Comment by NikxDa
21 hours ago
The thing that stands out to me with all of this is how little accountability there is left within the field.
Published a rip-off? "Sorry, Claude must have done this".
Published a shitty/wrong/insensitive/<insert other adjectives here> post somewhere? "Sorry, the AI wrote it"
Regardless of how we view LLMs as a whole, if you produce content with AI and publish it, you personally own every line of what you published. "Claude did it" cannot ever be a valid excuse.
> "Claude did it" cannot ever be a valid excuse.
I think this an incredibly important point. As soon as we devolve reposnsiblity to computer progams, society cedes control to the algorithm vendors.
Jeff Geerling was called out today for his clickbaity video entitled "Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously.". Jeff's personal response was "I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it."
Another commenter replied: "You are trying to launder responsibility for a clickbait title to a computer program." I think this exactly nailed the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223079
It's funny, I saw that YT video in my feed and instantly was turned off from ever wanting to click on it. I know there is a write up about it, so I'd rather read than watch. Esp knowing what I know now.
What a funny thread. Probably not a great first impression for potential viewers
I think it's time to bring back the IBM classic.
> A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
I think we're at the point where people are making the opposite conclusion from the premise: Let's let the computer make the decision because then we can't be held accountable.
My favorite is when they're clearly caught out so they move on to trying to minimise the use and optionally passively aggressively turn it back on you.
"I was genuinely only using Claude to make my writing clearer/redraft/to organize my thoughts because I can't write as well as you can"
The new one for me this week was someone claiming they write exactly like Claude does.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212416
There are enough grammatical oddities (e.g. "reads off", "my not-the-proudest") in the linked excerpt that I'm honestly inclined to believe them.
This is just finally bringing the magical "the computer did it" to the masses!
When companies like Amazon accept, warehouse, bill for and ship unsafe Chinese trash, well, at every step it was just a computer. Google, X and others will happily show state funded scam advertisements from fake accounts and there is no one accountable, because it's just the computer handling those.
Now with AI, everyone can claim this magical legal immunity for themselves.
> how little accountability there is left within the field.
I don't think it's limited to the tech field: it's stronger here, due to the proximity with the tech giants who are enabling Trump's bullshit, but he and all that goes on around him are the real center of it.
More broadly, it's been on the rise for a number of years now, due to the Republican Party doing its level best to eliminate accountability for anything their people do wrong—like, for instance, cozying up to Epstein and his ilk.
They've been promoting a culture of unaccountability, trying to destroy the very idea that we have obligations to each other...as opposed to the masses having obligations to do whatever our leaders tell us.