You're right, but I don't think there's anything particularly insightful about the author's perspective.
People are allowed to set their expectations/standards but in 2026 taking the position that use of AI is lying (when not disclosed) and trust destroying (when disclosed) is basically going to set you up for a lot of disappointment. It's just unrealistic.
For better or worse, AI is being used everywhere and it's harder and harder to spot, especially when the use is "thoughtful". Your only real defense is to think critically about the content you're consuming to determine whether it's accurate and has value.
> People are allowed to set their expectations/standards but in 2026 taking the position that use of AI is lying (when not disclosed) and trust destroying (when disclosed) is basically going to set you up for a lot of disappointment. It's just unrealistic.
Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
Or you could engage with content critically, understanding that in this day and age, you can't be 100% sure of its provenance. Decide whether it's accurate, insightful, worth thinking about and researching further, etc. based on its substance, not who you think produced it and how.
Ugh that sounds like a lot of work. Are you sure we can't just throw shallow dismissals around and feel smug about it, rather than interacting with the contents of what something is saying?
Isn't that, ironically, exactly the sentiment that motivates people to use AI to produce content?
I think your comment hints at the reality: we're all just increasingly lazy. We want to minimize how much time and effort it takes to produce content, and at the same time we want to minimize how much time and effort it takes to engage with it.
You are asking many readers to do substantial amount of work for something nobody potentially put any effort into. This is the fundamental imbalance. Much like answering unknown numbers, reading articles from new sources has become a time wasting trap.
It is absolutely possible to produce an insightful article using AI. But it intakes skill and dedication few people have.
> You are asking many readers to do substantial amount of work for something nobody potentially put any effort into. This is the fundamental imbalance. Much like answering unknown numbers, reading articles from new sources has become a time wasting trap.
But AI is only the latest continuation of what you're describing. The internet has been full of slop (clickbait, SEO-bait, etc.) and propaganda/disinformation for many years before AI was even a thing. Social media gave every person on the planet with a heartbeat and internet connection a publishing platform over a decade ago.
The only realistic approach for dealing with this is to exercise critical thought when you consume content. And if the massive volume of content we're flooded with is problematic, narrow the sources from which you consume content and consume less of it. Get off social media. Disavow YouTube. Don't doom scroll the news. And so on.
I don't see this article as inconsistent with exercising critical thought. In a sense, this policy the author is describing is itself an exercise of critical thought. And it's one way of narrowing the sources from which they consume content. Exercising critical thought involves noticing patterns and developing heuristics and rubrics to judge things. That's entirely compatible with what the article describes.
Saying "if you use AI and don't tell me, you're a liar and if you use AI and tell me, I won't trust anything you write" is not critical thought. It's a sledgehammer filter and basically impossible to apply because there is virtually no way in 2026 to identify the provenance of any content you consume.
The likelihood that the author has consumed and trusted content that was produced using AI in some form, and not even realized it, is close to 100%. It's literally everywhere these days, and not everyone using it is using it to do all the work. But it leaves little hints that it was involved.
There are frequently posts that hit the front page of HN that have numerous AI fingerprints that produce discussion devoid of any comments questioning whether they were produced using AI. And HNers are probably one of the groups more likely than the general population to be able to identify AI content.
> Decide whether it's accurate, insightful, worth thinking about and researching further, etc. based on its substance
This is the part the original human poster is assumed to have screened as a first step, not the audience, particularly if the audience is unfamiliar with the subject (such as a guide, etc).
I literally came across a guide online from a user who wasn't a spammer, who disclaimed they haven't even read the very guide they posted as an article on their website, as it was LLM generated. At least that user put up a disclaimer but why would I trust such a guide, given my and others' extremely inconsistent experience with the veracity of LLM output and as someone coming to the guide to learn (ie: not a domain expert)? Overwhelmingly other users don't put up such disclaimers so we don't even get to know whether they've vetted anything.
Trust is the key thing. To continually erode reader trust means you're putting the burden at every step on the reader. Sure, one should always apply critical thinking to even human output but there is an implicit, baseline assumption that with human output they're at least familiar with what they've output (whether they're lying or telling the truth or ignorant but honest). LLMs meanwhile handle ground truths in a flaky way, such as when they'll hallucinate quotes from even articles they claim to have read and cited. And the most common models users are using are the cheapest/free ones anyway, only compounding the accuracy issues.
Imagine you went to a library assuming authors, publishers and library staff have done some minimum due diligence only to find the library is being replaced rapidly with books that no one in the chain has read.
No one can be a domain expert in every single thing they encounter, which is why we place trust in others to varying degrees to fill in the gaps based on their experience and knowledge, even if you're a dyed in the wool skeptic. When increasingly what we encounter isn't being vetted as a basic first step then it's a waste of time and rude to the audience, which only decreases peoples' tolerance for bullshit and increases cynicism (which we could use less of).
> it's harder and harder to spot, especially when the use is "thoughtful".
It's not, only suckers think otherwise. The more you consume, the easier it gets to spot them, and also you get bored of it quicker. Which is fine for an actual tool.
