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Posted by shehuphd 3 hours ago

The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft(mohammedshehu.com)
37 points | 70 commentspage 3
GolfPopper 2 hours ago|
Presumably the author believes checking food for contamination, and vehicle safety standards are also daft. Insofar as LLMs are a tool, they are not a tool that reliably produces desired output. There was just a thread on this. [1] Even setting aside any moral questions of using them, LLMs create plausible sounding BS. We're not just talking about fire, we're talking about methanol fire.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49042354

malensek 1 hour ago||
It’s worth pointing out that the author of this site has published ~100 articles over the span of two months. How much original thought has been put into these ideas? People are frustrated with AI slop because it’s low effort and wastes their time. They don’t care if it was written by hand, typewriter, whatever. The fact that no human effort is being expended is the problem. Giving your shower thoughts to AI is not writing.
firasd 2 hours ago||
I think it depends on the context too. Dale Carnegie (in his famous Win Friends.. book) mentioned how it's annoying to receive letters that say Dictated But Not Read. So people don't want to read (for example) a twitter reply or email that's written on their behalf rather than their own thoughts

When it comes to something like a LinkedIn post however who cares. Everyone uses AI cause the content itself is mercenary anyway right. Thought leadership.

But I have been using Sonnet to write some Youtube narrations and I think I've discovered a kind of value that is not 'AI slop'. I already posted one of them -- about the giant pink hologram in Blade Runner 2049 -- and it's been getting thousands of views and a dozens of likes when clipped into shorts. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK-TsLQkIos]

The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."

To me that is a kind of LLM writing that's "value above replacement". Like if I lost that Sonnet 4.6 script I wouldn't be able to get it again it was just a particular permutation of the neural network manifold that emerged from our discussion about the movie and the style I wanted etc.

hodgesrm 2 hours ago||
> The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."

That sounds cool. It's also a style of SciFi writing--clipped sentences that juxtapose images and let you put together meaning. I wonder how long this sequence can go before the LLM messes up because it has limited understanding (if you will) of the underlying meaning of the images.

tayo42 2 hours ago||
I think this ignores that we're being spammed with written content.

The craft of writing is part of the interesting part. The words you choose are important,same as brush strokes in a painting. Offloading the act of writing to llms takes away that whole part.

oasisbob 2 hours ago||
Setting up the strawman of writing "by hand" only to attack it as being ableist is facile and asinine. Nobody is arguing that Hawking, or anyone else who uses dictation or other assistive technologies to capture writing, aren't writing.

Plagiarism will always be plagiarism.

remywang 2 hours ago||
I’ll gladly use AI to write if it were good at writing as much as how it is good at coding. But it’s just a terrible writer, and currently it’s easier to type things out myself compared to yelling at Claude.
slopinthebag 2 hours ago||
I simply don’t like AI writing because its prose is terrible. It gives me the ick. No other justification is needed for my dislike. Same with AI generated code for the most part. Takes a lot of work to make AI generated anything palatable, which is fine - we don’t really want to deprecate effort or skill do we?
forgetfreeman 2 hours ago||
Low grade engagement bait that reads like a mediocre attempt at whitewashing slop. If the author's premise holds then we're saying that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.
ducktective 2 hours ago||
>that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.

Well, the promise of AGI and current LLM trajectory looks like this is how it's going to be. This is part of the reason that juniors or university students feel animosity towards LLMs.

Have you looked at the recent prompts mathematicians use to disprove conjectures? One of the last ones related to graph theory was basically: continue research...enough partial results, give me a breakthrough...

Not exactly skillful prompting...

doug_durham 2 hours ago||
That's not what the author is saying at all. You are presuming that AI is capable of generating original thoughts. The author's point is that original thought is what matters. If a skilled writer with decades of experience can generate low effort content just as well as someone using an LLM. Your use of the word "dilettante" is elitist and says that only certain people should be allowed to express themselves.
noduerme 2 hours ago||
TL;DR, Semi-literate people who get paid to write garbage no one wants to read are just as well served by aiming their fact-free thoughts at an LLM as they would be writing 30,000 meaningless words by hand.

Case in point, this insipid blog post which I didn't bother to read.

Wait, that wasn't the plan? Sorry, with all this fantastic new content flooding the internet, I just don't have time to read whatever this guy or his LLM are trying to say.

em-bee 1 hour ago|
I understand why people want you to write; because it’s good for you, because it focuses a wandering thought, because the first sentence is usually rubbish and the seventh is often better, because you learn cadence and structure and argument through repetition, because there are things you don’t know you believe until you try to explain them, and because spending an afternoon wrestling a stubborn idea into words can leave you with a stronger brain;

no, i want you to write because i want your authentic input. i don't care what you get out of it.

but none of this explains why we’ve decided that the physical production of every word, one keystroke at a time, must now serve as a test of whether a thought is human.

well, if you didn't write it yourself then it guaranteed not to be human, that's why.

It’s daft.

there is no alternative.

It takes one useful method of thinking and promotes it into the only respectable one.

it is the only one. if you didn't write it, you didn't think it. you thought the prompt, but that's not what you are sharing.

It confuses the exercise with the outcome,

the exercise IS the outcome. if you didn't exercise it, you didn't produce it.

the labour with the intelligence,

the labor is the only proof of intelligence we have.

and the movement of fingers with the movement of a mind.

if you didn't move your fingers, then your mind didn't move either.

It asks whether someone typed every word themselves when it should ask whether they had something useful to say, whether they understood it, whether they made the important decisions, whether they checked the claims,

if you didn't type (or dictate) it yourself then

you didn't say anything. you didn't understand anything. you didn't decide anything. and i have no idea whether you checked the claims.

and whether they can defend the finished work when someone else asks what on earth they were talking about.

if you had written it all yourself, maybe you wouldn't have to defend it. and if you do defend an AI text, then why didn't you write that to begin with? that was the contribution i was looking for. but then how am i supposed to know that the defense is not also AI generated?

all the same is true if you cite a lot of other peoples writing without adding anything of your own. it may be the correct message, but it doesn't tell me anything about you. but at least i know that writing came from humans and if you cite them correctly i can interrogate them directly. AI writing does none of that.

i stopped reading after the first two paragraphs. i am pretty sure i could continue refuting everything line by line.

(one more because i think i have a clever response:)

A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.

yes, that is a possibility, even if not very likely. if you paste AI output however it is a certainty.

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. Under our emerging rules of literary customs inspection, the writing police see the first person as a human writer and the second as a suspicious package.

yes, you can do all that, that's called research. but it's only valuable if the final conclusion is written by yourself.

that's the same as writing a paper where you read lot's of other papers to research a topic. you can't just create an amalgamation of the texts you read. the conclusion has to be your own.

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