by xpe | 2026-03-08 03:16:16+00:00
> ... But prose? That's from human to human, it's sacred and meant for other people. Using AI for that is deceitful.

I understand the sentiment. Meaning I think I understand some of the underlying frustration. But I don't care for the tone or the framing or the depth of analysis (for there isn't much there; I've seen the "if you didn't write it, why should I read it" cliché before *, and it ain't the only argument in town). Now for my detailed responses:

1. In the same way the author wants people to respect other people, I want the author to respect the complexity of the universe. I'm not seeing that.

2. If someone says "I wrote this without any LLM assistance" but do so anyway, THAT is clearly deceptive.

3. If you read a page that was created with LLM assistance, it isn't reasonable for you to say the creator was being deceptive just because you assumed. It takes two to achieve deception: both the sender and the receiver.

4. If you read a page on the internet, it is increasingly likely there was no human in the loop for the article at all. Good luck tracing the provenance of who made the call to make it happen. It might well be downstream of someone's job. (Yes, we can talk about diffusion of responsibility, etc., that's fair game -- but if you want to get into the realm of moral judgments, this isn't going to be a quick and tidy conversation)

5. I think the above comment puts too much of a "oh the halcyon days!" spin on this. Throughout history, many humans, much of the time, are largely repackaging things we had heard before. Unfortunately (or just "in reality") more of us are catching on to just how memetically-driven people are. We are both individuals and cogs. It is an uncomfortable truth. That brainwashed uncle you have is almost certainly a less reliable source of information than Claude.

6. The web has crappy incentives. It sucks. Yes, I want people to behave better. That would be nice, but I can't realistically expect people to behave better on the web unless there are incentives and consequences that align with what I want. The Web is a dumpster fire, not because of bad individuals, but because of system dynamics. Incentives. Feedback.

7. If people communicate more clearly, with fewer errors, that's at least a narrow win. One has to at least factor this in.

8. People accusing other people of being LLMs has a cost. Especially when people do it overconfidently or in a crude or mean manner. I've been on the receiving end. Why? Because I write in a way that sometimes triggers people because it resembles how LLMs write.

* I want to read high quality things. I actually care less if you wrote it as bullet points, with the help of an LLM, on a napkin, on a posterboard ... my goal is to learn from something suited to some purpose. I'm happy reading a computer-generated chart. I don't need a human to do that by hand.

The previous paragraph attempts to gesture at some of the conceptual holes in the common arguments behind "if you want a human to read it, a human should right it": they aren't systematically nor rigorously "wargamed" or "thought-experimented"; they are mostly just "knee-jerked".

I am quite interested in many things, including: (1) connecting with real people; (2) connecting with real people that don't merely regurgitate an information source they just ingested; (3) having an intelligent process generating the things I read. As an example of the third, I want "intelligent" organizations that synthesize contributions from their constituent parts. I want "intelligent" algorithms to help me focus on what matters to me. &c.

If a machine does that well, I'm not intrinsically bothered. If a human collaborates with an LLM to do that, fine. Whatever. We have bigger problems! Much bigger ones.

Yes, I want to live in a world where humans are valued for what they write and their intrinsic qualities, even as machines encroach on what used to be our biggest differentiator: intelligence itself. But wanting this and morally shaming people for not doing it doesn't seem like a good way to actually make it happen. Getting to that world, to my eye, requires public sense-making, grappling with the reality of how the world works, forming coalitions, organizing society, and passing laws.

Yes, I understand that HN has a policy that people write their own stuff, and I do. (See #8 above as well as my about page.)

Thank you to the approximately zero or maybe one person who made it this far. I owe you a beer. You can easily find me. I'm serious. But then we have to find a way to have a discussion while enjoying a beer on a video call. Alas.

I expect better from people -- and unfortunately a lot of people's output is lower quality than what I get from Claude. THIS is what pisses me off: that a machine-curated output is actually more useful to me than a vast majority of what people say, at least when I have particular questions to ask. This is one or many uncomfortable realities I would like people need to not flinch away from. As far as intelligent output is concerned, humans are losing a lot of ground. And fast. Don't shoot the messenger. If you don't recognize this, you might have a rather myopic view of intelligence that somehow assumes it must be biological or you just keep moving the goalposts. Or that somehow (but how?) humans "have it" but machines can't.