IMO: if you think it's problematic if people could spot AI tool marks, you're not actually viewing or using AI as a tool. Rocket scientists aren't ashamed of using high end 5-axis CNC or SLS laser metal 3D printers to make rocket engines. Good machinists can tell how they were made, and that should mostly inspire confidence. If someone thinks the tool marks for a specific type of a tool needs to be hidden for the artifacts to be trusted, there has to be something wrong somewhere with the tool or how it's used, or both. Likely both.
Anyone looking at a Boeing 787 can tell that it flies on a pair of turbofan engines, and it's cool. Most people looking at AI images can tell it's generated using AI, and some can even identify models used, and that is NOT cool. That should be a strong enough sign that something is wrong with AI.
This was on the front page for a while yesterday. A decent amount of discussion. I'm quite sure this was produced using AI.
I was the only person who mentioned it.
AI is really easy to spot if it's being used to do all the work. It's less easy to spot when it's being used as a starting point, for editorial passes, concept development, argument refinement, etc.
It’s a perfectly reasonable position, though that may be because I share it.
If you’ve “written” something with AI, I have idea if you even read it, thus I have no idea if it even really reflects your thoughts. And I don’t care what a computer has to say, I care what a human has to say.
> If you’ve “written” something with AI, I have idea if you even read it, thus I have no idea if it even really reflects your thoughts. And I don’t care what a computer has to say, I care what a human has to say.
At a more fundamental level, if AI generated it then I have no trust it is actually true or reflects facts or matches reality. It's insulting to throw AI slop at us because you expect us to read something you didn't bothered to write or perhaps even read. The text is probably all wrong with a veneer of well sounding verbiage, and potentially is created to drive engagement instead of actually communicating useful information.
The problem we have now is determining if the person actually wrote it. It suddenly got a lot easier for people to get someone else to generate text. And there are a lot more lazy humans than skilled writers.
And the great gatsby can be summarized as “rich guy throws parties and then dies” - but sometimes saying something slowly is the point. Sometimes doing something slowly is the point too.
If you are serious, then AI has already begin to rot your brain.
My post was much more than saying “don’t use AI.”
I use AI. I even use AI adjacent to my writing. But with me, you always know that my written words are directly from me. They sound like me. I pretty much write how I talk, albeit more grammatically.
My post was about why you are taking a big risk with your reputation/brand if you let AI draft your written communication on your behalf.
> If you are serious, then AI has already begin to rot your brain.
First, it's not a good look to start off your rebuttal with an ad hominem. Based on the high standards you speak to in your post, and your concern about reputations, I would have expected more.
> I use AI. I even use AI adjacent to my writing. But with me, you always know that my written words are directly from me. They sound like me. I pretty much write how I talk, albeit more grammatically.
To play the role of cynic, what does "AI adjacent to my writing" even mean? You wrote in your post:
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
Who decides if your "adjacent" use of AI was deep or meaningful? You wrote:
> Unless I know exactly how you did that work– which would have to have been from personal observation– I can’t know the truth.
You're admitting that you use AI but only "adjacent to [your] writing". Even if you explain what that means, how can I trust you? I wasn't there to personally observe how you used AI.
If you consult with AI in any fashion to flesh out an idea, test your arguments, etc., someone with an even more extreme position could say, "Well, even if he wrote the words, AI must have influenced his writing in some way, perhaps even unconsciously, and therefore everything he wrote is tainted."
I don't think this is accurate. The key sentence is "don’t use AI to write things for you that you present as your own work". This leaves many other ways to use AI.
When I write something heavily edited by AI - I mention that I use AI assistance (not AI led thinking). I will probably remove that because the perception is quite different. Its like applying one applying to an engineering job but write "a pychic, a medium" in a corner of their resume.
It is very common to see that any interesting thought gets immediately tagged like AI slop and the real AI slop wins. Try an A/B test and you shall see that AI actually wins because of the people who hate AI. Most people cannot distinguish between a human and a AI written post and yet those same people want to be judgemental. And the people who are against AI and say "its just the next token generator and I don't use it" and yet use autocomplete on their mobiles are just duplicit. And yes AI is the next-token-generator, we have no proof that most humans were not brainwashed to become the same.
I don’t use autocomplete, either. But if I did that would not be hypocritical. Autocomplete does not operate on the level of key ideas.
The “humans are just as bad” argument holds no water. Humans have many infirmities, but you can form relationships of trust with people who earn trust and deserve it. You can hold people accountable, personally and publicly. With the exception of rare criminals and the severely mentally ill, you understand people and you can work with them.
Anyway, if you hire someone to pretend to be you, that’s fraud. That’s being a scammer. Don’t do that. For the same reason, don’t let AI write in your name.
Or if you do, remember that I warned you how your reputation would collapse and people would stop taking your work seriously.
The problem lies with people trying to claim credit without doing the work: writing. AI is a fantastic tool that catches flow errors, grammar problems and punctuation misuse, just like a copywriter. But copywriters don't get bylines.
My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.
I think the argument is misguided, even if I agree with the principle: it is based in the effort one puts in and how it's similar to a sport.
I don't care whether my favorite author sweated for months facing a typewriter, of he effortlessly dictated the final form of the book in one sitting to a secretary while sipping mojitos.
