alt Hacker News>This shows the downside of using AI to write up your project. I see the eloquent sentences, but don't get the message.
Not really sure what this obsession with calling things you don't like AI generated is but it's poor form. If you have something to say about the text then say it. Otherwise leave baseless accusations out of it.
>What's the benefit? Is it speed? Where are the benchmarks? Is it that you can backprop through this computation? Do you do so?....
It's pretty clearly an ideological thing. Some people are firmly on the 'some sort of symbolic logic is necessary' camp. From the article, 'A system that cannot compute cannot truly internalize what computation is.'
Some things are just interesting for the sake of it. This is one of those things. I don't agree with the authors on the above and I'm still glad they shared. It's a very interesting read regardless.
Replies
I'm glad they shared too! Wish they shared without letting the LLM process it so heavily, it makes it too hard to read, it gives monotone importance to every piece of text. Mostly it does this by bringing everything up to a slight over-importance with tone and fluff language, and by turning everything into dry statements of fact.
As to why people call this out without going into great detail about the problems with the actual text, it's because this is happening all over the place and it's very disrespectful to readers, who dig into an article that looks very well written on the surface, only to discover it's a lot of labor to decode and often (but not always) a total waste of time. Asking for a critical report of the text is asking even more of a reader who already feels duped.
I got the same impression as the parent post. Even if its not AI-generated, the text reads like a politician's speech at a lot of places. Talks a lot, says little.
The idea itself was very cool, so I endured it. But it was not a pleasant read.
This is a nice case study of the downside of creating explicit policies of "no AI comments" without a technical method of enforcing it. I am sure the hacker news comment quality will suffer almost as much from an escalating culture of accusation and paranoia that it will from LLM comment themselves.
Agreeing first that it is genuinely interesting, let me make a constructive comment on the text: Early on, there are too many small paragraphs that don't on their own make a cogent argument. That important but easily overlooked structural work is pushed back to the reader. I felt rewarded in pushing past that though. Bravo.
> Not really sure what this obsession with calling things you don't like AI generated is but it's poor form
Admonishing someone for correctly identifying AI-written or AI-edited blog posts is poor form, friend.
It is without a doubt written by an LLM. All of the telltale signs are there. I work with these tools 8-20 hours a day and after a while the verbiage and grammatical structures stick out like a sore thumb.
Get off the high horse. I too think this is a very interesting read. I was fascinated with the subject, but the presentation was nauseatingly distracting and immediately sets off yellow flags about how Percepta operates, and what kind of quality they're willing to settle with. It tells me they are more interested in appearances and superficiality.
The numbers that are there categorically cannot be trusted, because hallucinating those details is quite common for models. There is simply no indication that a human adequately proof-read this and therefore any of its claims must be taken with a grain of salt. Don't forget the recent Cloudflare+Matrix debacle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516
I share the same concerns as OP; this post lacks metrics and feels like someone did something cool and raced to get an AI to post about it, instead of giving it a proper treatment.
> If you have something to say about the text then say it.
I could point out the individual phrases and describe the overall impression in detail, or I can just compactly communicate that by using the phrase "AI". If it bothers you, read it as "AI-like", so there is a pretension.
I have no problem with using AI for writing. I do it too, especially for documentation. But you need to read it and iterate with it and give it enough raw input context. If you don't give it info about your actual goals, intentions, judgments etc, the AI will substitute some washed-out, averaged-out no-meat-on-the-bone fluff that may sound good at first read and give you a warm wow-effect that makes you hit publish, but you read into it all the context that you have in your head, but readers don't have that.
Formatting and language is cheap now. We need a new culture around calling out sloppy work. You would not have had a problem with calling out a badly composed rambling article 5 years ago. But today you can easily slap an AI filter on it that will make it look grammatical and feel narratively engaging, now it's all about deeper content. But if one points that out, replies can always say "oh, you can't prove that, can you?"