I didn't finish the article, it was slightly difficult to read due to handwriting, and I'm not sure if I would have gotten any more value if I had continued. The mere of act of having written, or prompted to get something written is not intrinsically valuable to me. I have a degree in English literature, and I do not feel confident in my ability to discern AI writing from human anymore. I wasn't sure when I stopped reading if the images had been generated or not, and I don't know if it matters either way.
If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.
I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.
I think that perhaps you would have gotten more out of finishing it - given that you would have found out that it is more of a short story than an "article."
> I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof.
The problem, at least for me, is that I don't trust AI. Subtle mistakes, outright hallucinations, or mistakes/omissions that an actual expert of the domain would immediately notice, whatever.
And as soon as I encounter anything that even looks like one of the typical AI tells or, in long content, a lack of cohesion or repetition... I can't help myself from immediately second-guessing every little thing in the content. And where there's smoke, usually there is fire... and I find myself annoyed for having wasted time to read something I had to crosscheck with other sources and found my suspicions confirmed. At least sometimes I learn something from digging into original sources, but frankly, I don't have the time for that.
Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?
Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.
> Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.
I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.
> Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?
With a human, I can at least have implicit trust based on credentials - e.g. a medical doctor, a scientist or a well-known programmer. Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true. But if it's some random blogger, the text reeking of LLM tells, who posts no sources, nothing I can (easily) cross-check? Off to the bin it goes, or if it's something that might actually be useful for me to know being true, I'll go and research it.
Or there's other trust cues for content. A respected academic magazine ranks higher than a "layman's magazine" which ranks higher than a well-respected newspaper which ranks higher than a tabloid which ranks higher than yellow-press which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (without bluecheck) on Twitter which ranks higher than "j0ey r4nd0m" (with bluecheck) on Twitter.
It used to be the other way around with Twitter, but nowadays, the bluecheck is mostly used by garbage LLM bots farming views for monetization.
(Side note: the fact that AI training cannot do this kind of "implicit trust" accounting at all and just blindly ingests everything in the corpus into its weights is a huge issue!)
> I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder.
I'd rather say in a few years people who get caught using AI get lynchmob'd. The resistance, particularly among the artist, environmental and worker rights groups, is fierce and it's only increasing with all the negative impacts of AI.
> Basically, if Raymond Chen writes a blog post detailing how Windows 95 recognized software installers to ward off unwanted modifications to files [1], I'll 100% trust what he writes to be true.
OK, now what if tomorrow Raymond Chen writes a blog post that was partially or wholly authored by an LLM. Would you trust it as much as one entirely written by Raymond? Why or why not?
> obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder
I disagree and think this is an overly extreme take.
I will agree that the trust/correctness thing is kind of silly because humans can be and are often wrong just as much.
But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output. Maybe LLM output is OK at work. I honestly don't care if its used for corporate bureaucracy stuff I probably wasn't actually reading it anyway outside of skimming it or putting into an LLM to summarize for me.
But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection. We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
So I don't think its unreasonable at all to be immediately dismissive of anything that is pure LLM output. The actual content itself is only one half of the equation.
> But there's a creative element that gets missed with LLM output.
You mean there's a human creative element that is lost. LLMs are creative just as humans are. I had an LLM write something fairly creative, and people on HN loved it (I think it was clear that it was LLM generated).
I had an LLM write a song about a piece of technology, and one of the key folks behind the technology loved it, and reached out to me to get permission to play it in the next conference about that technology.[1]
Normal people can appreciate LLM creativity. That's why I mentioned disorders.
> But there's a real human creative element that's lost when LLMs are used everywhere for nearly all writing. AI generated art, music, novels, articles, etc. miss the point of human connection.
As Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crap". He had it wrong - the percentage is much higher. Most of the human generated stuff in the categories you listed above are crap. Why put the spotlight on LLMs when they also produce crap?
> We consume works from each other as a form of social and empathetic connection, very important things that makes human society work, we're naturally social creatures.
You are blindly looking at only one facet of human communication. Much of human communication is also misunderstood, miscommunicated, and breaks those empathetic connections and cause social problems. And I'm not talking about bad human actors, but ordinary folks who, in their attempts to create connection, make things unwittingly go in the opposite direction. These are not exceptional situations - you'd see plenty of it in any large HN thread in the pre-LLM days.
