Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.
Just saying that everything is going to go to shit and one or two corporations will take over everything... Maybe, but I've heard that story already.
I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.
Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?
I guess I'm also learning the value of working with an editor from first principles... over the last couple weeks before publishing I read through and made edits to this piece at least twice a day and still didn't catch this.
I don't think that phrase means what you are trying to say here.
What it doesn't mean: - learning by doing
I believe it generally means: a formalization that comes after a subject is understood so well that you can reduce it to "first principles" that imply the rest. Or, the production of a hypothesis by deduction from widely-accepted principles.
However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier.
The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better.
We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.
I feel like this ultimately boils down to something similar to nocode vs code debates that you mention. (Is openclaw having these flowcharts similar to nocode territory?)
at some point, code is more efficient in doing so, maybe even people will then have this code itself be generated by AI but then once again, you are one hallucination away from a security nightmare or doesn't it become openclaw type thing once again
But even after that, at some point, the question ultimately boils down to responsibility. AI can't bear responsibility and there are projects which need responsibility because that way things can be secure.
I think that the conclusion from this is that, we need developers in the loop for the responsibility and checks even if AI generated code stays prevalent and we are seeing some developers already go ahead and call them slop janitors in the sense that they will remove the slop from codebase.
I do believe that the end reason behind it is responsibility. We need someone to be accountable for code and we need someone to take a look and one who understands the things to prevent things from going south in case your project requires security which for almost all production related things/not just basic tinkering is almost necessary.
I've mostly been digging through my own version of that and trying to find things I find interesting and seeing what kinds of stories we can build about what a day in that job might look like.
For the exact same reason why there is absolutely no technical reason why two departments in a company can't talk to each other and exchange data, but because of <whatever> reason they haven't done that in 20 years.
The idea that farmers will just buy "AI" as a blob that is meant to do a thing and these blobs will never interact with each other because they weren't designed to(as in - John Deere really doesn't want their AI blob to talk to the AI blob made by someone else, even if there is literally no technical reason why it shouldn't be possible), seems like the most likely way things will go - it's how we've been operating for a long time and AI won't change it.
Or you can ask the agent to do this after each round. Or before a deploy. They are great at performing analysis.
> If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.
This is really the whole idea behind this project with Near Zero. I think there's a lot of anxiety out there around AI and the future, I was there for a while too. Ultimately I've ended up pretty optimistic about it all, and inspired by what the group at Protocolized is doing, found science fiction a great way to help express that.
I don't know if this is what the future will look like, but this looks realistic. And if my non-existent grandson starts re-coding my business without asking, he's going to spend the next six months using K&R C.
Edit: got it right!
30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
I'm happily surprised (frankly amazed TBH) that the submitter didn't get bawled out by people flagging the post and accusing him of posting slop.
Can you elaborate on this?
Hard to imagine many occupations that have undergone more radical change in the recent past than farming. The profession is now utterly technology-dependent, and a few companies like John Deere have hastened to take unfair advantage of that. Hence the growing advocacy of right-to-repair laws.
It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about
It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
Well, then, you gotta move on to reading better science fiction. Because this is pretty damn bland. I gave up after 2 minutes because of it. Kinda feel vindicated after coming to the comments.
I can see it working for casual readers, which is why it's already an editorial problem. Imagine having to sift through a growing number of faux writers sending publishers AI generated prose.
But this submission? It feels like the writer is trying to enter a spiral which turns out a circle. Ridden with exposition and matter of facts. The dialogue is barren, soulless. I tried to pick it up again, but the more I read the more I want to get out. Its topic being brand new doesn't justify all of the monotony. I'm sorry to the author (orchestrator?); I'm just being earnest.
The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.
Which is totally fair, I'm honestly not! I haven't read much of that myself
It was the text equivalent of hearing a singer whom you know has perfect pitch sing atonal playground songs.
Take this sentence:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible.
Perfectly fine, a nice set up for a next sentence, but then you get hit with this:
He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years.
Bad. The rhythm is all off. Minor improvement:
For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield.
Minor change, really, but the fluidity of the language matters a lot and just that one sentence written that one way breaks the flow.
It's almost as if a second person interjected and wrote that sentence like a friends annoying girlfriend who won't let him finish a story without adding in her parts.
But two notes does not a music make, so let's compare that 1 minor change with a before and after of all three opening sentences:
Original:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
Modified:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
* this is a good attempt at a work of art, but written in a generic style that detracts from it * nobody making genuinely good attempts at art like this would also write so generically * and if they were making it generic on purpose, they wouldn't be able to do it so flawlessly * oh, it must be AI
I guess I can discern the presence of a human artist, but only in the idea, which just means it was a good prompt.
But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.
We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.
FTFY
I can't say I agree, at all. This is essentially just your average post on Facebook or Linkedin made relevant on HN through telling a story about software mechanics. I don't find it interesting to 'read' collaborations between human and AI bots there and I would greatly prefer it if they don't infest HN as well.
That's fine. Nothing on HN is of interest to everyone. But the post spent 20 hours on the front page and earned over 450 upvotes and 300 comments. It was clearly interesting to a lot of the community and activated a worthwhile discussion.
> I would greatly prefer it if they don't infest HN as well
We are actively working against AI-generated/bot-posted comments "infesting" HN. LinkedIn-style marketing slop has always been unwelcome on HN, whether it's AI-generated or not. In this case a collaboration between a human and AI produced an interesting result, as evidenced by the community's response.
“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”
“Everything.”
He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.
Ethan looked ill.
--
I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?
[Edited for clarity]
The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.
But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.
Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.
Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
The error is that the LLM should have have said that the costs went lower, not higher.
It got the overall logic correct, but had a nonsense sentence in the middle.
I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling.
It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable.
I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.
One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.
So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.
But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.
If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.
In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.
