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logicprogyesterday at 9:49 PM1 replyview on HN

> This statement is honestly so ridiculous that I felt it didn't warrant a direct response, but here's one anyway: AI enthusiasts have been proudly proclaiming for literal years that AI makes them 10x as productive based on cherry-picked anecdotes with zero empirical evidence to back it up. It's way, way too late to claim hypocrisy here. As I stated under the original submission about this topic, irrational anti-AI behavior is usually just an equal and opposite reaction to irrational pro-AI behavior.

I'm talking about the double standard on the anti-AI side about what evidence should count, not some vague industry-wide epistemic standard, whatever that means. I'm aware LinkedIn Lunatics and Steve Yegge are also being crazy. And it seems to me that even your response here is engaging in a bit of a double standard, or something akin to it, in that you think the irrational anti-AI behavior should be given a pass — and the conclusions perhaps even taken seriously — just because pro-AI people did it too.

> And that doesn't help. If anything, editing the AI output to make it read less like blatant slop just comes off as deceptive, like you're trying to hide the fact that the analysis was AI generated.

Okay, so, if I don't spend the time to write everything myself, that's bad because it's AI slop. If I do rewrite everything myself, then it's evidence of deceptiveness... despite being asked by multiple people to do that, and being extremely explicit about my methods and process and the commit history being (as you've shown), very public.

Also, the AI-generatedness of the text doesn't mean the analysis is AI generated, in terms of what was actually done. That's a category error.

> Looking at the commits, you were adding more AI generated text less than 2 hours ago[0] before quickly editing out one of the most blatantly sloppy sentences I've ever read[1].

The second commit literally says that that was my prose it was fucking with by adding slop. It's just that me adding my prose, and it adding slop to it, were in the same previous commit. Additionally, my process is often giving it exactly what I want to say, more or less, and having it HTML-format it and insert the templated numbers and UI widgets around that text.

But again, even if I'm spending the time to read through and edit everything it's writing to de-slop it, then I'm clearly also reading it through enough to make sure the analysis makes sense, and is accurate; how is that not enough "effort" for you, if effort is supposed to be a proxy for verification?

> Even if we ignore the bias clearly on display there, the premise alone is enough to dismiss the entire thing as heavily biased and chasing a pre-determined conclusion - of course someone who is so dependent and trustful of AI that they decide such an analysis on the bugginess of AI code should itself be written by AI is going to steer the conclusion towards "actually AI code is good and you luddites are overreacting".

That's not ignoring the bias, that's literally restating that you think the bias is there. But if you really think that my bias meaningfully "steered the results," then show me how that happened. Tell me how you would've proven the Claude releases were meaningfully worse, or unusual, at all, or how the methods I chose biased the data against that result, or literally anything except shifting the goalposts and using accusations of "bias" as a get-out-of-jail-free-card.

> The entire concept is so tone-deaf that failing to notice it or predict the criticism before publishing is enough to prove the bias.

And you're so committed to your preconceived notions that anything made with AI must be bad, wrong, or not worth your time, that you'll spend your entire time begging the question ("it's made with AI, therefore it's wrong") and shifting the goalposts instead of engaging meaningfully.

Also, I certainly predicted the criticism (in general, anyway, to the fact that it was made with AI; not the prose being AI) but I made it this way anyway, because if someone is so AI-blinded that they can't read and evaluate the actual metrics, methodology, and provide meaningful criticism to it, and instead can only see that it was made with AI, and they're so it doesn't matter.

Nothing you have said makes the analysis wrong. At this point, you're essentially just resorting to ad homenem and begging the question.


Replies

bakugotoday at 12:48 AM

> If I do rewrite everything myself, then it's evidence of deceptiveness... despite being asked by multiple people to do that

I don't know who asked you to do it. I wouldn't have done it. Personally, the original intent matters far more to me. You intended to submit an AI-generated article, defending AI, to be read by humans. Anything short of taking the article down and rewriting the entire thing from scratch doesn't meaningfully change that.

> Additionally, my process is often giving it exactly what I want to say, more or less, and having it HTML-format it and insert the templated numbers and UI widgets around that text.

Sorry but you're just further proving my point here. You are so deeply invested in AI that even just manually writing some English text into a static HTML file is something you consider to be below you.

Imagine going back in time 5 years and telling someone: "In the future, nobody uses text editors. On the rare occasion that we actually want to write something to a text file verbatim, we instead recite the text to a complex artificial intelligence algorithm that uses large amounts of computing power to process said text and then recite back a command that writes the text to a file. Sometimes the algorithm decides to be a smartass and change our words or add an extra quip, but that's all part of the fun."

> That's not ignoring the bias, that's literally restating that you think the bias is there.

I was referring to the bias within the actual text of the article vs the inherent bias displayed by the very concept of an AI-generated article defending AI. Passages like these:

> The thread did not stop at words. As is typical for anti-AI users, it eventually escalated to fantasies of violence

Make it fairly obvious that you went into this project with the primary goal of proving such people wrong, possibly backed by a sense of moral superiority relative to a few weirdos on the internet who took things too far (such individuals are present in every online discussion that gets big enough, and their actions do not represent the whole).

> And you're so committed to your preconceived notions that anything made with AI must be bad, wrong, or not worth your time

"Bad" or "wrong" may be subjective, but it's definitely not worth my time, no. If you didn't consider it worth your time to write it, why do you believe it's worth someone else's time to read it? Again, it doesn't matter if you went back to rewrite parts of it after being criticized, as that doesn't change the original intent.

Submitting an AI generated article and expecting meaningful human responses only makes sense if you consider your own time to be worth more than that of others. Do you?

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