Comment by antonvs

25 days ago

What better solution do you have in mind? This scenario is AI being used as a tool to eliminate toil. It’s not replacing human creativity, or anything like that.

If you have a problem with that, then you should also have a problem with computers in general.

But maybe you do have a problem with computers - after all, they regularly eliminate jobs, for example. In that case, AI is only special in its potentially greater effectiveness at doing what computers have always been used to do.

But most of us use computers in various ways even if we have qualms about such things. In practice, the same already applies to AI, and likely will for you too, in future.

It's not eliminating toil, it's externalizing it from the writer to the reader.

If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader enough to just give me the prompt you used rather than the output.

  • In a lot of my AI assisted writing, the prompt is an order of magnitude larger than the output.

    Prompt: here are 5 websites, 3 articles I wrote, 7 semi-relevant markdown notes, the invitation for the lecture I'm giving, a description of the intended audience, and my personal plan and outline.

    Output: draft of a lecture

    And then the review, the iteration, feedback loops.

    The result is thoroughly a collaboration between me and AI. I am confident that this is getting me past writer blocks, and is helping me build better arcs in my writing and lectures.

    The result is also thoroughly what I want to say. If I'm unhappy with parts, then I add more input material, iterate further.

    I assure you that I spend hours preparing a 10_min pitch. With AI.

    (This comment was produced without AI.)

    • Great example. Just give me the links you would give to the LLM. I also have an LLM and can use it if I want to, or I can read the links and notes. But I have zero interest in reading or hearing a lecture that you yourself find too tedious to write.

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    • Because it’s not totally clear from your comment: what part are you contributing in this process?

  • The original comment was saying that the AI would be both the writer now and the reader, in future. That's how the toil is eliminated. Instead of reading or searching through a series of release notes, you can just ask questions about what you're specifically looking for.

    > If writing something is too tedious for you, at least respect my time as the reader

    "If comprehending something is too tedious for you..."

    Seriously, don't jump to indignant rhetoric before you're sure you've understood the discussion.

    • What's the point of the AI writer in that use case? Just send your prompt to my AI. And for that matter since prompting is in plain English, why not just send your prompt directly to me, and I'll choose to prettify it through an AI or not as I prefer.

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    • In this scenario the ai _writer _ is redundant.

      You might as well publish the prompt you were going to give to the writer and have the ai reader consume that directly.

      Assuming you think any of this is a good idea of course. Personally I wouldn’t trust ai to interpret release notes for anything that i cared about

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Obvious better solution is to either a.) not write those release notes b.) try to figure out release notes format and process that leads to useful release notes. Once it is useful, you can decide to automate it or not - and measure whether automation is still achieving the goal.

What OP did was "we lacked communication, then created ineffective process that achieved nothing, so we automated the ineffective process and pay third party for doing it".

If you pay tokens for release notes that nobody reads, they you may just ... not pay tokens.