> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text…

Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable).

I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do). Really elegant code is cool to read, but many tools I use daily are closed source, so I have no idea if their code is elegant or not. I only care if it works.

> I've seen people say something along the lines of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" and I think that pretty much sums it up.

Amen to that. I am currently cc'd on a thread between two third-parties, each hucking LLM generated emails at each other that are getting longer and longer. I don't think either of them are reading or thinking about the responses they are writing at this point.

The short version of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" is "ai;dr"

What's interesting is how AI makes this problem worse but not actually "different", especially if you want to go deep on something. Like listicles were always plentiful, even before AI, but inferior to someone in substack going deep on a topic. AI generated music will be the same way, there's always been an excessive abundance of crap music, and now we'll just have more more of it. The weird thing is how it will hit the uncanny valley. Potentially "Better" than the crap that came before it, but significantly worse than what someone who cares will produce.

DJing is an interesting example. Compared with like composition, Beatmatching is "relatively" easy to learn, but was solved with CD turntables that can beatmatch themselves, and yet has nothing to do with the taste you have to develop to be a good DJ.

> "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write"

At this point I'd settle if they bothered to read it themselves. There's a lot of stuff posted that feels to me like the author only skimmed it and expects the masses to read it in full.

I feel like dealing with robo-calls for the past couple years had led me to this conclusion a bit before this boom in ai-generated text. When I answer my phone, if I hear a recording or a bot of some sorts, I hang up immediately with the thought "if it were important, a human would have called". I've adjusted this slightly for my kid's school's automated notifications, but otherwise, I don't have the time to listen to robots.

The truth is now that nobody will bother to read anything you write AI or not mostly, creating things is like buying a lottery ticket in terms of audience. Creating something lovingly by hand and pouring countless hours into it is like a golden lottery ticket that has 20x odds, but if it took 50x longer to produce, you're getting significantly outperformed by people who just spam B+ content.

Exactly, I think perplexity had the right idea of where to go with AI (though obviously fumbled execution). Essentially creating more advanced primitives for information search and retrieval. So it can be great at things we have stored and need to perform second order operations on (writing boilerplate, summarizing text, retrieving information).

It actually makes a lot more sense to share the LLM prompt you used than the output because it is less data in most cases and you can try the same prompt in other LLMs.

Except its not. What's a programmer without a vision? Code needs vision. The model is taking your vision. With writing a blog post, comment or even book, I agree.

For now.