I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation.

LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say.

They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1]

So now we are flooded with stupid people's attempts to show us how smart they are.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300763

> The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person.

Because it wasn't pre-AI. It was normal for people to post links as arguments, counterarguments, etc. It annoyed me, and I didn't bother clicking most of them, and would occasionally tell them "If you can't bother articulating your thoughts, I can't be bothered with that link".

But I was always in the minority. If that behavior is acceptable to the masses, so is AI generated content.

(And, BTW, the "link as argument" bugs me a lot more than AI responses. If I know the person, I can assume the person has done some due diligence in reviewing the AI response before sending it to me.)

> If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.

To play the devil's advocate: it's far from a given that had you asked the LLM it would have given you a comparable response to the one you got. You're precluding the possibility that the other party instructed the LLM to write what he intended to say.

Don't get me wrong, I loathe the AI style as the next person.

But I don't buy your argument: if a person used AI to produce a text it doesn't mean they haven't steered the I in the direction they wanted the conversation to go and (hopefully) review the output.

That's an added value

Yes, it would be nice if it was also pleasant to read

It's like when you type a search in Google and get a wall of SEO spam.

I do feel like there is some middle ground where AI helps, but there's this one guy who keeps emailing everyone with walls of dumbass text and does not integrate or understand the feedback he gets when we are telling him what he needs to do. He just runs it though the LLM and replies and then forgets half of it in the next email engagement which functions as /clear on his end apparently. Like... dude I have ChatGPT and Claude, too. Actually read your goddamn emails.

A few thoughts.

- I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection.

- I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response.

- In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify.

- The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.

People are posting on this very website and commenting on Reddit using AI. I can't get myself into the headspace that would enable this behaviour. What exactly is the point of not engaging in conversation yourself and getting a bot to post it for you on an free platform. Crazy.

I completely agree in principle, but to play devil's advocate, if an "author's" prompting technique is better than mine such that they generate a more useful article than what my own AI session might produce on average, then maybe there's value in some generated articles.

The above still implies some effort going into good prompting, however. I completely agree about the uselessness of "build me a castle; no bugs plz" style generated articles.

> If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?

You are likely not the target audience anymore and they don't care if you're going to read it.

You and I and everyone else need to make it clear to people who do this that we don't like them doing this and we think they are uncool.

This is why even if I ask GPT or Claude or whatever to rewrite an email, I still rewrite it by hand with my own words, what I look for is, did the AI remove sentences where I repated myself or that were too wordy? Perfect, I'll ommit those details.

It takes energy to generate the LLM response. If you read the already generated response instead of generating your own, we burn less coal.

AI;WR

it’s not that it’s ai generated it’s that it’s bad.

i wonder if you’re equally offended by a public figure hiring young people to ghost write for their social media accounts or their books etc

Is Ai really any more offensive than the templated influencer slop of the past few years?

If your favourite creator is engaged in generating this style of content, then I think it says more about your tastes than their morals.

Don't smash the like button, don't share and unsubscribe.

> that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person

There has even been an advert extoling the behaviour (I forget which phone OS brand it was for, which is a shame as I might like to try avoid buying anything from them): "if a friend asks a question and your phone can answer directly, shouldn't it?", to which my gut reaction is "absolutely fucking not, it shouldn't". My more considered reaction is pretty much exactly the same.

For a start I'd consider it rude and if I found out it was happening reduce my fucking my communication with that person, or call instead if messaging (unless it seems they have a fake them taking calls, no doubt that'll be a thing sooner rather than later). And quite frankly I will reply when I'm good and ready, thankyouverymuch, instant automated reactions plays far too much into the "always available" thing that I don't care for even without AI.

I look forward to future news stories where people with such features turned on suffer PII exfoliation or other hacks when someone finds a prompt injection hole, or just uses the feature as designed because the user has been too open with what they have given it access to and who it should respond to (perhaps by inaction, because the defaults will likely be wide open for "convenience" until there is uproar).

while i might not have written it, i used my masters in prompt engineering to carefully guide its creation :)

I went to a farm opening this weekend. A guy was there with fliers with about the barn renovation he completed, products they used, how the process went. 100% LLM output. How would you talk to your LLM about something like that? If he gave you that flier, would you scoff and trash it talking about how you can't be bothered to read it if he didn't write it? Or would you look it over?

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale.

None of this is new. People who act like they were born yesterday at every instance in this parade of slop induced phenomena are more grating to me than the slop itself.

Just take your response. Reads as incredibly lazy to me. I've read pretty much the exact same sentence so many times by now. At a certain point, what distinguishes a mob of humans repeating each other from an LLM? Original, high quality commentary is exceedingly rare. Surely you must already know this. Of all the words written on the internet, most must be garbage. It was not LLMs that tipped this balance. In my experience, the average LLM actually speaks as a superior interlocutor to the average person online. It comes with the benefit that if you get a lame response, you probably deserve it for asking such a lame question.

Most humans are not worth reading. Sorry, but this should be obvious to anyone who has tried to research or investigate anything with significant rigor. People don't appreciate enough that many times when something comes up where the LLM is doing something "dumb" it is obviously because they are trained on a corpus authored by dumb humans. My favorite example of this is when people complained in a geopolitical simulation the LLM happily deployed a "tactical nuke" as if the phrase "tactical nuke" is not itself aptly described as a wholly human authored hallucination.

People are using LLMs at work or w/e to get back time from their corporate bosses that don't care about them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to act like an enlightenment era university student. Most words published have to be akin to "we'd like to reach out to your about your car's extended warranty" anyway. Many blogs are more or less cover for the same, or at the very least indirectly subsidized by such commercial interests. If that is not offensive, frankly it's not clear why it would be more offensive to have an AI author it. It's mostly all pablum anyway.

No one who actually cares about a topic will use a LLM. The rest of them might as well, because it makes almost no difference. If you had a clearer model of this incentive structure you doubtlessly on the whole benefit from as a modern human typing on hackernews, instead of this knee-jerk reactive one ("universally offensive and reviling") you would learn to just move on and get over it. If you want more people to have the luxury of your enlightened discernment, you should probably celebrate LLMs automating away the majority of so-called "knowledge work" so that the economy, which has largely already solved for basic human needs, can achieve a state of hyper optimization, algorithmic foresight and UBI where none of us have to work and we can spend all our time in symposium with each other, given that is what you seem to desire for yourself and other humans. We will not get there if at every turn LLMs are demonized on these incessantly banal terms.

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