I think my issue with AI has more to do with the signal it sends: reading takes effort, particularly literature, and I use the author's name as a proxy to judge whether to invest that effort myself. Nothing bad in selling dollar store crap, but it's bad to put 'Nike' on it.
Your individuality is what you sell as an author. I can get access to the LLM without you.
And you can read a car maintenance book. That doesn't mean you can fix your car now.
The author vouched the LLM output using their experience, that's what you get. Unless you are as experienced in their domain, it will take you time to figure out if the output of your LLM prompt is correct or non-sense.
It doesn't work for me sorry, because you wouldn't accept a book by John, a friend of Hemingway, as a Hemingway book no matter how much he assisted in editing. Nor a Picasso museum exhibition is by Marie because Marie chose which paintings to display.
they are, but when i read a scifi magazine like clarkesworld, i can trust that the editor made a good selection of stories. the work of the editor does have value. it's just a different value.
and how do you handle the reverse? use AI as the editor for a hemmingway book. is it still hemmingway?
>the work of the editor does have value. it's just a different value.
I mostly agree with that, with some caveats (in short, there's an uncomfortably thin line to appropriating the curated work, consciously or not).
>and how do you handle the reverse? use AI as the editor for a hemmingway book. is it still hemmingway?
I'd be comfortable saying at least that it's less misleading to declare that book as written by Hemingway. Doing so is more in line with the social expectations that come with having the author's signature on it.
i don't get your point. am i reading the article in a different way?
my reading is: if you use AI to help you write, then i can't know how much of the work is yours and how much is AI. therefore, when AI helps i have to expect the worst and assume that it is mainly AI and your input is very little. consequently, don't use AI at all, or the work is no longer yours.
i think that's a pretty good argument. it's not about the effort you made but about the amount of control you have over the text. and, as you say, the signal it sends. so i think you agree more with the article than you say.
what is weird is the title: don't say you use AI for writing, but then in the text it says: don't lie. if you can't do either then you can't use AI for writing, so why not just say it directly: don't use AI to help you writing.
I should have clarified or quoted, my bad. I was talking about the work references, mainly this paragraph:
>was I tempted to use AI to speed things up? No. It would be like hooking a motor to a stationary bike and calling that exercise. It would be like taking a helicopter to the top of Everest and saying that I summited.
I would never use AI for something where I need my own voice, say a blog post or a personal letter.
But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with a recruiter to turn this:
1. I just said I'm hard of hearing and prefer text.
2. If it's only two minutes you can darn well send email.
into this:
As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me —
I find I miss things and it's frustrating for both sides. If it's just a
couple of minutes' worth of information, an email works great and I can
give you a thoughtful response. Happy to go from there!
I'm not ashamed, I think I'm right, and I'll do it again. This recruiter didn't deserve my authentic voice or my personal toil, not for this task.
If it makes James Bach think I'm a liar, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
What was the value-add of AI here? Some modicum of undeserved politeness instead of the curt bullet points you prompted with? Or an intentional “fuck you” by sending something sloppy with AI tells?
It’s not that you are a liar, it’s that I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you are. Not just me, but also many other people will automatically discount whatever you say when they suspect they are talking to something not-you that bears your name.
Maybe it’s not your goal to be seriously? But if it is…
> My policy is that I never let AI draft anything for me that has my name on it. Not one sentence. Nothing. Ever.
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
So using author's logic, I should not trust them when they say they never use AI for writing, because all we have is their word.
> “I’m a skilled liar. I frequently tell lies. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t lie to you!”
Interesting how saying you used any amount of AI instantly labels you as "a skilled liar" to the author.
The conclusion conflicts oddly with the author's arguments and interests. Attributing LLM usage would actually help the author avoid articles even touched by LLMs, but they indirectly admit being haphazardly dismissive.
Their arguments are mostly addressed by proper, clear attribution. "My sister helped with my homework essay" deserves distrust withour further clarification.
Comparing LLM usage to lying is a fun perspective, but most of the lying happens in attribution. Their moral against lying also seems silly.
We should be better than genAI. For me, with things like coding and writing, I think I'm better than it. For painting? It wins over me. But I'd never in a million years claim creation of a painting I prompted, even if I went and modified it after. Same with code or writing, for that matter.
For the record, I never use AI in writing. First, it's no fun, and that's really reason enough. It'd be like sending a bot to watch a movie for me. Second, I'm better than it is, and it would just be an exercise in frustration micromanaging its every word. I might as well just type what I want it to say.
And third, most importantly, who would read anything I wrote if they could just generate it themselves? The goal is to be better.
> And third, most importantly, who would read anything I wrote if they could just generate it themselves?
This should be embarrassingly obvious to everyone, but allegedly there are hoards of vibecoders and other slop producers to whom it never occurs (if it's not astroturfers pretending to be that). If prompt slinging is your only expertise, you already are redundant.
> If prompt slinging is your only expertise, you already are redundant.
You got this right. I do a lot of stuff that requires LLM prompting recently. But I haven't written a single prompt. LLM agent does that for me when I tell it to as if I told an employee.
> For me, with things like coding and writing, I think I'm better than it.