This is what the deconstructionists were preparing us for, I guess. The author is dead, and if not dead, then fake. It was never a good idea to tie our sense of meaning to external validation.
The humanity immanent in the text came from you, the reader, not the author, and it has always been that way. Language never gave us access to the author's mind -- and to the extent that statement is wrong, it doesn't matter. AI is just another layer of text, coming between the reader and the same collective consciousness that a human author would presumably have drawn on. The artistic appreciation of that text is the sole privilege of the reader.
Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.
I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel like the current attitude towards AI generated art will suffer the same fate—but I'm really not quite sure.
Read my comment below for a perspective.
> I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.
If you assume you're reading something from a person with intention and a perspective, who you could connect with or influence in some way, then that affects the experience of reading. It's not just the words on the page.
(* "Cat Person" honestly felt like the literary equivalent of Rickrolling; I would have stopped reading it after the first page if not for my friend's glowing endorsement.)
It had a very similar quality to the AI'd article from this thread. A sort of attempt at Being Literary but never really ever getting to the point of saying anything. It has the same feeling of wallowing, of over indulging in its shtick.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-la...
but if you knew it came from a human it would be interesting as a window to learning what the writer was thinking
since there is no writer such window doesn't exist either
But LLMs don't have potential. You can make an LLM write a thousand articles in the next hour and it will not get one iota better at writing because of it. A person would massively improve merely from the act of writing a dozen, but 100x that effort and the LLM is no better off than when it started.
Despite every model release every 6 months being hailed as a "game changer", we can see from the fact that LLMs are just as empty and dumb as they were when GPT-2 was new half a decade ago that there really is no long term potential here. Despite more and more power, larger and hotter and more expensive data centers, it's an asymptotic return where we've already broken over the diminishing returns point.
And you know, I wouldn't care all that much--hell, might even be enthusiastically involved--if folks could just be honest with themselves that this turd sandwich of a product is not going to bring about AGI.
You cannot even get angry or upset if you disagree with anything in the story, maybe the author’s despicable worldview permeating through the characters... because there's no author’s worldview, because there's no author. It's a window into nothing, except perhaps the myriad of stories in the model's training set.
I want to at least have to option of getting upset at the author.
It's kind of an abandonment of having a worldview, outsourcing it to the AI.
And if you've read literally any science fiction you will know the myriad ways that could be absolutely terrible for us
But there was nobody there, and I'm only disappointed in myself for not noticing.
When AI can write convincingly enough, it is basically a honeypot for human readers. It looks well-written enough. The concept is interesting and we think it is going somewhere. The point is that AI cannot write anything good by itself, because writing is a form of communication. AI can't communicate, only generate output based on a prompt. At best, it produces an exploded version of a prompt, which is the only seed of interest that carries the whole thing.
Somebody had that nugget of an idea which is relevant for today's readers. They told the AI to write it up, with some tone or setting details, then probably edited it a bunch. If we enjoy any part of it, we are enjoying the bits of humanity peeking through the process, not the default text the AI wrote.
Or, I digress, it will be distinguishable from human work but because it's so much better than anything that a human could have ever created. These AI tools that we have now are as dumb as they will ever be. If we ever reach AGI or superintelligence or whatever—or even if not, even if these tools just advance for 10 more years on their current trajectory—it's easy for me to imagine some scenario where the machines can generate something so perfect to your liking that you just prefer it to anything a human ever would have created, storytelling and all.
You can take the general case where AI can just generate a better movie than a team of humans ever could plausibly generate. After all, AI doesn't have any of the physical constraints of a movie studio—the budget, the logistics of traveling from location to location, the catering, the fact that the crew has to sleep, has to coordinate schedules, all that. AI, with some human involvement or not, could just keep iterating on some script on a laptop overnight until its created an optimized version which is more satisfying to humans than any other human made movie ever created. Or in a narrow case it could create the perfect movie for you, given what it knows about you and your interests. All human movies would look inferior.
For my kids, who I'm sure are going to grow up in a world where this type of art is embedded everywhere—and where the human version is almost certainly going to be worse—I don't think the desperate cries to see the last scrap of human ingenuity will mean anything. All of these people throwing rocks at Waymos and others boycotting companies for generating ads rather than shooting one with a video studio; it's so obviously helpless, desperate and obviously futile in the face of what's coming.
I mourn the future that seems plausible here but I also welcome it as inevitable. The technology is coming, and people are going to have to adapt one way or another.
When I'm listening to music, looking at art, seeing a play or a short film I want to feel connection to the humans behind it. AI is by definition missing that connection. That's what makes me retrospectively vomit at AI writings like these. That connection requires that the humans behind it are imperfect, the solo can have one or two sloppy notes, but at least it's genuine interaction. We have seen this same yearning for connection with all the "Don't use LLM to comment, use your true style of writing with its flaws" rules.
I'm 100% certain mainstream studios will be producing "perfect" content with AIs just like current mainstream pop stars have 10 ghost writers working on each song to create "perfect" songs. The good stuff will exist in the fringes as always and I'm ok with that as I've already been for years.
And the future may not be as settled as you think it is. Leaders try to sell you their vision of the future by saying it is settled and that things are certain, but that is because they want you to believe that, because if you and the masses believe so, it's more certain for the future to settle the way the leaders want. But you can also actively refuse that future and find a different future that's worth believing in yourself.
So what is AI bringing to the fans of these genres that the fans might value? Because it's not authenticity nor is it skills. What is the point you're trying to make?
But your point also stands here, every new guitarist must play the solos as close to the original ones as possible, otherwise it's not the same experience. So on the music level "what" is of much higher priority still. But I wouldn't say it is as black and white as you make it out to be.
Edit: And a lot of modern black metal for example doesn't even bother with stating who they are. Member lists are pseudonymous or anonymous. I think this "anti god" culture makes metal different from other genres in some ways.
