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cwillutoday at 3:34 AM2 repliesview on HN

A thing that notably triggers my allergies is that if significant human effort went into something, a few paragraphs written by a human seems like a trivial additional investment; if that last touch is missing, it's really hard for me to extend the benefit of the doubt that there really is something there.

Obviously this is only one signal among many, one that can be overruled, but the ick remains regardless.


Replies

dangtoday at 4:12 AM

I agree to an extent, but there are many exceptions, so one can't really withhold the benefit of the doubt.

For example, non-native English speakers (as is the case with these guys IIRC) frequently use these tools. Maybe they shouldn't—as I've been telling a lot of people who email, mistakes are rapidly becoming a sign of authenticity at this point—but the belief that they need to is widespread, and this doesn't mean they didn't do significant work.

(Side note: it's a common assumption that machine-translated text is in a different category from LLM-edited text. From what we're seeing, that assumption is unfortunately completely wrong.)

Another important case is people with disabilities who find these technologies assistive. Again, one can argue that they're increasingly better off just posting their own writing in the raw, but this is a pretty obscure point to get across to people.

Beyond those cases, a lot of people just don't write easily, and/or don't feel their writing is any good. A lot of them are using LLMs to compensate for that, and this by no means implies that their work is bad. Maybe they just have a phobia about writing and/or don't express themselves well that way.

People who enjoy writing or are confident writers fail to understand how emotionally fraught writing is for many others.

Personally I'm down with the "writing is thinking" view, from which it follows that bad writing is bad thinking. But it doesn't follow that "thinking is writing" - that's a much stronger claim, from which it would follow that good thinking is good writing—and this I think is false.

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clhodapptoday at 5:00 AM

It frankly doesn't matter how much human effort went into finding the vulnerability, it just matters if it exists, how severe it is, and how easy it is to exploit.

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