You are probably wrong already but even if not there is no reason to think you soon won't be. And you are definitely not better than you + AI.
> But I'd never in a million years claim creation of a painting I prompted, even if I went and modified it after.
It's weird because if you do it you still need to call this act somehow.
I no longer say I wrote a program. Because I didn't. However I started saying I built it. Because I believe I did. I won't say I wrote a novel. Because if I ever do it, it will be with intricate and extensive use of AI. But I will say I crafted or (possibly) constructed it. I won't say I painted a picture, but I might still say I designed it (if I use something like Ideogram 4) or that I generated it or created it (sic) when the details of the process are fuzzy.
I won't lie to anyone that I didn't use AI because soon I would have to lie about nearly everything because it's gonna be larger and larger part of my life and my output. I'll always happily explain what exactly I did to anyone interested. I perceive myself as talented enough that I don't have to pretend (using AI) that I have talents that I don't have.
In the end I believe the content is the king. And good content is good regardless of how it was made and slop is slop even if bunch of humans put their heart, sweat, tears and soul into the production process.
It was difficult to finish reading your post after you put the OP down for stating that they believe they're more original and more capable than an LLM. Maybe leave that part out next time, or at least don't lead with it. It does not help your argument the way you think it does.
I wonder why you would mince your words about LLM use at all though. Instead of couching your methods in language like, "I 'built' a program," or, "I've 'crafted' a novel," you ought to just put your money where your mouth is and say, "I used LLMs to make [something]."
If want to be up-front and proud about the fact that you use LLMs in your work, just dot that without indirection or ornamentation. Wear that attitude on your sleeve and let your audience determine if your work is worth their attention.
> It was difficult to finish reading your post after you put the OP down for stating that they believe they're more original and more capable than an LLM. Maybe leave that part out next time, or at least don't lead with it.
You are right. That's just something I deeply believe about myself. Along with the general belief that I'm not that unique from people I interact with. It would be more charitable to substitute myself for him in that part to avoid causing distress.
> It does not help your argument the way you think it does.
I didn't put it there to support the rest of my comment. I don't feel like it has anything to do with the rest of my comment. I tend to address peoples statements one my one when they make multiple. Claim about being smarter than AI was unrelated to argument about naming in his comment so it also was in my response.
> I wonder why you would mince your words ... and say "I used LLMs to make [something]."
Only because it's a mouthful. And when I have time, in personal conversations, both in work and personal contexts I definitely use that phrasing. Or even "AI built this cool thing for me. I told it that and that, and that's what it came up with." I even stress that AI built it for me nearly all by itself. Even diminishing my contribution to the process. Because what I want to communicate is my amazement, hoping my interlocutor might share it and attempt to do something like that themselves and it brings them as much joy and amazement as it brings me.
I don't brag about things I contributed to. I never really did. I have fairly unshakable self-esteem, acceptance of my flaws and nearly full emotional self-sufficiency. I don't care all that much if anyone likes my output. I don't hope to build any cred because of my output because I don't need or crave any cred. My most ambitious goal is to be occasionally randomly helpful just for the joy of knowing that somebody landed in a slightly better spot because of me. Sometimes I achieve that goal, sometimes I fail. Sometimes I make no impact whatsoever.
EDIT:
I just remembered that about two decades ago one of my friends was strongly disappointed in me when she actually saw me coding. Because when I said I wrote a program she thought I actually wrote the entirety of it, not picked about half of the texts from autocomplete menu.
I think the top reason for most people is so that they're worth hiring. If you offer no more than an AI, what is your value?
Is scotty79 human? Was this written by you? Or are you just an AI? And if you are human and wrote it, why did you do that when an AI could do it better than you? And if an AI could do it better, why even communicate with you? I could just go talk to Claude.
Other reasons might be to push the SOTA past what an genAI can do. Or to produce human work in human society.
Maybe someday we'll be past needing to be hired to eat, and then maybe we just stop worrying and let genAI be better than all of us. But I find that to be undesirable.
> And you are definitely not better than you + AI.
I think this is what I'm saying. If you're not better, you're just in the way. If you're not better, then you < you + AI.
Here's an example: early ChatGPT sucked at remotely complex jq. I wanted a function to do fuzzy comparisons between JSON objects, and it just could not get it right. I didn't speak jq, so it was just me pasting errors and output and cutting code--zero value add.
Eventually I gave up. I then spent 3 hours working on learning jq and and came up with a more robust and capable solution than ChatGPT had been working toward.
Now you're going to correctly say that ChatGPT didn't have enough training data to perform well with this relatively new and relatively infrequently-used language.
But my point is that you need to be better than it so you can do novel things that it can't.
All this assumes, of course, that the AI-bro future of AI doing everything doesn't come to pass. If it does, it'll be global economic collapse and we can just go back to feudalism.
> I no longer say I wrote a program
Other management verbs work well here, I think. "Produced", "oversaw", "managed development of", etc.
> In the end I believe the content is the king.
I think so, too. The question is, do you have anything to offer, or should I just go to a bot?
