alt Hacker NewsGiven this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier than ever with LLMs.
This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to where in corporate situations a reader can't say no to doing work for a selfish writer.
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I've had a guy once reply in an email with a bug report generated by ChatGPT telling me that some piece of software I wrote wasn't working. He just plopped right there the discussion he had with the confirmation bias machine confirming 100% that what he had in front was sending spurious messages. With all the information in the world at its disposal, the LLM did not consider informing the reporter that maybe his code should flush the serial device pipe before starting his processing. I stopped short from facetiously replying to him that maybe he should use another model, since his seems to be broken.
I think that this is the essence of the argument. I spent two weeks of long nights across a few different sessions with millions of tokens generated, to produce a 5 page proof. I think we have come to the age of the aesthetics of curation. At least I don’t feel like I broke this silent contract. The effort you put in driving the torrent of words before distilling it is a new art. First time I tried it and it felt more creative than slop. The judgement nevertheless lies on the eye of the beholder.
Isn't this just a continuation of the performance art of the modern corporate environment though? There's an entire industry producing pages of documents which aren't read, aren't responded to, but need to be at least X lines long for anyone to take them "seriously".
Then suddenly LLMs happened and it's like the mask is off: no one's reading them still, but also no one is writing them either.
Which is perhaps a drop in the ocean of the insanity which is "we need you to work on the Jira tasks" as basically a job title.
Its exactly this. I have had a few LLM coding sessions where I reviewed the resulting work and thought "I don't think my team can safely PR this." I then went back and broke it down into smaller PRs, still using LLMs but at a size that is easy to review. And I reviewed the output myself before I asked a reviewer to commit their time.
The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive workflow slowing everyone else down, so the pressure is growing for writers to just shove massive PRs out the door and reviewers to use LLMs to make that tractable. I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do.