Comment by breakingcups

5 hours ago

I can't decide whether this person writes in the type of style that was apparently overrepresented in LLM training, or whether they heavily used AI to spruce up their writing. I'm learning towards the latter.

Spruce up is unreasonably charitable. I'm more irritated that the authorship information is misleading. craig-kerstiens is not available on Huggingface, and yet not a single sentence in this article seems to have been typed on a keyboard.

When Claude writes things like "as someone who has spent a lot of time doing X", I think this is also a kind of failure of alignment. LLMs shouldn't write as if they had personal experience. It's something a person might say in the training data, but I just think LLMs shouldn't claim life experience they don't have, even if that's a statistically likely sequence of tokens.

These low effort constant comments about style or formatting are against Hackernews guidelines for discussions and something needs to be done to clean up the comment section. Getting to a ridiculous point

  • If comments about how "this blog post could have been a link to this github repo" are in-bounds, so are comments about how "this could have been a link to a LLM session." HN has always tried to work out if a submission is novel and interesting work or is just a slick coat of paint on mundane work (sometimes if good work is obscured by insufficiently clever presentation). Highlighting that content was generated by an LLM and asking if that impacts how to understand it is entirely in keeping with our culture and standards.

I get it's in vogue to take stabs at whether or not AI was used. But I think the more useful approach is to instead be critical of the end product, if you have criticisms of it.