Let's not romanticize human communications of yore by remembering only the (rare) positive examples.
> Interjecting an LLM into that communication breaks that connection. You are no longer connecting with, or sharing an experience with, the human on the other end of the art. Your connection is with a machine, which is to say, not a connection at all. Its low effort, and its an uncanny valley of imitating a human.
You state mere opinion as fact, and feel comfort by surrounding yourself with those who think likewise (much of the HN crowd). It is not grounded on anything.
If Jill used an LLM to state what she intended, and it did it in a way she approved, and Jack can't connect with the person because an LLM was at play, the problem is not with the LLM or the Jill. She is trying to connect, and may well be doing it in a more effective manner than she would have without.
Just as when writing something important, where strong emotions can get involved, we share a draft with someone to get feedback, people will share it with an LLM to get feedback. Yet people like the OP will criticize them for doing so (the part I quoted in my comment).
At the end of the day, if Jill got an LLM to help with her writing, and confirmed that the final text reflects what she intended, and Jack says he can't trust any of it because an LLM touched it, then Jack is clearly signaling a lack of respect for Jill. She put in the effort to communicate, put in effort to proofread/edit, and Jack has labeled her and moved on.
If Jack doesn't trust Jill to use an LLM appropriately, then Jack shouldn't bother reading anything Jill writes. The presence of an LLM is a red herring.
[1] Silly in retrospect. I didn't create it - why should I be the one giving permission?
AI text is just a quick heuristic for garbage. But I’ve always disliked garbage. Even when it came dressed like:
How to use Monads
When David James was a young child, his mother used to tell him that you could oil vegetables before putting them in the pan. On the ranch in Eastern Kentucky David’s mornings would be spent watering, caring for the cows, and then playing with the dogs. Before he started blah blah blah…
<500 words later> and then he defined a structure called a monad with three properties…
Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable. Now it’s interspersed with the useful parts.
But that’s fine: it’s a solved problem by just making a machine extract information. So yes, complaining about the form is passé. I’m going to put it in the ore refiner anyway and the slag goes in the pit. Away to the slag pit with David’s infernal mother.
> Dude, it’s just a class of this filler text for people whose success criteria is lines of code. At least previously the filler was somewhat skippable.
That is a different problem though. SEO optimization, the bane of modern human existence...
I hope that her star power encourages young people to read literally anything. The ability for her fans to sit with a singular text, without ad breaks, sponcon, brand deals, and everything else on social media seems like a societal win.
Spotify being listed as one of the brands doing AI right is jarring to me. It’s the only one of the companies mentioned where I’ve had multiple conversations with non tech people about how much they hate their AI usage. Specifically in their case the drift to AI produced and performed music in the playlists that are not explicitly labeled as AI. And there seems to be a nuance to what uses people are ok with, large language models for personal use, ok, generative ai in any creative capacity, offensive. Obviously anecdotal, but this article was very far from the reality I’m experiencing
Now, personally I want AI to disappear, but music is one of the few areas where AI COULD be potentially useful. The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it. I still think humans are better than AI, but there were audio tracks fully AI generated which was not bad. It does not convince me into one of those humans who fell for the skynet trap and embraced AI, but I also can not say that all of AI is totally useless - just 99.9%.
> the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it.
Setting aside how simplistic a simple good/bad scale for any art is, who made a piece of music and what they were expressing with it is absolutely part of the quality consideration.
A big part of music is being able to share it with friends at a party, sing it at Karaoke, see the performer live, follow their story etc. so that I can be a part of some kind of culture.
I’m not looking for an emotional painkiller to keep me subdued and isolated.
> The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it
The first thing I do when I find a nice track is to lookup the album and the artist. I may not like all the tracks on the album, or all the albums of the artists. But the album vision and the artist motivation and skills is why an album (I listen by album) get added to my collection. That collection is meaningful for me, not for the quality of the tracks (which is fairly subjective) but the emotional resonance I have with it. Kinda like the house I grew up vs a random penthouse. An AI produce piece may be nice, but it won’t have the emotional depth to anchor it for me.
