Posted by shehuphd 1 hour ago
But it does raise the question: what if he hadn't? What if Stephen Hawkings had secretly used an LLM to write A Brief History of Time? Imagine that we find a letter in which he confesses that he used an LLM to write the book. Would that lessen the value of the book? I don't think so.
I think we need to distinguish between two arguments:
A. You should avoid AI writing because it is bad. B. You should avoid AI writing because it isn't human.
I find myself in camp A. I think a lot of AI writing is bad, but (1) it gets better when a human spends time working on it, and (2) AI is improving over time and its writing is getting better.
For me, an AI writing detector is about curation. It is hard to figure out what's worth reading, so filtering out low-effort AI writing is a good heuristic.
But what I really want is a Good-Writing Detector. I don't care how a piece of writing happened--all I care about is if I'm going to value reading it.
In contrast, camp B is never going to be happy with AI writing. It doesn't matter how good it gets; even if it is better than human writing, camp B will not approve.
I get that, even if I don't agree. There is virtue in sacrificing to support an ideal.
I do think that there is a gate against poorly written comments.
I don’t exactly care about whether or not the actual bits on my screen came directly from a human’s fingers on a keyboard or from an LLM, but I do care about whether or not the material is good, well-written, appropriately concise (which varies both on the content and the audience), fact-checked, and I’m sure a bunch more factors. Some humans fail at these criteria as well.
Human authorship is an imperfect proxy for quality, but saying it’s imperfect doesn’t mean that it’s worthless… quite the opposite, I’d argue. Even if there are flaws in the writing, it at least shows that the author tried, which I do personally put value on. Copy & pasting Claude output without even fact-checking… that’s inherently low effort and if that’s what I wanted to read, I’d just ask Claude myself.
I use LLMs in my workflow to varying degrees depending on the task, but their output never makes it into the wild without serious scrutiny. Sometimes their code is better than what I’d have written, which is great. Sometimes it completely misses the point and needs significant re-steering several times, to the point where it’s easier if I write it myself. For writing, I’ll happily have an LLM harness put together a document explaining a dataflow through a complex system; I ask it to include source filenames and line numbers and can do my own validation before accepting it as truth.
Are there infinitely many primes p such that p − 1 is a perfect square? In other words: Are there infinitely many primes of the form n2 + 1?
Answer: [ ]
( ) I don't know
Why wouldn't you want spraypainted messages which bring real value to your house?
The real point isn't that they're "obligated" to allow AI-generated comments, but that they're being something of a hypocrite.
"Dogs should be legal to have as pets" yet "I don't own a dog"
"Banning sushi is daft" yet "I don't want sushi smeared on my house"
"Checking for human writing is daft" yet "I don' want strangers to be able to SSH to my webserver and edit the HTML files with their comments"
Alright, compare the following degrees of autonomy:
- I wrote it, made sure everything's correct, let the LLM proofread it/translate it to English, and checked it afterwards
- I had brief scattered notes with no coherent idea, then threw it at an LLM to make it an article in whatever way it feels best because I don't care
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a deep research agent spent ungodly amount of tokens and search and scraping requests, and put up an article (at least some grounding and it can depend on the harness quality)
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a model did it in a single call with no real-life grounding at all
You're looking at my clearly generated article. Can you tell what is mine, what is collected from the web or another source by the agent, and what is sourced from the model's own knowledge? Sourcing is exactly what the generated text obfuscates.
Completely apart from that, I also hate posts that look like a 15-year-old on /r/thisisdeep, whether or not they used an LLM to wrap a lot of words around their absence-of-much-of-an-idea.
So I can hate posts on more than one axis. I hate the lack of decent writing, and I hate the lack of decent thinking.
I can make an exception for LLM translation, if the thinking is good. Even if the writing isn't perfect, it's better than LLM-generated-from-a-prompt text, because it has something with a real voice to start from.
Although there are some niche uses where LLMs assist or enhance the creative process, the vast majority of machine writing exists specifically because it takes zero effort and allows you to spam human cognition at an unprecedented scale. There is no redeeming quality to 99%+ of AI-generated LinkedIn posts, AI-generated books on Amazon, and so on.
The style-based heuristics we previously had at our disposal to filter zero-effort content no longer work here, so detecting LLM text is the next fallback.
LLMs are fundamentally different from other writing tools because they attempt to construct meaning in a way that is not done by the author. A main purpose of writing is to convey meaning, so LLM writing defeats that purpose.
"Just sent me the prompt" is also such a hive-mind thing to say these days. It seems you definitely don't need the AI to think for you, HN does it already for you.
This isn’t the common case. How many of the thoughts produced while working on the words have much novelty or high quality may be an open question, but it’s rare to type or handwrite 3000 words and not have any thoughts.
> Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma
Also probably not the common case. And so far my experience is that models make decent to good editors/critics, but average originators (though with remarkable breadth and sometimes outlier originations).
Now though, it undercuts itself, because if the world is filled with authors using AI to express their interesting thoughts, then how come--this post included--it's always the same regurgitation and bloviation?
We know by now--have had countless examples--that people using AI to produce text do not care for the quality of that text. It's a path-of-least-resistance tool, and that's what people use it for.