alt Hacker NewsWas it Blaise Pascal who wrote:
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.
Replies
mapontosevenths • today at 12:36 AM
Exactly. What I want is not effort. It is quality. The sweat of your brow is just gross salt water.
Use whatever tool does the job, and own it if you use the wrong tool and it sucks.
I agree that the bottom line really ought to be usefulness; if it's useful and doesn't waste my time, it's fine if you received it by the use of seer stones for all I care.
However, I don't blame anybody for having red lines like this:
1. Don't send me a big long string that is merely LLM output resulting from pasting a trivial prompt + text I already have access to (or my own words!). I know about Claude too, and if that's what I wanted I'd have done it myself.
2. Don't throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don't even fully understand.
3. If you're preparing information for me, and it's overly verbose and wastes my time, I'll be twice as mad if it's obvious AI than if it's obviously human. This is basically the article's point. The asymmetry of wasting an hour of my time reading a bunch of crap that took 15 seconds of your time should make it clear why this is antisocial behavior.