Comment by twoodfin
5 hours ago
hn consumers by and large weren’t upvoting AI-written technology articles 12 months ago. The models got better, and now multiple such articles appear on the front page daily—with glowing comments.
Humanity’s aesthetics are not (apparently) all that sophisticated on average.
Could you give some examples of such articles?
Here’s a sample of my “flagged” list from just the past few days:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897140
Not the person you're replying to, but here's one that was at the top of the homepage this morning (and that I immediately clicked out of because it had that AI stink). I would bet my next paycheck that this was heavily edited by an LLM, if not outright written by one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973376
OK, but to qualify it also needs glowing comments about the writing, not just interaction with the concept (or title) of the article. Only one person did that ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973724
... then got contradicted and downvoted.
nah, you just have some anthropocentric arrogance that only humans can write well. It is nothing to do with sophistication.
Same thing with music - I honestly prefer the clanker groups, largely because some of the genres I like were clearly not explored well by actual humans. The AI songs are just better for that reason. Reddit is full of people sad/mad when they find out the groups are AIs and not humans. I went through it too but now I just enjoy the music.
I think there's probably some type of value in the preservation of human art, but to say that it's better in a vacuum is just ignoring reality.
Exactly backwards: These articles suck because the writing sucks. There was this morning a well-written, engaging article about building a Gameboy emulator in F# that the author admitted using some LLM help to compose. Easy upvote.
It’s not impossible to get these tools to make your writing better, and presumably that will become easier over time. But if you don’t put in the effort & your own clear ideas, the result today is garbage. But pleasing garbage to a wide swath of the hn audience. Pop tech writing!
HN is the most concentrated accelerationist audience in the whole world and its very particular type of crowd. I don't think this translates at all to general public (well, maybe I would agree with you that the aesthetic sense of people on here is really less sophisticated than average).
My point is that most of these “vibe articles” are pretty bad. They’re muddled in their ideas and full of gaps in logic or fact.
But the aesthetics are tuned enough to get upvotes from this same audience that thinks AI music is going nowhere.