If an LLM is used in the drafting of an article, this should, at least, be disclosed, preferably at the beginning of the article. For example, I recently came across this article ( https://thedispatch.com/article/affordability-crisis-healthc... ). The LLM voice was suppressed well enough until this inane passage:
"One number. Four completely different stories. The number is engineered to include all of them, because including all of them is what produces the 49 percent."
I decided to fact-check a statement ("CNN’s May 2026 survey found the share of Americans spontaneously naming gas prices as their top economic problem rose from 5 percent to 23 percent in a single year, with food costs cited almost as often") and it was incorrect (food costs were in fact cited more often than gas prices). Since the first thing I checked was wrong, I decided it wasn't worth my time reading the rest of the article. It was, as they say these days, slop.
It felt like a little bit of my time had been stolen. If a disclosure had been at the top, it would have been more of a caveat emptor situation.
basically
disclosed public ai
undisclosed private ai
this only works, any thing public should be disclosed you can do anything when you are working locally as you know but it should be explicitly discloses as soon as it goes public.
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
If the author of this write up actually used AI for writing he would have way more than just word. Because you can definitely tell AI output that somebody put no effort into from output that somebody put in a ton of effort into.
It can be as much of a difference as between artistic photograph and a photo from a photo-trap installed in the forest or from a speed camera.
ElProlactin | 15 hours ago
Because in his view, if you use AI and don't disclose it, you're a liar. And if you use AI and disclose it, he won't trust you anyway.
throwawaysoxjje | 15 hours ago
ElProlactin | 14 hours ago
People are allowed to set their expectations/standards but in 2026 taking the position that use of AI is lying (when not disclosed) and trust destroying (when disclosed) is basically going to set you up for a lot of disappointment. It's just unrealistic.
For better or worse, AI is being used everywhere and it's harder and harder to spot, especially when the use is "thoughtful". Your only real defense is to think critically about the content you're consuming to determine whether it's accurate and has value.
BrenBarn | 14 hours ago
Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
ElProlactin | 14 hours ago
fragmede | 14 hours ago
ElProlactin | 13 hours ago
Isn't that, ironically, exactly the sentiment that motivates people to use AI to produce content?
I think your comment hints at the reality: we're all just increasingly lazy. We want to minimize how much time and effort it takes to produce content, and at the same time we want to minimize how much time and effort it takes to engage with it.
It's a vicious cycle.
yoz-y | 14 hours ago
It is absolutely possible to produce an insightful article using AI. But it intakes skill and dedication few people have.
ElProlactin | 13 hours ago
But AI is only the latest continuation of what you're describing. The internet has been full of slop (clickbait, SEO-bait, etc.) and propaganda/disinformation for many years before AI was even a thing. Social media gave every person on the planet with a heartbeat and internet connection a publishing platform over a decade ago.
The only realistic approach for dealing with this is to exercise critical thought when you consume content. And if the massive volume of content we're flooded with is problematic, narrow the sources from which you consume content and consume less of it. Get off social media. Disavow YouTube. Don't doom scroll the news. And so on.
BrenBarn | 13 hours ago
ElProlactin | 13 hours ago
The likelihood that the author has consumed and trusted content that was produced using AI in some form, and not even realized it, is close to 100%. It's literally everywhere these days, and not everyone using it is using it to do all the work. But it leaves little hints that it was involved.
There are frequently posts that hit the front page of HN that have numerous AI fingerprints that produce discussion devoid of any comments questioning whether they were produced using AI. And HNers are probably one of the groups more likely than the general population to be able to identify AI content.
Springtime | 13 hours ago
This is the part the original human poster is assumed to have screened as a first step, not the audience, particularly if the audience is unfamiliar with the subject (such as a guide, etc).
I literally came across a guide online from a user who wasn't a spammer, who disclaimed they haven't even read the very guide they posted as an article on their website, as it was LLM generated. At least that user put up a disclaimer but why would I trust such a guide, given my and others' extremely inconsistent experience with the veracity of LLM output and as someone coming to the guide to learn (ie: not a domain expert)? Overwhelmingly other users don't put up such disclaimers so we don't even get to know whether they've vetted anything.
Trust is the key thing. To continually erode reader trust means you're putting the burden at every step on the reader. Sure, one should always apply critical thinking to even human output but there is an implicit, baseline assumption that with human output they're at least familiar with what they've output (whether they're lying or telling the truth or ignorant but honest). LLMs meanwhile handle ground truths in a flaky way, such as when they'll hallucinate quotes from even articles they claim to have read and cited. And the most common models users are using are the cheapest/free ones anyway, only compounding the accuracy issues.
Imagine you went to a library assuming authors, publishers and library staff have done some minimum due diligence only to find the library is being replaced rapidly with books that no one in the chain has read.
No one can be a domain expert in every single thing they encounter, which is why we place trust in others to varying degrees to fill in the gaps based on their experience and knowledge, even if you're a dyed in the wool skeptic. When increasingly what we encounter isn't being vetted as a basic first step then it's a waste of time and rude to the audience, which only decreases peoples' tolerance for bullshit and increases cynicism (which we could use less of).
skeledrew | 12 hours ago
numpad0 | 13 hours ago
It's not, only suckers think otherwise. The more you consume, the easier it gets to spot them, and also you get bored of it quicker. Which is fine for an actual tool.