There's also upcoming math rock band Angine de Poitrine who are also anonymous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so . In these cases you can argue that the person doesn't matter but in my opinion it still does. There's a person inside that costume, who has made the decision to be anonymous as part of the whole experience. That's part of their expression.
Of course there's then bands like Ghost who have mainstreamed this too - the players wearing the costumes are usually just contract musicians and don't have anything to do with Tobias or the music other than playing for money. Good for them but f that, you are just a robot at that point.
I used dashes quite frequently in the past, but stopped using them to avoid being associated with llm generated text :(
It's a shame really, because it is a useful gramatical tool.
But:
> readers are finding it a phenomenal story
is not true across the board.
I thought to myself, explicitly, and fairly early "This is a fun and thoughtful idea, but the writing is kinda crap" before I realized (maybe a third if the way through) "ah, right, this is genAI. That tracks."
Despite my deep-seated hatred of LLMs, I choose to finish the piece and see if I was being unfair to the actual work ("the output", in the soulless descriptor used by programmers who've never once written a real story or crafted a song).
As a longtime avid reader of fiction, lit nerd, and semi-pro musician, I understand writing and artistry better than the average HN poster, and couldn't help but see the flaws in this.
People who don't have deep knowledge of literature don't catch the tells or flaws as well, but are still understandably angry when they find out they burned their time reading clanker output, and are understandably depressed that they were suckered into it because they haven't spent a lifetime developing a deep understanding of the discipline.
It's possible that genAI approaches will surpass humans in every field we invented.
So far, though, in every field I understand deeply, I see the uncanny mediocrity of the average in every LLM output I have subjected myself to.
For me, the answer to this riddle is very easy: I want to engage with other human minds. A robot (or AI) doesn't have a human mind, so I'm not interested in its "artistic" output.
It was never about how good it was. Of course AI slop adds insult to injury by being also bad. Currently. But it'll get better. My position was never that AI art (shorts, pictures, music, text) is to be frowned up because it's bad. I don't like it because it's not the expression of a human mind.
It's a bit like how an AI boy/girlfriend is not the real deal, no matter how realistic -- and I'm sure they'll get uncannily realistic in the future. They aren't the real deal because there's no real human behind the facade of companionship.
Quite honestly, I do that sometimes too -- but I _know_ that it's unreasonable.
Humans are designed to form emotional connections with non emotional things. Its sort of our whole deal.
With stories that shared experience is between author and reader. Book clubs etc will try to extend that "shared experience" but primarily it is author <-> reader relationship.
Remove that "shared feeling with the author" and what meaning does it have?
It means, "Wow. Cool. I'm a member of a species that taught rocks to think. Holy fuck. That's pretty insanely fucking awesome. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Fuck."
That's about all it means. Nothing was removed from your life, but something optional was added.
It has absolutely made my life worse not better
But after how many AI stories does that novelty wear off?
And yet, in ironic counterpoint, there is a different artist I follow on Spotify that does EDM-fusion-various-world-genres. And it’s very clearly prompt generated. And that doesn’t bother me.
My hypothesis is that it has to do with how we connect/resonate with the creations. If they are merely for entertainment, then we care less. But if the creation inspired an emotion/reasoning that connects us to other humans, we feel betrayed, nay, abandoned, when it comes up being synthetic.
The most quantifiable is the presence of a high frequency component that sort of sounds like someone tried to clean up our restore a highly compressed track. It almost sounds kind it's going to start doing that warbling sound that happens when a teleconferencing call has a bad connection but it's just not bad enough to lose connection completely. I guess it's the sound of being highly noise gated.
The other is more qualitative. The song is boring. Like you said, on paper the song should be something I enjoy. But I suddenly notice that there is no... variation or never hook or anything to make it interesting. Anything to make it something other than the result of a machine. The aural equivalent of eating at Applebee's or reading The New Yorker. The songs just kind of plod onward without ever really getting to a point.
It feels kind of like a vivid dream when you're on the edge of lucidity. You can tell something is wrong, but there is something messing with you faculties. You're trying to see where things are going, how things will resolve, and it never happens. It just keeps going and going in a particular mode. If it does change, it's not to resolve, it's to start on a new thread that is an alternate universe version of the previous thread. With no attempt at establishing continuity, no resolution is ever found.
I think if you left it to its own devices, some of the narrative exposition stuff that humanized it would go off the rails
It's really interesting to hear about others that have been exploring generating fiction with Claude. I clearly need some more work based on some of the comments, but it has been really interesting discovering and coming up with different techniques both LLM-assisted and manual to end up with something I felt confident enough about to put out.
I'd be curious to hear more about your experience!
Because it's productized I need to "one-shot" the output, so I focus a lot on post-training models these days, but I've also used tricks like running wordfreq to find recently overused words and feed the list back to the model as words that cannot be used in the next generation.
Models couldn't always follow instructions like that (pink elephant problem), but recently they're getting better at it.
It felt like it was written by someone trying to quit an addiction to Corporate Memphis content spam. Like it came from some weird timeline where qntm was a LinkedIn influencer. It straddles an uncanny valley of being a criticism of the domination of The Corporation over human culture while at the same time wallowing in The Corporate Eunuch Voice, not because it's a subversion of form, but because it knows no other way.
I then came to the comments section and found the piece that brought the picture into focus.
It's just... hard to explain the specific kind of disappointment. Perhaps there is a German phrase-with-all-the-spaces-removed kind of word that describes it succinctly. I feel like I exist in this Truman Show kind of world where everyone is trying to gaslight me into thinking LLMs are important, but they aren't very good at it and whenever I try to find out how or why, it all evaporates away. I was very reluctant to say that because I'm sure it's going to come with a heaping side of Extremely Earnest Walruses ready to Have A Debate about it and I just don't have the energy for it anymore. That's the baseline existence right now. It's like a really boring version of Gamergate.
