alt Hacker NewsWhat kind of text are you reading? Do you work in LLM development? Or are you just noticing that many news sites are using LLMs more and more?
I've noticed obvious LLM output on low quality news sites, but I don't tend to read them anyway. Maybe all the comments I read are from LLMs and I just don't realise?
Perplexity is now my default search engine. If I'm doing research, I use LLMs to summarise documents or scan through them to find relevant excerpts. If I'm doing general background reading on something, I'll ask an LLM for an explainer; likewise if I've read about one particular thing and want to understand the broader context around it. If I'm thinking through a problem, I'll bat the idea around with Claude or Deepseek, asking them to provide alternative perspectives.
It's quite difficult to analogise because LLMs are so profoundly novel, but the best I can do is that it's like having an infinitely patient and extremely knowledgeable assistant. That assistant isn't omniscient or infallible, but it's extremely useful because it tends to provide the information that I want, presented in a way that's particularly relevant to me. That requires a certain amount of rapport-building - understanding the characteristics of various models, learning to ask good questions, guiding the model towards my preferences with customised system prompts - but the effort pays off handsomely.