logoalt Hacker News

ep103last Thursday at 2:54 PM1 replyview on HN

> For example, in a situation where you can strongly benefit from the Napoleon technique, and all the potential negative outcomes are minor and unlikely to occur, you will almost always want to implement this technique. Conversely, in a situation where there is even a moderate likelihood that this technique will lead to serious negative outcomes, you will likely want to avoid using it, even if it has some potential positive outcomes.

I swear, AI is decreasing everyone's reading and writing abilities.

Well written language conveys maximum information (or emotional impact, or etc) with minimum verbosity. AI is incentivized to do the exact opposite, and results in slop like the above.

The quoted paragraph above takes 71 words to say "You should do this technique if the positive potential outcomes outweigh the negative ones," which is such a banal thought as to have been a waste of the reader's time, the writer's time, and the electricity it took to run an AI to generate those sentences.


Replies

archi42yesterday at 11:31 PM

The text was first linked on HN during September 2020. ChatGPT became public access in November 2022.

The paragraph you criticized was part of the original text: https://web.archive.org/web/20200909104647/https://effectivi...

So: Yes, it could have been more concise. Nope, we humans can write much too long text for the sake of writing text, which some of us can do better than others (e.g., better than me), and we can do that with no artificial assistance or substitute - we do it just fine using our own (in)ability ;-)