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pessimizer • today at 5:36 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

> But Cynthia Dunlop's survey on tech reader preferences has shown that people overwhelming dislike AI-written articles, preferring even "bad" human writing to "good" AI writing.

I would absolutely ignore surveys on this, and pay attention to studies on this (or run your own if you have a mix of slop and human-written articles on your site.) People don't know their preferences.

It's fine to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how they might vote; it's dumb to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how the economy is doing.


Replies

kqp • today at 6:26 PM

People absolutely know what they experienced, they’re just guessing about what went wrong and how to fix it. “I hate AI” doesn’t necessarily mean “I can only please this person by not using AI”, but it sure does mean there’s something about your AI this person hates. “The economy’s doing poorly” doesn’t tell you about Nvidia’s stock price, but it does tell you about this person’s experiences and information exposure.

gfody • today at 6:02 PM

yep, there's a massive say-do gap in play - very similar to the way people say they prefer no makeup but behavioral studies reveal a preference for light/tastefully-applied makeup

people love to openly hate on ai/assisted writing meanwhile https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector reveals a lot of it is being voted up to the frontpage