And then this thing comes along. And yeah, it's a thing. You got me. Ha. Ha. Joke's on me. I lost the shitty, fake version of the Turing Test that I didn't even ask to be a part of. And it reminds me of the Microsoft Hololens: a massively impressive technological achievement that was ultimately a terrible consumer experience. Like if you figured out Fusion Power but it could only power Guy Fieri restaurants.
Ever since the pandemic I've been keenly aware of the complete destruction of every enjoyable social structure around me. The meetups that evaporated. The offices we essentially squatted in that suddenly turned Extremely Concerned about what people were doing. The complete lack of any social interaction at work because we're all so busy because we're running at half-workforce and pretty sure the executive suite is salivating at the bit to lay the rest of us off. The lack of care about how this is impacting open source software. The lack of concern for people.
I feel like my entire adult life was this slow, agonizing, but at least constant push forward into recognizing the humanity in others and creating a kind and diverse world and then over night it's all been destroyed and half the people I see online are cheering it on like it's Technojesus coming to absolve them of their sins of never learning to invert a binary tree. Where the blogs and books and startups of the early 2000s were about finding the hidden potential in people--the college dropout working as a barista who just needs someone to give them a chance to be a programmer or a graphic designer or an artist or whatever--the modern era seems to all be about the useless middle management guy who never had any creative bone in his body no longer having to write status reports to his equally mendacious boss on his own anymore.
We might be restarting old coal plants, but at least Kevin in middle management gets to enjoy "programming" again.
This had the feeling of reading someone's diary: today happened, same as yesterday.
The only difference is that the routine, and almost identical, stories is set in in a fictional place.
Some journal/found footage fiction can be good (Dracula for example), but this was not that.
It feels great to use.
It feels terrible to have it used on you.
Personally I have an uneasiness with it and are correspondingly cautious. Often after a review and edits it loses that "smell". I kind-of felt the same about NPM and package managers for a long time before using it became obligatory (for lack of a better word).
Are we conditioned to use other people's code unthinkingly, or is it something else?
An elegant algorithm or intentionally inelegant one do not speak or communicate ideas? Please, keep hairsplitting.
Sir. You’re wrong and wrong on the internet. Two capital offenses. For shame.
I dont think you are reading my point at all and are instead getting worked up. If you disagree, fair.
I think a heavy argument needs to be made to say that code or programming languages do not carry ideas for me to change my mind on it. Id be happy to engage in good spirit but you seem pretty set in stone there.
With AI-generated text where there is this disconnect between the audience and the prompter who has an idea but not the skill to express it. Would you say reading an English translation of Dostoevsky is similar because you're connecting with the interpreter rather than the actual author? Or something as simple as an Asterix comic where the English translation is rarely literal but uses different English plays on words?
I wouldn't go as far as can't, but in general it won't be, and if any ideas are indeed communicated, they will be impersonal.
>With AI-generated text where there is this disconnect between the audience and the prompter who has an idea but not the skill to express it. Would you say reading an English translation of Dostoevsky is similar because you're connecting with the interpreter rather than the actual author? Or something as simple as an Asterix comic where the English translation is rarely literal but uses different English plays on words?
I can think of a better example. In comic circles there's the rewrite, which is when an editor isn't fluent in the original language, and so instead of actually translating, they just rewrite all the dialogue to something that matches the action. People (generally) hate rewrites. Unknowingly reading a rewrite provokes a similar feeling of betrayal that unknowingly reading LLM output provokes.
Of course this has always been a bit of a problem with digital art trying to mascarade as the real thing... I always think of programmed drums using real drum samples. In my adult life I found out that an album I loved as a teenager that listed a real drummer as the performer was actually 100% programmed (this was an otherwise very "organic" sounding heavy guitar album). I always had my suspicions since it was so perfect but I experienced exactly what you are describing. I also never got over it.
Thinking deeper, it seems prudent that we tag submissions like this with a prefix. Example: "LLM: ". This would be similar to "Show HN: ". While we cannot control what the original sources choose to disclose, we can fill that gap ourselves.
My point: I agree with you: It is misleading that the blog post does not include a preface explaining it was written by an LLM (and ideally, the author's motivation to use an LLM). However, it is still a good blog post that has generated some thoughtful discussion on HN.
why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.
Creative writing is the intent to convey feelings, thoughts, to create atmosphere. Here's a great example of the failure to do so here, in a way that even most terrible writers would avoid.
> “It just said harvest,” she told Tom. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, holding a cup of the adequate coffee.
The coffee in this story is conveyed as being 'perfectly adequate'. But how do you convey adequacy? When you simply just say 'the coffee is adequate' there's nothing there. It could be conveyed by establishing that the coffee is always perfectly room temperature, or with the mere hint of bitterness and sweetness, or that it tastes like every other brand out there. In many respects this story is the exact same as the 'perfectly adequate' coffee: functional, unexciting and ultimately flavorless.
This "flavorlessness" is all over the story, and paired with the obviously genAI images is how I realized as I read that this was either generated or at the least deeply driven by AI.
It constantly described facial expressions, tones of voice, and other emotional cues in generic, dry terms that communicated nothing but the abstract notion of "this person felt a particular way about what happened and it's up to you, the reader, to imagine what that feeling was."
It felt very much like it was prompted to "show, don't tell," by someone who has no idea what that phrase actually means.
As a professional programmer with a deep background in literature and music, this is yet another example that if you aren't an expert in a field, you will get mediocre results at best from an LLM, while being deceived into thinking they're great.
> obviously genAI images
You are correct that a previous era would have included a bunch of Fiverr images that would be in sort of that style, but it's not the style that's the problem. None of the images say more than the text that they're illustrating. It's subtle, but once you notice the lack of information density it becomes starkly apparent.
Obviously everyone's mileage may vary, but I didn't see this as a huge defect, and actually felt it worked pretty well.