IMO: if you think it's problematic if people could spot AI tool marks, you're not actually viewing or using AI as a tool. Rocket scientists aren't ashamed of using high end 5-axis CNC or SLS laser metal 3D printers to make rocket engines. Good machinists can tell how they were made, and that should mostly inspire confidence. If someone thinks the tool marks for a specific type of a tool needs to be hidden for the artifacts to be trusted, there has to be something wrong somewhere with the tool or how it's used, or both. Likely both.
Anyone looking at a Boeing 787 can tell that it flies on a pair of turbofan engines, and it's cool. Most people looking at AI images can tell it's generated using AI, and some can even identify models used, and that is NOT cool. That should be a strong enough sign that something is wrong with AI.
ElProlactin | 13 hours ago
This was on the front page for a while yesterday. A decent amount of discussion. I'm quite sure this was produced using AI.
I was the only person who mentioned it.
AI is really easy to spot if it's being used to do all the work. It's less easy to spot when it's being used as a starting point, for editorial passes, concept development, argument refinement, etc.
nkrisc | 15 hours ago
If you’ve “written” something with AI, I have idea if you even read it, thus I have no idea if it even really reflects your thoughts. And I don’t care what a computer has to say, I care what a human has to say.
locknitpicker | 14 hours ago
At a more fundamental level, if AI generated it then I have no trust it is actually true or reflects facts or matches reality. It's insulting to throw AI slop at us because you expect us to read something you didn't bothered to write or perhaps even read. The text is probably all wrong with a veneer of well sounding verbiage, and potentially is created to drive engagement instead of actually communicating useful information.
diydsp | 14 hours ago
cryo32 | 13 hours ago
The problem we have now is determining if the person actually wrote it. It suddenly got a lot easier for people to get someone else to generate text. And there are a lot more lazy humans than skilled writers.
kennywinker | 14 hours ago
[OP] satisfice | 13 hours ago
My post was much more than saying “don’t use AI.”
I use AI. I even use AI adjacent to my writing. But with me, you always know that my written words are directly from me. They sound like me. I pretty much write how I talk, albeit more grammatically.
My post was about why you are taking a big risk with your reputation/brand if you let AI draft your written communication on your behalf.
ElProlactin | 12 hours ago
First, it's not a good look to start off your rebuttal with an ad hominem. Based on the high standards you speak to in your post, and your concern about reputations, I would have expected more.
> I use AI. I even use AI adjacent to my writing. But with me, you always know that my written words are directly from me. They sound like me. I pretty much write how I talk, albeit more grammatically.
To play the role of cynic, what does "AI adjacent to my writing" even mean? You wrote in your post:
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
Who decides if your "adjacent" use of AI was deep or meaningful? You wrote:
> Unless I know exactly how you did that work– which would have to have been from personal observation– I can’t know the truth.
You're admitting that you use AI but only "adjacent to [your] writing". Even if you explain what that means, how can I trust you? I wasn't there to personally observe how you used AI.
If you consult with AI in any fashion to flesh out an idea, test your arguments, etc., someone with an even more extreme position could say, "Well, even if he wrote the words, AI must have influenced his writing in some way, perhaps even unconsciously, and therefore everything he wrote is tainted."
dang | 4 hours ago
I've put that sentence in the title above because (per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) it seems less misleading.
anupshinde | 14 hours ago
It is very common to see that any interesting thought gets immediately tagged like AI slop and the real AI slop wins. Try an A/B test and you shall see that AI actually wins because of the people who hate AI. Most people cannot distinguish between a human and a AI written post and yet those same people want to be judgemental. And the people who are against AI and say "its just the next token generator and I don't use it" and yet use autocomplete on their mobiles are just duplicit. And yes AI is the next-token-generator, we have no proof that most humans were not brainwashed to become the same.
[OP] satisfice | 13 hours ago
The “humans are just as bad” argument holds no water. Humans have many infirmities, but you can form relationships of trust with people who earn trust and deserve it. You can hold people accountable, personally and publicly. With the exception of rare criminals and the severely mentally ill, you understand people and you can work with them.
Anyway, if you hire someone to pretend to be you, that’s fraud. That’s being a scammer. Don’t do that. For the same reason, don’t let AI write in your name.
Or if you do, remember that I warned you how your reputation would collapse and people would stop taking your work seriously.
anupshinde | 6 hours ago
f4stjack | 14 hours ago
My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.
torben-friis | 14 hours ago
I don't care whether my favorite author sweated for months facing a typewriter, of he effortlessly dictated the final form of the book in one sitting to a secretary while sipping mojitos.
I think my issue with AI has more to do with the signal it sends: reading takes effort, particularly literature, and I use the author's name as a proxy to judge whether to invest that effort myself. Nothing bad in selling dollar store crap, but it's bad to put 'Nike' on it.
Your individuality is what you sell as an author. I can get access to the LLM without you.
dist-epoch | 13 hours ago
And you can read a car maintenance book. That doesn't mean you can fix your car now.
