alt Hacker NewsAgree, AI generated articles & comments provide little to none value other than the original prompt. Please just post the original prompt instead.
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Here is where I'd like to push back just a little.
Not all AI prompting is expanding the prompt.
What if the original prompt is 1000 words, includes 10 scientific articles by reference (boosting it up to 10000) , and the AI helps to boil it down to 100 words instead?
I'd argue that this is probably a rather more responsible usage of the tools. And rather more pleasant to read besides.
Whether it meets the criterion is another thing. But at least don't assume that the original prompt is always better or shorter!
Would prompts really be interesting or thought-provoking, though?
I don't expect AI HN responders to out themselves by sharing, but I would be curious to learn if people are prompting anything more involved than just "respond to this on HN: <link>", or running agents that do the same.
"Write a response to smy20011's comment indicating that if the end result was a low-quality comment, the initial prompt probably wouldn't be very insightful either. Make it snarky."
Disagree. The prompt holds no information at all. The answer actually discovers information, organizes it, presents it in a way that's easy to read.
Example: "write me an article about hidden settings in SSH". You get back more information than most of HN's previous posts about SSH, in a fraction of the text, and more readable.
Actually, screw it, we should just make a new version of HN that has useful articles written by AI. The human written articles are terrible.
It's not just AI-generated articles -- it's the other things that we delve into as a result. Listicles. Comments. Posts. It's what it means to be human, and honestly? That's rare.
I only disagree a little. It's that sometimes there is a discussion about AI itself where "I prompted X with Y and it output Z" can add to the convo.
But those are pretty specific cases (For example, discussing AI in healthcare). That's about the only time where I think it's reasonable to post the AI output so it can be analyzed/criticized.
What's not helpful is I've been hit by users who haven't disclosed that they are just using AI. It takes a few back and forths before I realize that they are just a bot which is annoying.