In the hands of Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut it could be spun into a whole recurring motif.
In this case it's merely...adequate. Almost captures the density of ideas packed into something like "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" but doesn't quite manage the same effect.
every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions.
asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone to bake you a wedding cake, and then claim you baked it, you’re a fraud.
we deserve to know the actual writer.
Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do.
For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes:
1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam)
2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough)
3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text)
In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).
Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view.
I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing.
A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications.
With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in.
LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.
but you dodged the question i asked - why can't a piece stand on the contents, rather than its pedigree?
Would you care if a writer used a pen name? Does that in any way diminish their works? What about the unknown editors that contributed?
When you interact with art, you do so to interact with the author and the point they want to make. Writing is something where a skilled writer will be able to make a point tersely and have it stick, knowing where to embellish and where to keep it simple. Every decision in art tells you about the artist. Generative AI may be able to fake the composition process, but the point of composition is it reveals something about the human. All of those are artistic decisions that a machine apparently now "can do", but not with any coherency.
The holder of the reigns of slop is not an artist, this is plain to see because they do not interact or engage with their work on the same level as an artist. The produced slop is not art, because it cannot be engaged with on the same level.
Due to LLMs making the cost of publishing “thoughts” extremely low, there’s now an over-supply of content that looks decent on the surface, but in reality the author has probably spent less time on than the reader.
I’m just talking about the general topic about the usefulness of an “this is AI generated” classifier.
exactly what i'm trying to get at too. And my thesis is that this classification method is pointless - it's just as pointless as saying things like "this author went to harvard", or "he/she came from a poor background".
Of course these systems may eventually break down, but for now they seem to work.
we have pop musicians who produce massive hits under their names and the song writers are still given credit in liner notes and in the tracks details on spotify or wherever.
if it’s created by a bot, id take it even further and say which version of which model actually generated it should be declared. why would anyone be against giving proper attribution?
AI is just a tool
If you used a fancy auto bake cake machine instead of an oven, you still get to claim that you made the cake.
100 years ago someone would be making the claim that using an oven to make cakes “doesn’t count”
All AI did was raise the bar
It’s quite clear here that the author spent a lot of time on this so he absolutely gets credit as the author
If you use an AI, there isn't.
Either way, it's clear that the author (yes, the author) put a lot of work into this by iterating and shaping it to what he wanted, and that's a lot more than sprinkles.
> If you use an AI, there isn't.
What is the functional difference here? You are commissioning (see: prompting) someone (see: an AI) for a piece of work, or artwork or whatever. The output is out of your control; and I don't think the existence or lack thereof of a human on the other end materially matters.
If we had hyper-advanced ovens from The Jetsons where we could type a prompt using a fold-out keyboard and it would magically generate whatever cake we ask of it: did we or did we not bake that cake? And I do not think it is clear the author put a lot of work iterating and shaping it into what he wanted; we have zero insight into that.
If we had a complete black box where you submitted Prompt and out came Thing, and you had zero clue what said black box actually did, could you claim creation over Thing? What does knowing that it's a human vs LLM make materially different in terms of whether or not you created it?
Imagine if you had an auto cake making machine that decides on its own the best time to make cake. It adds the ingredients, stirs, turns the oven on, and leaves the finished cake on the counter for you.
People start opening bakeries consisting entirely of cakes baked by the automatic machines. The owners of these machines have no idea whether the cakes have a bit too much flour or were slightly over-stirred. In some cases, they haven't even tried the cakes.
Who gets to claim they made the cake?
By contrast, there are others who carefully tune their machines to make sure everything is perfect. They adjust the mixing settings and ingredient proportions. They experiment and iterate. They taste test throughout the process. And what they give to the public tastes every bit as good as a homemade cake.
The first group is creating slop. The second group, I think, is baking. And OP is in the second group.
Why would I give him the same credit I would give a writer.
Or why would I give a writer the same credit I would give someone who created the AI prompts and scaffolding to generate this?
Being unhappy about not being able to call oneself an author, ends up betraying a lack of confidence in the work or process.
In the end writer, dancer, actor, whatever - these titles come from their impact.
There will be a different name for this, and eventually there will be something made that is good enough that people will be spell bound. At which point its going to be named something else.
At which point.
In general, though, I think part of the mistake people keep making is that they try to imitate what would be value to engage with if a human wrote it, in an attempt to claim the role of an author of a book or whatever. There's likely artforms that are unique to what an LLM can facilitate, but trying to imitate human artforms is going to give you stunted results. The AI is very good at imitating the form but not the substance.
Once we stop trying to generate and pass off AI essays, novels, choose your own adventure stories, and all the other human genres as being human writing, we'll have a chance to figure out actually interesting artistic forms.
However - since we are humans - we also care about the artist.
Creating something without the effort previous works involved, can and do affect the context and understanding of it.
Hah - just thought of one good example: how would people feel about talking to only fans creators, if they didn’t know it was AI.
not really. Unless you place value on _effort_, rather than be objectively outcome based. Someone digging a hole with a spoon doesn't make it a better hole than a jackhammer.
I maintain that the work itself - that is, the contents of what is being expressed - is the sole judgement of how good the works is. Not the authorship, LLM-usage or otherwise.
A core fact about information, is that signal only exists in the right context.
As an illustrative example: A string of static or gibberish numbers converts to signal when we have the right tools to interpret it.
You could see a bunch of rocks arranged on a beach, while someone who understands the local language may see an SOS.
Culture itself keeps evolving, and teenagers reuse language to create jargon that makes sense to them, but is opaque to others.
I am arguing that your point is true, but its phrasing focuses on the Platonic ideal, and avoiding the messy practical context of communication.
> how would LLMs fair when the content of the work itself is about “Something made by a human”.
it would fair just as well as if the same words had been written by a human, provided the contents are sound and has good meaning - conversely, slop is slop, regardless if it was written by an LLM or human.