I feel that "good" music has some emotional resonance with me, at some level. In my opinion AI won't ever be able generate what I'm looking for, it always strikes me as somewhat bland or seems too much like another track.
Background music in distracting environments, where the listening is maybe the third or fourth thing I'm doing, maybe AI will be acceptable.
https://www.audible.ca/fr_CA/pd/What-Could-Go-Wrong-Livre-Au... , this podcast (which I guess is now only available as a book) was really interesting, about 3/4 of the way through they tackle the emotional resonance bit, with one of the people from Broken Social Scene, and the artist kinda breaks down because the AI model they were experimenting with was able to replicate the "humanness" of music that loved. All in all it was a really interesting program, but the music section was probably the most fascinating.
The humanness of the music I listen to is given by actual humans composing and playing it. I don't mean little mistakes or whatever signal, but knowing it's made by humans. Otherwise I can't be arsed to listen to it, because probably I only care so much about the music itself. Because why would I? But yeah some people choose a virtual girlfriend too, so I'm probably just not in the right target group for AI productions.
PS: of course they can lie to me. Until I find out.
But then why stop at music and not apply it to all art like movies and books as well. The criterium to judge should be the same for them.
But I feel you are underestimating how much people care about the artist as well. Could AI get that level of support from people knowing its not a real human being? I don't think so. I mean most artist stories are also fabricated but if you explictly tell people hey this is like not real at all and fully ai but its a rapper from this particular city who grew up struggling with this particular issue so people from that city and facing those issues could relate to him probably, dont think it will work because people will still know its a bot pretending to be from their city and facing their particular issue.
Lastly i also generally public likes authenticity and the idea of an algorithm just spamming music is not very inspiring in that regard. Maybe in a blind test, they wouldn't even be able to tell which track is ai and which is not but the moment you tell them which one it is, they will likely think its bad, because who made the art completely changes the prespective of the consumer
I’m not going to get the wow of “how did they perform that phrase/melody/rhythm” the same way from music that wasn’t actually performed (ack this doesn’t apply to all genres obviously)
I think someone downloading an app to help them be more spontaneous for a partner who wants that is extremely authentic, it takes someone seeing that they have a blind spot.
On the most recent iPhone pro I have a query running (about ~15 minutes so far) and the results are really good, just really slow, but I imagine the performance is worse on an older device
A lot of people are taking fentanyl thinking it's something else. It's pervasive in the drug supply. Kids who are being served ads for ketamine on social media are buying street K (obviously with a confidence boost from the advertising big tech allows) and boom, fentanyl. People who have been prescribed xanax, and got a little addicted and then buy it on the street because the pharmacist and doctor are onto their misues... It's not as simple as calling it an opiate thing, and even then, opiate addicts in my book deserve to like live. We have to rethink our approach to drugs, because this isn't the same game as even a decade ago. I think legalizing and deshaming to the point of exhaustion makes sense, but I'm not sure my thought is right.
I thought this seemed fair till i read it was in flushing. Nyc is the worst, but, if you’re American where else can you get a city that international and walkable
Chicago, DC, Boston, SF, Philly (depending on "international"), Portland (walkable but not really international - it's just 90s-2000s white Americans doing 90s-2000s white American stuff, you'd think Kurt Cobain still roams the earth)
Though if you want affordability, that leaves Chicago and Philly.
NYC sucks in that sense though, as a lot of industries that are conglomerated in NYC haven't ensured salaries keep up with those in High Finance and Tech
At least Boston has relatively affordable suburbs and Bay Area level wages, DC has plenty of federal jobs that pay competitively, and SF has the larger tech industry (which is still going great despite a couple high profile layoffs)
Miami? I was impressed with Miami when I visited. Lots of high rise residential housing, sane political governance, nice downtown, and pretty walkable.
IIRC Miami was the worst on a list put together by CityNerd of large cities with a high (housing+transit)/income ratio. I can't access YT at the moment so feel free to correct.
Yeah, though I think Bay Area is similar - LA is huge and more equivalent to compare to Bay Area (SF + Oakland + Peninsula + San Jose), than just SF itself.
