You don't have to
scottsmitelli.com94 points by marginalia_nu 10 hours ago
94 points by marginalia_nu 10 hours ago
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that same kind of treachery when somebody tries to pass off a piece of AI-generated work as if it were their own voice.
There's a flaw in the Milli Vanilli argument. The band had no input into their songs. They 'performed' them by lip-syncing on stage, but all of the music and lyrics were someone elses. Milli Vanilli had no part in the creative process.
That's not technically true of AI content. There's some tiny little seed of a creative starting point in the form of a prompt needed for AI. When someone makes something with Claude or Nano Banana it's based on their idea, with their prompt, and their taste selecting whether the output is an acceptable artefact of what they wanted to make. I don't think you can just disregard that. They might not have wielded the IDE or camera or whatever, and you might believe that prompting and selecting which output you like has no value, but you can't claim there's no input or creativity required from the author. There is.
Beautifully written.
I see a lot of arguing over whether this is "good" or not. This seems like a subjective question. Some people enjoy it, if you don't, it wasn't written for you--don't read it.
Maybe the arguing is really over whether it's higher-status to enjoy longform content, or to criticize it for not being more efficient? By identifying the argument, I've revealed it as silly, and clearly proven myself to be higher status than either side. The arguing may stop now. You're welcome.
The deep irony of the longform critiques is that the length is a proof of concept for the value of human effort.
I accidently clicked on the article instead of the comments link for this one, a rare mistake as I usually glance at the comments before deciding to read, but I'm glad I did in this case.
I read it all, and found myself engaged throughout. Not to say that it was all riveting, there were certainly dryer spots than others, but it felt 'real'. Maybe they did use AI (I somehow doubt that given the content), but even if they did they went over everything in a way that retained a voice that felt authentic.
I hate many of the articles I read now all feel like they have the same half hearted attempt at trying to grab your attention without every actually clearly saying what they mean.
As for the content, I had actually just been told by management this last week that I need to become AI 'fluent' as part of future performance evaluations and I have been deeply conflicted about it. I do think AI has value to add, but I don't think it's something that should be forced and so this article resonated with me.
It's a long read, and not for everyone, but I recommend it as a way of hearing another humans opinion and deciding for yourself if it has value.
If you trust the AI disclosure at the top, this was all human made except for one heading
I liked the phrase "Aislop's fables".
"the Ghibli-inspired scenes that really, really love using every available shade of brown"
Also, Aislopica. He missed the opportunity to say Aislopica Fables.
To nobody in particular: I loved this article, and all the little jokes and asides.
I for one enjoyed this very long essay. It should've been a lot shorter, but you also didn't have to read it, it says right there in the title :)
> There were entire classes of Hacker News submissions that I refused to read the comments on. Including the comments about this article, should such comments ever materialize.
The author has made the correct call. There's a pretty deep irony that all the top-level comments at the time of this writing are about how the article is too long. It's quite clearly not trying to succinctly convince you of a point, it's meant to be a piece of genuinely human writing, and enjoyed (or not!) on the basis of that.
Author writes an interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching essay about AI and society, with a main theme being about AI and its impact on our humanity.
All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read.
Truly a gem of irony.
Design can go a long way when reading long form text. If someone here is in contact with the author please tell them to improve the typography; most notably smaller and justified text for mobile phones. Other designers could probably weigh in. I’m not an expert, but well designed text goes a long way towards comfortable reading.
Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.
I personally love the appearance of the tl;dr about a third of the way through, that is some S tier trolling.
Tl;dr:
Over sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models very much but might in the future
I would imagine that the target audience has an attention span and literacy level that allows reading sixteen thousand words without too much trouble.
Either they actually wrote all that on their own, or they had an LLM spew it. Either way, why? They had a valid point; you don't have to use LLMs to write your stuff. Why bury that point in this insane pile of verbiage?
But thanks for saving the rest of us. This is why I read the comments first.