My point at the grandparent post is that there's a lot of blind discrimination on the origin of a works - if it was written by or with the help of LLM, then it automatically deserves less attention, and/or its content's worth diminished. All without actually discussing the content.
> why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?
clearly it does to you?
thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement
the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building
what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict
my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant
Also I feel a bit conned. I was curious what Tom Hartmann was up to and now it seems he doesn't exist and it's just some slop?
next stop will be to ask for some sort of regulation
and other stuff... it's not that good.
But I deeply feel that art only matters if there is an artist. The artist wants to convey something.
What makes you uneasy (if you are like me) is that a machine deliberately created emotions in your brain. And positive emotions, at that. It’s really something I can’t stand.
So, the guy who suspends buckets of paint with a hole in the bottom to make patterns has an idea of what he's creating. The guy who just put a few strips of electrical tape in different colours had an idea of what he was trying to convey. The guy who flings paint against a wall also has an idea of what he's creating. The guy who made all the white paintings. All that art is trivial to copy in the same style, maybe even an exact copy for the electrical tape, but it's the artist's intention that makes it worth more than a toddler's painting.
Personally, I think most of that abstract art is pointless, because I don't really see how the artist's vision is represented by whatever the mess they've created is, but I definitely understand that at least they had an idea that they wanted to convey. A machine creating the same thing has no meaning behind it, it's just a waste of paint and canvas.
Very few humans have managed this. This text is at the average level of "i want to pass the message and i'm trying to write professionally".
Maybe the summary of the first section wouldn't have landed without the example but "People who would spend $50,000 on elective surgery without blinking would balk at a $200 annual wellness check. The fix was always cheaper than the failure, the prevention was always cheaper than the fix, and somehow the money always flowed toward the crisis rather than away from it." explained the problem far more succinctly than the rambling prose before it.
I did notice something else AI about it - I really liked the art style for the illustrations, and had mixed emotions as my thought process was "I'd really like to learn how to draw like this, but I guess there's no point spending my time doing that because now I could just get an AI to generate it, and I guess that's the point of the article".
He says he spent months on this piece and then some, I think it's safe to assume here that this was well supervised, guided, thoughtful and full of human intent despite the AI-assisted part.
In short, I think calling it "AI generated" takes all the human effort that went into these months and the ingenious creativity of OP towards crafting this piece!
Anyways, I enjoyed it. :)
> After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
There is a substantial amount of work here, comparable to how long a human writer would take to write from scratch, definitely not slop. I think we can call it AI-assisted, not AI-generated. Even the illustrations are well above average.
When ChatGPT first came onto the scene I actually started using it to write something in this vein - a techno-thriller starring a former fashion model trained in Krav Maga working as a nuclear physicist who discovers a sinister government conspiracy to alter the foundations of quantum mechanics and enslave humanity with assistance from extraterrestrials. And, of course, only she can stop them with the help of a gruff-but-sensitive retired Marine who has since opened a ranch where he teaches orphaned puppies calculus. I only got 20 pages (so one gunfight and a car chase) in but it was as riveting as anything. Context limit cut my efforts short. Perhaps I'll revisit it soon.
I say all this to say that if words themselves are distantly secondary to narrative then I don't see anything particularly wrong with leveraging an LLM to help crank something out.
But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste.
The story is good.
I am also extremely interested in thinking about where software development is going, so I really appreciated the ideas that went into this.
Since you seem open to feedback, I want to add that I felt the generated images were a negative addition. Maybe they wouldn't be if they also got a little polish - the labels in them were particularly bad.
And thanks for the note about the images, I'll take that into account! I only really just started this project and am going to keep iterating as I learn to use the tools better and I find the right visual language for it.
Since you seem in the mood to give feedback ;) If you take a quick glance at the previous story, do you feel the same way about the images in that one or was it just this one's that you found particularly unpolished?
I did read your previous story (not as polished but still interesting) and noticed in the image that linked to "beautiful but the Mandarin module has a tone recognition bug that makes it nearly impossible for non-native speakers", that the tone bug was Hebrew rather than Chinese characters. Interesting...I might have a look again and translate.
> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project [...] about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
The amount of work and walltime expended sounds about right. You have discovered / stumbled upon the relatively well known but little appreciated job of a publishing editor. It takes a lot of nitty-gritty work and built up domain knowledge ("world bibles") to direct a piece of writing - and its author - to a level where you confidently believe that you have captured the intent and desired tone of the piece, while keeping it sufficiently tight, engaging and interesting / non-patronising enough for its audience.
Disclosure: did ~decade of freelance writing around the turn of the millennium, and have had the privilege of being schooled by a small group of good old-school journalists. And then had a publishing editor assigned for a separate project, from whom I learned even more about writing.
what was my surprise when I read it was AI-generated
All I found was a human name given as the author.
We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.
I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.
As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine.
Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?
Yes, science fiction writers and readers have, since before any of us were born.
And also be surprised by some of the uses to which it's put. And horrified by some of the societal backsliding despite what should be utopian technology.
"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"
Prompts in, garbage out.
This is my common issue from building websites for SMEs. It's not until Google updates their algorithm - killing their ranking and their sales leads slow that you hear from them.
There is wisdom in constantly up-selling to your customers (we offer management services, SEO and are cautiously moving in AIO), they may say no, but you have a fall back that you offered things that would have mitigated their current crisis.
Then I started scrolling and thought the author was just verbose like RMS.
When it just kept going I was just mad to have fallen into the AI tarpit.
Fun idea. 5x too long. I need to calibrate my ai spidey sense better.
As an allegory it reminds a lot of one I read as a teen: Joshua by Joseph Girzone. Not a literary masterpiece but a cleaver thought-raising story.