To be clear; what I mean LA as in LA city not the county. LA and Miami are similar in they have some neighborhoods that are walkable (the most popular parts), but the majority of them are not and they’re not very walkable between the two. Little Tokyo is walkable but then there’s a gap between there and downtown, then you have a huge Hollywood stretch then a huge gap around ktown if you go between them. Miami has the same issue, Brickell is walkable but as soon as you leave it has a bunch of impassable areas to go to downtown, same as if you were to leave wynwood. The worst part of Miami city’s unwalkability is once you leave those neighborhoods it pedestrian hostile like Shendahdoah or Little Havana.
SF and NYC do have neighborhoods like this, but those occupy very tiny portions of those cities comparably to Miami.
Yes. In the US, sure. Compared to cities outside the US it is horrible. Less walkable than most, food is ok if you know where to go but nothing special and also super expensive like everything else, aggressive drug addicts wandering the streets, high crime including random acts of violence for literally no reason at all, incessant aggressive honking at all hours of the night, even when you are paying $5k a month for your 1 bedroom apartment it the apartment itself is not a nice place to live in terms of things like sunlight and ventilation, and the city itself is super corrupt. There’s a million folks in unions and other arrangements who are “grandfathered in” to all sorts of privileges that are used to secure their vote. The city has an astronomical budget, all the money is going to more or less bribe key voting blocks. It has been this way for well over a century.
The thing that NYC really has going for it is that the rest of the country is a giant suburban dystopia.
i live in NYC and have traveled to plenty of other international cities.
none of the things that you're saying are true compared to my experiences (or those of my friends) in any way that i can think of as meaningful.
the only city i've been to that feels like it's captured the same "vibe" as NYC, for me, has been Paris.
Tokyo was more impressive in its sprawl and history (and obviously cleanliness), but there is a sense of Japanese monoculture that saturates everything in a way that is almost tactile. not in a bad way, but definitely such that i felt like something was "missing" during my visit.
Singapore gets really close to the same feeling, but for all of its heterogeneity there's an undercurrent of authoritarian sterility that made it very difficult to feel comfortable (Disneyland with the Death Penalty, indeed).
anyway this is already pretty long winded so i should probably stop talking, but NYC has a lot "going for it" besides the rest of the US just sort of being a suburban hellscape. at some point i'll move out, but living here has been a really comforting reminder that international views such as yours of American cities are incorrect.
I was born in Manhattan and lived in the city for over a decade and still own an apartment downtown. I know a thing or two about the place. It's cool that you get a vibe from being a transplant here for a couple years, that has literally nothing to do with anything I said. The lawlessness is also quite a different experience for women--I am guessing having random guys off the street try to force your door open and follow you into your building or corner you on a subway or follow you around riding a bike aggressively catcalling you is probably not something you are dealing with on a regular basis.
The day I left I moved out over a pool of dried blood from a stabbing in front of my door the night before. I've lived in over 20 countries since then and not experience anything similar except maybe in Canada, which has similar drug problems as the US.
With the caveat that I moved away (due to work) a little under a decade ago... what you describe doesn't match my experience with NYC at all. Maybe back in the 80s, before it was cleaned up... but I was less frequently there back then. Before you said you lived in the city, the message from your first post made me assume you were talking about the city as someone who learned everything they know about it from the news.
Visiting another city is not in any way comparable to living there. Or would you defer to the opinion of some tourist who visited NYC for a random weekend?
I already felt like I was ranting for too long, but yes that too. People are paying far more now for a much worse experience/quality of life compared to before the pandemic. I was at one point in the city among my reasons because it had good public transit, but then taking taxis all the time because my partner did not feel safe on the subway after numerous incidents, and just had a “what the fuck am I even doing here” moment.
Oh. Yeah I would also probably pay $15k for $1k rent if I intended to stay in NYC long term. You'd have positive ROI on that before the end of year two.
But Flushing is too far from Manhattan and too close to La Guardia. I'd gladly pay more not to listen to that shit all the time, the car noise in the city is bad enough.
Well, if it's "international" you're looking for, there are other cities abroad like that. But I get your point, the US has very few walkable cities with high levels of diversity.
If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.
I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.