The author vouched the LLM output using their experience, that's what you get. Unless you are as experienced in their domain, it will take you time to figure out if the output of your LLM prompt is correct or non-sense.
torben-friis | 13 hours ago
It doesn't work for me sorry, because you wouldn't accept a book by John, a friend of Hemingway, as a Hemingway book no matter how much he assisted in editing. Nor a Picasso museum exhibition is by Marie because Marie chose which paintings to display.
Authorship and edition are different claims.
em-bee | 9 hours ago
and how do you handle the reverse? use AI as the editor for a hemmingway book. is it still hemmingway?
torben-friis | 9 hours ago
I mostly agree with that, with some caveats (in short, there's an uncomfortably thin line to appropriating the curated work, consciously or not).
>and how do you handle the reverse? use AI as the editor for a hemmingway book. is it still hemmingway?
I'd be comfortable saying at least that it's less misleading to declare that book as written by Hemingway. Doing so is more in line with the social expectations that come with having the author's signature on it.
em-bee | 9 hours ago
my reading is: if you use AI to help you write, then i can't know how much of the work is yours and how much is AI. therefore, when AI helps i have to expect the worst and assume that it is mainly AI and your input is very little. consequently, don't use AI at all, or the work is no longer yours.
i think that's a pretty good argument. it's not about the effort you made but about the amount of control you have over the text. and, as you say, the signal it sends. so i think you agree more with the article than you say.
what is weird is the title: don't say you use AI for writing, but then in the text it says: don't lie. if you can't do either then you can't use AI for writing, so why not just say it directly: don't use AI to help you writing.
torben-friis | 9 hours ago
>was I tempted to use AI to speed things up? No. It would be like hooking a motor to a stationary bike and calling that exercise. It would be like taking a helicopter to the top of Everest and saying that I summited.
mjd | 14 hours ago
But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with a recruiter to turn this:
into this: I'm not ashamed, I think I'm right, and I'll do it again. This recruiter didn't deserve my authentic voice or my personal toil, not for this task.If it makes James Bach think I'm a liar, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
eloisius | 13 hours ago
Freak_NL | 13 hours ago
mjd | 13 hours ago
mjd | 13 hours ago
eloisius | 13 hours ago
>This recruiter didn't deserve my authentic voice or my personal toil
Yet they deserve inauthentic politeness from a chatbot? It just sounds like "fuck you" with more steps.
iLoveOncall | 13 hours ago
mjd | 13 hours ago
iLoveOncall | 13 hours ago
mjd | 13 hours ago
[OP] satisfice | 13 hours ago
Maybe it’s not your goal to be seriously? But if it is…
yieldcrv | 14 hours ago
more at 11
dist-epoch | 13 hours ago
> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.
So using author's logic, I should not trust them when they say they never use AI for writing, because all we have is their word.
> “I’m a skilled liar. I frequently tell lies. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t lie to you!”
Interesting how saying you used any amount of AI instantly labels you as "a skilled liar" to the author.
Alien1Being | 13 hours ago
I want to read code by Abrash, Peyton Jones and Karpathy, not Claude's output based on a prompt from a third rater.
If you send me AI generated writing, I will have my AI agent read it and respond to it.
Meanwhile I will use my limited human time to engage with humans and human created content.
praash | 13 hours ago
Their arguments are mostly addressed by proper, clear attribution. "My sister helped with my homework essay" deserves distrust withour further clarification.
Comparing LLM usage to lying is a fun perspective, but most of the lying happens in attribution. Their moral against lying also seems silly.
cadamsdotcom | 11 hours ago
If one uses the first person in one’s writing, it follows that the words are their own.
Anything else is disingenuous.
beej71 | 5 hours ago
For the record, I never use AI in writing. First, it's no fun, and that's really reason enough. It'd be like sending a bot to watch a movie for me. Second, I'm better than it is, and it would just be an exercise in frustration micromanaging its every word. I might as well just type what I want it to say.
And third, most importantly, who would read anything I wrote if they could just generate it themselves? The goal is to be better.
classified | 4 hours ago
This should be embarrassingly obvious to everyone, but allegedly there are hoards of vibecoders and other slop producers to whom it never occurs (if it's not astroturfers pretending to be that). If prompt slinging is your only expertise, you already are redundant.
scotty79 | an hour ago
You got this right. I do a lot of stuff that requires LLM prompting recently. But I haven't written a single prompt. LLM agent does that for me when I tell it to as if I told an employee.
scotty79 | 2 hours ago
Why exactly?
> For me, with things like coding and writing, I think I'm better than it.
You are probably wrong already but even if not there is no reason to think you soon won't be. And you are definitely not better than you + AI.
> But I'd never in a million years claim creation of a painting I prompted, even if I went and modified it after.
It's weird because if you do it you still need to call this act somehow.
I no longer say I wrote a program. Because I didn't. However I started saying I built it. Because I believe I did. I won't say I wrote a novel. Because if I ever do it, it will be with intricate and extensive use of AI. But I will say I crafted or (possibly) constructed it. I won't say I painted a picture, but I might still say I designed it (if I use something like Ideogram 4) or that I generated it or created it (sic) when the details of the process are fuzzy.
