Comment by btown
2 days ago
For all the challenges that AI poses to online communities, it does allow people for whom typing and dictation are painful, difficult, or impossible, to participate in those communities in ways they never could before.
I think HN is broadly supportive of these voices, and I think that an "unwritten exception" to this rule is implicit here. But I'm in the camp that making an explicit exception for special circumstances would be a meaningful statement that all voices are welcome.
>it does allow people for whom typing and dictation are painful, difficult, or impossible
Putting aside the example proposed above where typing or dictation may be difficult, "impossible" seems, well, impossible. I am curious how you suppose that someone who cannot type or dictate at all would prompt an LLM.
In a forum/community context, speed is vital! If it takes an order of magnitude more time to generate responses like yours and mine, one must choose which conversations one participates in much more carefully, and every such investment risks having the context of the conversation shift dramatically while drafting a response - to the point that one might be considered rude or disconnected. That makes participation essentially impossible.
Someone with a slower rate of both reading and creating text would benefit less from LLM assistance, to be sure. But someone who can read quickly, but may only be able to generate/select a few bits of entropy per second due to physical limitations? (Human speech is widely cited at a median of 39 bits per second.) They’d benefit massively from a system that could generate proposed responses that could be chosen from and refined.
In other words, if you’re the oracle, and the machine asks multiple choice questions until it is certain it speaks with your voice - is there a better set of such questions than just letter-by-letter a-z, a-z, a-z? Does that imply the content is AI-edited? Or is it an accessibility tool?
This response did not even attempt to address my question whatsoever.
Without negating your point I want to add that at some threshold of tediousness, usability issues become accessibility issues. The fact that this threshold varies from individual to individual makes heuristic guidelines difficult.
Of course! This applies to more than just issues like this, but essentially all types of moderation.
There have to be exceptions because humans have exceptions.
I am just very interested in the specific scenario this person imagined for the case of typing or dictation being impossible.