Comment by gabriel666smith

>Taking the time to write something, and read over it is a better skill than asking an LLM to do it for you.

Furthermore, if someone doesn't think whatever they're saying is worth investing the time to do this, it's a signal to me that whatever they could say probably isn't worth my time either.

I don't know why this isn't a bigger part of the conversation around AI content. It shows a clear prioritization of the author's time over the readers', which fine, you're entitled to valuing your own time more than mine, but if you do, I'll receive that prioritization as inherently disrespectful of my time.

> Taking the time to write something, and read over it is a better skill than asking an LLM to do it for you.

Yes, this is a great skill to have: no argument from me. This wasn't my point, and I hope you can see than upon reflection.

> All those points you mention in your first paragraph are excuses, trying to make it seem like there was some sort of effort to get an LLM to write a post.

Consider that a reader of the word 'excuses' would often perceive an escalation of sorts. A dismissal.

> Quality comes from your ability to think and reason through a topic.

That's part of it. Since the quote above is a bit ambiguous to me, I will rephrase it as "What are the factors that influence the quality of a comment posted on Hacker News?" and then answer the question. I would then split apart that question into sub-questions of the form "To what extent does a comment ..."

- address the context? Pay attention to the conversational history?

- follow the guidelines of the forum?

- communicate something useful to at least some of the readers?

- use good reasoning?

One thing that all of the four bullet points require is intelligence. Until roughly ~2 years ago, most people would have said the above demand human intelligence; AI can't come close. But the gap is narrowing. Anyhow, I would very much like to see more intelligence (of all kinds, via various methods, including LLM-assisted brainstorming) in the service of better comments here. But intelligence isn't enough; there are also shared values. Shared values of empathy and charity.

In case you are wondering about my "agenda"... it is something along the lines of "I want everyone to think a lot harder about these issues, because we ain't seen NOTHING yet". I also strive try to promote and model the kind of community I want to see here.

> The prompt & any follow-ups do have notable effects, but IMO this just means that most of actual meaning you wanted to convey is in those prompts.

If you mean in the sense of differentiating meaning from the base model, I take your point. But in another sense, using GPT-OSS 120b as example where the weights are around 60 GB and my prompt + conversation are e.g. under 10K, what can we say? One central question seems to be: how many of the model's weights were used to answer the question? (This is an interesting research question.)

> If I was your interlocutor, I'd understand you & your ideas better if you posted your prompts as well as (or instead of) whatever the LLM generated.

Indeed, yes, this is a good practice for intellectual honesty when citing an LLM. It does make me wonder though: are we willing to hold human accounts to the same standard? Some fields and publications encourage authors to disclose conflicts of interest and even their expected results before running the experiments, in the hopes of creating a culture of full disclosure.

I enjoy real human connection much more than LLM text exchanges. But when it comes to specialized questions, I seek any sources of intelligence that can help: people, LLMs, search engines, etc. I view it as a continuum that people can navigate thoughtfully.

This. LLMs are an autocomplete engine. They aren't curious. Take your curiosities and use your human voice to express them.

The only reason you should be using an LLM on a forum like this is to do language translation. Nobody cares about your grammar skills, and there really isn't a reason to use an LLM outside of that.

LLMs CANNOT provide unique objectivity or offer unknown arguments because they can only use their own training data, based on existing objectivity and arguments, to write a response. So please shut that shit down and be a human.

Signed, a verified/tested autistic old man.

cheers

> This is about genuine humanity.

The meaning of the word genuine here is pretty pivotal. At its best, genuine might take an expansive view of humanity: our lived experience, our seeking, our creativity, our struggle, in all its forms. But at its worst, genuine might be narrow, presupposing one true way to be human. Is a person with a prosthetic leg less human? A person with a mental disorder? (These questions are all problematic because they smuggle in an assumption.)

Consider this thought experiment. Consider a person who interacts with an LLM, learns something, finds it meaningful, and wants to share it on a public forum. Is this thought less meaningful because of that generative process? Would you really prefer not to see it? Why?

Because you can point to some "algorithmic generation" in the process? With social media, we read algorithmically shaped human comments, many less considered than the thought experiment. Nor did this start with social media. Even before Facebook, there was an algorithm: our culture and how we spread information. Human brains are meme machines, after all.

Think of human output as a process that evolves. Grunts. Then some basic words. Then language. Then writing. Then typing. Why not: "Then LLMs"? It is easy to come up with reasons, but it is harder to admit just how vexing the problem is. If we're willing, it is way for us to confront "what is humanity?".

You might view an LLM as an evolution of this memetic culture. In the case of GPT-OSS 120b, centuries of writing distilled into ~60 GB. Putting aside all the concerns of intellectual property theft, harmful uses, intellectual laziness, surveillance, autonomous weapons, gradual disempowerment, and loss of control, LLMs are quite an amazing technological accomplishment. Think about how much culture we've compressed into them!

As a general tendency, it takes a lot of conversation and refinement to figure out how to communicate a message really well to an audience. What a human bangs out on the first several iterations might only be a fraction of what is possible. If LLMs help people find clearer thinking, better arguments, and/or more authenticity (whatever that means), maybe we should welcome that?

Also, not all humans have the same language generation capacity; why not think of LLMs as an equalizer? You touch on this (next quote), but I am going to propose thinking of this in a broader way...

> I think the one exception I would make...

When I see a narrow exception for an otherwise broad point, I notice. This often means there is more to unpack. At the least, there is philosophical asymmetry. Do they survive scrutiny? Certainly there are more exceptions just around the corner...

That’s a generous way to think about downvotes. Seeing them as signal rather than rejection leaves room to reflect and adjust.

I’m new here and come more from a philosophical background than a technical one, so I’m still learning the norms. One thing I’m sensitive to in communities like this is who ends up informally deciding what counts as legitimate participation.