Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
tacitusarc | on: Filesystems are having a moment
Does everyone just use AI to write these days? Or is the style so infectious that I just see it everywhere? I swear there needs to be some convention around labeling a post with how much AI was used in its creation.
heavyset_go | parent | next
I'd be embarassed to put my name on AI prose without a disclaimer and I'd also be annoyed to read it as a reader.

IMO it's insulting to the audience, it says your time and attention is not worthy of the author's own time and attention spent putting their own thoughts in their own words.

If you're going to do that at least mention it's LLM output or just give me your outline prompts. I don't care what your LLM has to say, I'm capable of prompting your outline in my own model myself if I feel like it.

josephg | root | parent | next
> If you're going to do that at least mention it's LLM output

Yes, this! Please label AI generated content. Pull request written by an AI? Label it as ai generated. Blog post? Article generated with AI? Say so! It’s ok to use AI models. Especially if English is your second language. But put a disclaimer in. Don’t make the reader guess.

Eg:

> This content was partially generated by chatgpt

Or

> Blog post text written entirely by human hand, code examples by Claude code

coliveira | root | parent | next
I'm not a fan of AI and try to avoid it, but there is a difference from AI output published by someone knowledgeable and any other AI output that you run by yourself. If an expert looked at the result and found it to be ok, then you can have some assurance that it at least makes sense. Your own AI run doesn't mean anything, it could be 100% hallucination and a non-expert will buy it as truth.
Joel_Mckay | root | parent
Unfortunately, LLM slop now makes up >53% of the web, and is growing.

It is easy to spot the compacted token distribution unique to each model, but search engines still seem to promote nonsense content. =3

"Bad Bot Problem - Computerphile"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg

"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

fragmede | root | parent
Have any outlines you'd care to share?
sethev | parent | next
LLMs were trained on stuff that people wrote. I get there are "tells", but don't really think people are as good at identifying AI generated text as they think they are...
afro88 | root | parent | next
I wouldn't have picked this article as AI until I got an agent to do some writing for me and read a bunch of it to figure out if I can stand behind it. Now I see the tells everywhere "It's not this. It's that." is particularly common and I can't unsee it. (FWIW I rewrote most of the writing it generated, but it did help me figure out my structure and narrative)

The problem I think with AI generated posts is that you feel like you can't trust the content once it's AI. It could be partly hallucinated, or misrepresented.

sethev | root | parent
Yeah, but "it's not X. It's Y" is a common idiom that LLMs picked up from people. That's the point i was making. And it's starting to feel like every post has at least one comment claiming that it was AI generated.
antonvs | root | parent | next
Good chunks of the article don't trigger this for me, but I would bet money on the final paragraph involving AI:

> That's not a technical argument. It's a values argument. And it's one that the filesystem, for all its age and simplicity, is uniquely positioned to serve. Not because it's the best technology. But because it's the one technology that already belongs to you.

computably | root | parent
You don't have to be good at identifying AI generated text to detect low-effort slop.
malgamves | parent | next
As the author I can assure you there’s a human behind these words. Interesting times me live in though, I find myself questioning what’s AI and what’s not often too and at the moment we’ve offloaded that responsibility to the good will of authors or platform policy which might have to change soon
meindnoch | root | parent | next
"there’s a human behind these words"

That's a bit vague. Was the article written without the aid of LLMs? Yes or no.

torginus | root | parent
Well, if the words were 100% hand-written, I assume he'd have said that.
green-salt | root | parent | next
Nice dodge! Unfortunately, this made it more obvious.
jonmagic | root | parent | next
I thought it was a great post tying a lot of things I’ve been reading and thinking about together. Could care less if you used AI if it helps my brain expand and or make connections I wouldn’t have otherwise.
lovecg | root | parent
As in, you used 0 AI to write or edit this text? Or some AI? I’d like to calibrate myself.
grey-area | root | parent
We all know the answer to that.
| parent | next
{"deleted":true,"id":47290211,"parent":47288468,"time":1772908403,"type":"comment"}
q3k | parent | next
Everyone's trying to be the new thought leader enlightened technical essayist. So much fluff everywhere.
orsorna | root | parent
What's wild is that with a few minutes of manual editing it would give exponential return. For instance, a lead sentence in your section saying "here's why X" that was already described by your subheading is unnecessary and could have been wholly removed.
therealdrag0 | root | parent | next
That’s pretty presumptive of how obviously the author could improve it. As someone who writes a lot of docs, I find feedback and preferences varies wildly. They may just have well made it “worse” to your preferences by hand editing it more.
amarant | root | parent | next
Exponential return? This is the front page of HN! What does exponential returns even look like?

Are you saying this post is a few edits away from becoming a New York Times bestseller?

orsorna | root | parent
No, I guess I meant editing to approach a text that doesn't look rushed over (LLM generation is a subset of such poor writings)

But you're right, it did hit the front page, and that says more about my sensibilities not lining up with whoever is voting the article up.

gzread | root | parent | next
You'd have to have a good idea of how you want the document to read, which is half (or more) of the process of writing it.
antonvs | root | parent
IME many people aren't very capable of editing their own work effectively. It's why "editor" exists as a profession.
idiotsecant | parent | next
This doesn't seem particularly AI slopped to me.
einr | root | parent
"Not bigger than databases. Different from databases.

It's not a website you go to — it's a little spirit that lives on your machine.

Not a chatbot. A tool that reads and writes files on your filesystem.

That's not a technical argument. It's a values argument."

panarky | parent
Does everyone just easily accuse genuine, literate humans of "cheating" with AI when there's no way they could know that?

There are a lot of unique aspects of the writing in this post that LLMs don't typically generate on their own.

And there's not a "delve" or "tapestry" or even a bullet point to be found.

Also, accusations and complaints like this are off-topic and uninteresting.

We should be talking about filesystems here, not your gut instinct AI detector that has a sky-high false-positive rate.

I swear there needs to be some convention around throwing wild accusations at people you don't know based exclusively on vibes and with zero actual evidence.