alt Hacker NewsI fear in the future people will read even less because of how often people cheap out and use AI to write. I know the author of this article tells you never to use a single word it suggests, however I still, while reading, am checking for any amount of AI used. This makes reading less enjoyable, and even a bit stressful.
If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
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Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest.
Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
100%. We're producing more content, faster, than ever before but ... most of it is just click-producing garbage that won't stand the test of time.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Because the value of writing are not the words on a piece of paper but the idea they convey.
Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them?
Teacher assistant homeworks are not worth to do, because they are made by a TA and not by the course professor?
Of course there are writing as: "Hey ChatGPT write me a piece around coding with LLMs" and yeah, those are not worth reading.
But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.
People on my FOSS project couldn't see the issue with their AI slopped documentation contributions.
On one hand I'm like, yeah fair enough it needed writing and something is better than nothing.
On the other I know nobody wants to read it now because it's just word vomit rather than how a human would write something they'd like another human to read.
I hate it so much.
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Because the information in the post could be valuable regardless of human or LLM involvement.
I don't ever watch TV or streaming shows anymore. It's been a huge improvement in my life. It's the same with reading. Reading is mostly a waste of my time, with some notable exceptions. I'm glad I spend way less time doing each of these!
Just read people you can trust. Why are you giving yourself all this busy work?
Just make your own tree of material to read. You should have a couple dozen writers/journalists you admire, look at who these people read then start reading those people, then you repeat the cycle.
Don't waste your time reading anything new, most new things are bad. Most ideas we struggle with, are ideas we have been discussing since the written record was invented out of necessity.
Anything new worth reading will assuredly make your way to you if you are at all connected.
Agreed completely. (This reply took me 0.4 seconds to generate.)
> If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
This isn’t your thought; you are merely regurgitating a sentence we have all heard many times before, practically word for word.
Presumably you think there is value in posting yet another copy of that other person’s thoughts in this discussion, despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.
Why is that? Is it because you think there is inherent value in the sentence you transcribed, in spite of the near zero effort you spent creating it? If you think anybody here should read it, then you have undermined your own point. If you don’t think anybody should read it, then you shouldn’t post it.