As for spec-to-software - I am still pretty unsure about this. Right now of course we are not really that close, it takes too much iteration from a prompt to a usable piece of software, and even then you need to have a good prompt. I'm also not sure about re-generating due to variations on what the result might be. The space of acceptable solutions isn't just one program, it's lots, and if you get a random acceptable solution that might be fine for original generation, but it may be extremely annoying to randomly get a different acceptable solution when regenerating, as you need to re-learn how to use it (thinking about UI specifically here.) Maybe these are the same problem, once you can one-shot the software from a spec maybe you will not have much variation on the solution since you aren't doing a somewhat random walk there iterating on the result.
I also don't know if many users really want to generate their own solutions. That's putting a lot of work on the user to even know what a good idea is. Figuring out what the good ideas are is already a huge part of making software, probably harder than implementing it. Maybe small-(ish) businesses will, like the farmers in the story, but end-users, maybe not, at least not in general.
I do think there is SOMETHING to all this, but it's really hard to predict what it's gonna look like, which is why I appreciate this piece so much.
I thought they were AI because I suspected nobody would pay an illustrator/actually spend time making those illustrations for a story like this.
The fact that the whole text was AI came as a surprise. I did notice that weird inconsistency about feed pricing mentioned in another comment but just thought the author made an error or I misunderstood something.
If you have an eye for fonts, the text itself stands out too, at least to me. The font style of "HARTMANN SOFTWARE MECHANICS" is a particular combination of clean, bland shapes and rounded corners that you rarely see in human-designed fonts, but it's super common in AI-synthesized text. I guess it's sort of an average middle ground in the abstract space of letter forms, and the lack of distinguishing features is what creates the impression.
I personally have on occasion added software rendered fonts into hand-drawn images. Sometimes instead of directly adding it with a text tool I would add it on a temporary layer and then trace it over by hand. This results in similar looking text with clean shapes and rough lines that fit better with the other parts of the drawing.
To me the only thing that stands out in the image is the view through the laundry shop windows. The line of laundry machines doesn't look aligned at a right angle to the window - given that the tiles in front of the window clearly establish perspective lines it's a mistake that seems hard to make and would be pretty apparent in early stages when drawing this.
In fact looking closely, the perspective of the building itself doesn't match the perspective of the fields behind it, but I can see myself doing something like this if it's not that noticeable and gives me better composition.
Looking at it again now, things like the electrical wires not being aligned, or going nowhere are always obvious tells. The outlines on the A in “laundromat” are okay but for some reason the vertical line on the R isn’t open.
It’s impressive that this can be generated with AI. I just wish it would come with a “generated with llm-name” label.
Because of a bad habit reading comments before the link I knew it was AI. I read it regardless, and... I still enjoyed it!
I'm very much not a writer or a critic, so my definition of good writing is likely very low. Yet I can't shake off this weird feeling that I truly enjoyed the writing and felt the emotions, _while_ knowing it's LLM.
I'm guessing that human after touch is what made it pleasant to read. I'd love to see the commit history of the process. Fun times we live in!
Dont know why that makes me annoyed, maybe cause its the depressing seriousness of being a 'prompter' and the americana framing of it.
Does that make the OP an "authoring mechanic"? Or an "AI editor"?
Douglas Adams had it right, the problem is not that the answer was useless, it was that people didn't know what the right question was.
"The tool had changed. The domain had not. People who understood the domain and could also diagnose specification problems were the most valuable people in any industry, and most of them, like Tom, had arrived at the job sideways from something else."
People my age and older arrived in the software business sideways too; in my case from physics and electronics. My background in physics was a great help to me later when programming in the domain of electrical machines because I could speak both languages so to say.
Much grander people than me came into software sideways as I was reminded when reading Bertrand Meyer's in memoriam of Tony Hoare; Tony Hoare's first degree was classics at Oxford.
So perhaps we aren't entering a new phase, merely returning to our roots with new tools.
The images hit that sweet spot too. Just enough and few in between to support the plot without getting in the way, just enough to like visually clarify without over-explaining. It all worked together even with minor contradictions around labelling. The inconsistencies wasn't sticky enough to disrupt the plot at all.
Over the MY years I’ve seen an idea play out in movies, books, articles, short stories, that the “humanity only unites when faced with an alien intelligence”. What gets me is how people can enjoy something like this, then immediately recoil once they figure it was actually AI-assisted enough to be largely Ai generated. Does that actually diminish the substance of what they just experienced? I don’t think it does but I'm not gonna argue such a subjective stance.
Someone in the comments suggested tagging AI-assisted work with sth like an “LLM:” prefix, similar to “ShowHN:”. That feels weird to me. LLMs might not be sentient, but they’re clearly capable enough that the output should stand on its own, alongside the intent and effort of whoever’s guiding it. Pre-labeling it just bakes in bias before anyone even engages with the work. It’s not that far off from asking human authors to declare their race or nationality up front. 'cause really if nothing about my direct experience changed, why should my judgment?
In a tech-forward space like HN, I’d expect a stronger bias toward judging things on merit alone. Just read the thing. Let it speak first. I sincerely hope this isn't gonna be an 'LLM vs Humanity' thing 'cause personally, I find the idea of a different kind of intelligence extremely interesting.
I understand why people feel like they need more transparency around these things. Reading for me is intentional, and I feel cheated when I put in the effort to read something for which the author put in little. I would like to think the author put in a lot of effort for this story despite AI assistance, and so it was worth me putting effort in. But whether that's true or not I still felt like I got something out of it (hard not to as a software engineer wondering about their place in the world), and that's something.
So the idea of feeling tricked based on how much effort went into it feels foreign to me. If I got something out of it, that's enough. Even if it took the author and a model no time at all.