Because it was, even if you disagree with it, beautifully written, emotionally resonant, full of funny jokes and cute stories and metaphors, and states well — and encapsulates — all of the nuances and sub-arguments of its side of the argument?
...because reading and writing well-written prose is meaningful and enjoyable?
It feels like half the people here do not read or write in their free time, which would be understandable if this were not primarily a site for software engineers who write (sorta) as a job
It is funny how that's basically one of the core points the article makes -- and in fact the article paints Hacker News commentors specifically as people who don't see that kind of inherent value in craft and artistry -- but the AI-generated summaries those people are relying on have missed it completely.
I actually disagreed with that particular point made in the article, because I don't really see myself as somebody who sees value in craft and artistry, I just want effective code that works (which imho LLMs cannot create).
But after reading this comment section... I mean if enjoying well written prose counts as enjoying craft and artistry I guess I do then? Damn.
Nobody reads any more. It's been that way for at least ten years. Nobody writes any more, without prompting.
> because reading and writing well-written prose is meaningful and enjoyable?
This is not prose, it is exposition. It is perfectly valid to critique any expository essay, especially one of this length, for its density (or lack thereof) of substantive information.
Sometimes writing can both contain information and be beautiful? This article is charming and thoughtful. Its style may not be for everyone, but for me it really hit, I am thoroughly enjoying reading it. Its style gives me no problem calling it prose.
A person writing an essay on their own site doesn't need to have the information density of bus timetable.
I somewhat disagree that this is not prose? This didn't seem like a purely expository piece. Like if it were just a straightforward technical piece than yeah its way to long, it could have been a few sentences.
But this seemed like it bridges the gap between prose and an expository essay -it was doing both.
> prose and an expository essay -it was doing both.
Putting prose in an essay means there are more valid criticisms of a piece of writing, not fewer. If somebody is breakdancing and reciting the periodic table at the same time it’s ok if somebody notices if they skipped the lanthanides and actinides.
I’m a fan of blending the two! It’s just really really hard to do both well at the same time. My most recent example is Malcolm Harris’ history of Palo Alto, it is incredibly well-done.
Sure, but the specific critique that it is too verbose seems less valid if one of the primary purposes of the piece was to be prose.
That’s kind of the point that I was making. When you mash the two together, both lenses are valid critiques.
It’s an exponentially more difficult way to accomplish either goal because one reader will see it and think “this is a sixteen thousand word essay that says very little” and another will see it and think “what a wonderful story” and there’s nobody to adjudicate who is correct.
Like I posted “this is sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models but might one day” and some folks’ rebuttal is that they enjoyed reading it. Those are two completely unrelated things! It’s like if folks saw the cover of The Hobbit and thought “Hell yeah!” and then when they read “there and back again” thought “whoever wrote that was being unnecessarily reductive”
>Either they actually wrote all that on their own, or they had an LLM spew it. Either way, why?
I mostly skimmed it. It’s entirely feasible that the author buried a confession about getting away with manslaughter or whatever that I missed somewhere in a few sentences in the middle of that novella though. It does begin with several paragraphs essentially telling you not to read the post and has a lot of completely unnecessary exposition (for example the section on Luddites)
Edit: I want to point out that I went over the post with my own eyeballs and brain
"If I cared as much as I want you to, I'd have written a shorter article"
This was so wordy I had to ask an LLM to tell me what the point is.
So you don't have to:
"you don’t have to embrace a trend, tool, or narrative simply because others say you should — especially if it doesn’t resonate with you or align with your values"
An important new twist to add to the great AI versus NO AI discussion.
> This was so wordy I had to ask an LLM to tell me what the point is.
Every time I check this comment section, this sentence jumps out at me again. You "had to" ask an LLM. You "had to".
Most people simply do not have the patience to spend 30 minutes reading something anymore. It's why magazines like The New Yorker are on life support. So, yes. "Had to."
I should point out that simply not reading a blog post that you're not interested in reading is also an option...
I noped out of this article because it was using 10 paragraphs to say nothing.
Genuine human writing can be great, this isnt it.