I won't lie to anyone that I didn't use AI because soon I would have to lie about nearly everything because it's gonna be larger and larger part of my life and my output. I'll always happily explain what exactly I did to anyone interested. I perceive myself as talented enough that I don't have to pretend (using AI) that I have talents that I don't have.
In the end I believe the content is the king. And good content is good regardless of how it was made and slop is slop even if bunch of humans put their heart, sweat, tears and soul into the production process.
SaucyWrong | 2 hours ago
I wonder why you would mince your words about LLM use at all though. Instead of couching your methods in language like, "I 'built' a program," or, "I've 'crafted' a novel," you ought to just put your money where your mouth is and say, "I used LLMs to make [something]."
If want to be up-front and proud about the fact that you use LLMs in your work, just dot that without indirection or ornamentation. Wear that attitude on your sleeve and let your audience determine if your work is worth their attention.
scotty79 | an hour ago
You are right. That's just something I deeply believe about myself. Along with the general belief that I'm not that unique from people I interact with. It would be more charitable to substitute myself for him in that part to avoid causing distress.
> It does not help your argument the way you think it does.
I didn't put it there to support the rest of my comment. I don't feel like it has anything to do with the rest of my comment. I tend to address peoples statements one my one when they make multiple. Claim about being smarter than AI was unrelated to argument about naming in his comment so it also was in my response.
> I wonder why you would mince your words ... and say "I used LLMs to make [something]."
Only because it's a mouthful. And when I have time, in personal conversations, both in work and personal contexts I definitely use that phrasing. Or even "AI built this cool thing for me. I told it that and that, and that's what it came up with." I even stress that AI built it for me nearly all by itself. Even diminishing my contribution to the process. Because what I want to communicate is my amazement, hoping my interlocutor might share it and attempt to do something like that themselves and it brings them as much joy and amazement as it brings me.
I don't brag about things I contributed to. I never really did. I have fairly unshakable self-esteem, acceptance of my flaws and nearly full emotional self-sufficiency. I don't care all that much if anyone likes my output. I don't hope to build any cred because of my output because I don't need or crave any cred. My most ambitious goal is to be occasionally randomly helpful just for the joy of knowing that somebody landed in a slightly better spot because of me. Sometimes I achieve that goal, sometimes I fail. Sometimes I make no impact whatsoever.
EDIT:
I just remembered that about two decades ago one of my friends was strongly disappointed in me when she actually saw me coding. Because when I said I wrote a program she thought I actually wrote the entirety of it, not picked about half of the texts from autocomplete menu.
beej71 | 46 minutes ago
FWIW, I've been on the Internet for a long, long time. I took no offense. But I still think I'm better than AI at those things. :)
beej71 | 48 minutes ago
> Why exactly?
I think the top reason for most people is so that they're worth hiring. If you offer no more than an AI, what is your value?
Is scotty79 human? Was this written by you? Or are you just an AI? And if you are human and wrote it, why did you do that when an AI could do it better than you? And if an AI could do it better, why even communicate with you? I could just go talk to Claude.
Other reasons might be to push the SOTA past what an genAI can do. Or to produce human work in human society.
Maybe someday we'll be past needing to be hired to eat, and then maybe we just stop worrying and let genAI be better than all of us. But I find that to be undesirable.
> And you are definitely not better than you + AI.
I think this is what I'm saying. If you're not better, you're just in the way. If you're not better, then you < you + AI.
Here's an example: early ChatGPT sucked at remotely complex jq. I wanted a function to do fuzzy comparisons between JSON objects, and it just could not get it right. I didn't speak jq, so it was just me pasting errors and output and cutting code--zero value add.
Eventually I gave up. I then spent 3 hours working on learning jq and and came up with a more robust and capable solution than ChatGPT had been working toward.
Now you're going to correctly say that ChatGPT didn't have enough training data to perform well with this relatively new and relatively infrequently-used language.
But my point is that you need to be better than it so you can do novel things that it can't.
All this assumes, of course, that the AI-bro future of AI doing everything doesn't come to pass. If it does, it'll be global economic collapse and we can just go back to feudalism.
> I no longer say I wrote a program
Other management verbs work well here, I think. "Produced", "oversaw", "managed development of", etc.
> In the end I believe the content is the king.
I think so, too. The question is, do you have anything to offer, or should I just go to a bot?
AnodicElegy | 3 hours ago
"One number. Four completely different stories. The number is engineered to include all of them, because including all of them is what produces the 49 percent."
I decided to fact-check a statement ("CNN’s May 2026 survey found the share of Americans spontaneously naming gas prices as their top economic problem rose from 5 percent to 23 percent in a single year, with food costs cited almost as often") and it was incorrect (food costs were in fact cited more often than gas prices). Since the first thing I checked was wrong, I decided it wasn't worth my time reading the rest of the article. It was, as they say these days, slop.
It felt like a little bit of my time had been stolen. If a disclosure had been at the top, it would have been more of a caveat emptor situation.
lordforever | 3 hours ago
scotty79 | 3 hours ago
If the author of this write up actually used AI for writing he would have way more than just word. Because you can definitely tell AI output that somebody put no effort into from output that somebody put in a ton of effort into.
It can be as much of a difference as between artistic photograph and a photo from a photo-trap installed in the forest or from a speed camera.