The ‘feeling tricked’ part, to me, suggests a kind of adversarial framing with AI outputs that I think is curious. I’m just engaging with the text in front of me, whether it’s a story, a README, or a wall of technical writing. If it communicates clearly and has substance, I don’t think much about where it came from. I think much of this just comes down to what people think they’re engaging with when they read, the work itself or the mind behind it.
And tbh, filtering what’s worth the attention has always been on the reader. There’s plenty of human written slop too. I tend to judge everything the same way on my way to deciding whether to keep reading or drop it.
would you be open to share the process?
But honestly, the ideas here are really good. The cascading failure from a weather model update, the spaghetti problem with forty tools nobody designed as a system, the $4 toggle switch being the most important tool --- that's sharper thinking about AI than most serious essays on the topic.
A lot of people who publish regularly can't write to this level of thinking. The prose could be cleaner, sure, but it made me think, which is more than most stories do.
Interesting work, nonetheless. I’d check out Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms for more of what I mean. They are very short, yet very metaphorically dense.
The prose is decent, I like the premise, thought provoking idea.
One issue though: I had to use firefox' reader mode, because the contrast between text and background was terrible.
---
The story was decent! I thought it was insightful and it made me reconsider some aspects of AI use. I am skeptical that an AI could write something on par with the Iliad, or Anna Karenina -- but perhaps I will be disabused of that notion someday. Still, this is a level of quality I am surprised to see to come out of an AI (though, as in your story, the LLM seemed to require its own "choreographer" in the form of your editing and polishing). Very thought provoking.
Call it what you want, but I think this sits better with "AI assisted" and, perhaps, really well supervised full of the human intent behind of it. Then again, labels are strange, we call algorithmic and synthesizer assisted music "electronic" music these days and we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft.
I could definitely feel the connection between the human author side of this post, thank you for sharing it!
There are still plenty of purists that will not consider this a "craft". But it's always been that way. The electric guitar itself was a controversial music transition. Bob Dylan was famously criticized heavily for going electric.
But that was a long time ago, and people got over it. And they will again this time.
Because folk music had strong norms about acoustic authenticity. Going electric at the time was seen as "commercialized" and "mass produced".
We see the parallels with what some perceive as "slop" today.
New Morning, Saved, Planet Waves, Basement Tapes
Source: Worked in record store for 15 years.
A lot of things about Dylan got empirically better throughout the '70s, I'll give you that. Deeper concepts, more challenging structure, yada yada yada.
The problem is that I don't decide what I listen to based on anything empirical. If I'm standing around thinking "man, I want to listen to Bob Dylan today," I'm thinking of Freewheelin'. You could say "well that's just you," but we both know it isn't. A third group probably thinks of Highway 61 or something.
Same thing goes for a lot of artists. Master of Puppets is the best Metallica album empirically, but if I'm thinking "gee I want to listen to Metallica today," I'm playing Ride the Lightning, or And Justice for All.
In any case, I think all of this subjectivity might suggest that Dylan going electric was a bad comparison for AI generated art, lol.
Some people appreciate simplicity more, or folk more than rock, but many people with Dylan, just like the social commentary more than the music itself.
I think the difference here is that the AI isn't a "work for hire" setup, it's more like a tool. It would be closer to buying algo sample packs, using Apple's Logic Pro AI drummer for part of the work, or other drum machines for example, and working your way around to glue them together into a composition.
The parallel would need to be between "tool" <—> "composition", rather than "author" <—> "composition" imo.
It explains why it kind of lost its way towards the end. Another thousand hours of everyone’s time wasted by a slop poster.
Many people here already chimed in on the emotion of being caught reading something that might not have felt AI so I will offer another angle. Akin to many The New Yorker article in the past, I felt disconnected with the article for a good portion at the beginning. So much so that I had to skip most of it.
The piece that got me very hooked was when he drove to Carol Lindgren’s farm. I read the remainder of the text and thought the content was engaging and thought provoking, in some sense. I loved the idea of manual override that logged into the system and changed the system behaviour over time. That's something that got me thinking about AI, actually.
Now, I would be curious which part of the author's genesis made it into the final text and how much of that couples with what I found to be intellectually engaging.
This story is itself the explanation of why we're not going to go this route at scale. It'll happen in isolated places for the indefinite future. But farmers are going to buy systems, generated by AIs or not, that have been field tested, and will be no more interested in calling new untested code into being for their own personal use on their own personal farm than they are today.
The limiting factor for future code won't be how much AI firepower someone has to bring to bear on a problem but how much "real world" there is to test the code against, because there is only going to be so much "real world" to go around.
(Expanded on: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ ).
It’s really been interesting since 2022 watching the gesticulations of the population around this idea of content generation aka “AI”
If one thing shines clear through it’s human irrationality and incoherence
It’s really just an infinite repeat of Chris Farley‘s reaction to the coffee crystals prank (1); millions of comfortable software engineers sitting in their well manicured spaces not starving to death, not struggling to survive, all morally offended when they learn something that they enjoyed turns out was not generated by a human.
That is, a lot of "broken software" has always been rooted in "an inadequate/incorrect specification" If problems in the spec are discovered up front they are cheap to fix, the further along you go in development or deployment, the more expensive they are to fix. AI doesn't change that. Like maybe with AI it is 20% faster to fix [1] across the board but it is still more expensive to fix things late -- you might think you are done with waterfall but waterfall is not done with you!
[1] My 20% is pessimistic but if you think you are 10x as productive with AI at putting functionality in front of customers in the long term with a universal scope I believe you've got the same misunderstanding about product life cycle that I'm talking about
1) Bravo. This was actually a fun, enjoyable read. Thank you fellow writer.
2) Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments on this. As one of the authors, I must confess it was not my intention when I wrote that tvtropes wiki page that was ingested by that dodgy script with that weird user agent string and a bad attitude, then added to the data set that eventually made the LLM weights just right for this beautiful story to be possible. I'll be working on more wiki pages soon, so you can look up to more of my stories in the future.