development process has lost that feeling of achievement, and nobody seems to care about code quality anymore.
Jokes aside, good article.