Why are comments turned off on the blog posts itself? I was planning to make 200 thoughtful comments with the cheapest AI I could find to prove a point, but the lack of an option to comment shows you already know the point: something has to gate participation in the conversation. Human authorship is a fantastic gate, which keeps me from pulling my stunt here, where that gate is firmly in place. You could achieve almost the same goals by requiring blog comments to hash to a number ending in X 0s, but requiring human writing is a strict improvement on this. A true devotee of “human writing is not fundamentally better than ai” is signing themselves up to never read a block of text written with actual effort again without some proof of effort mechanism.
This is probably true in the sense that it's also probably true that people are, at the margins, successfully manipulating votes, but it's part of the premise of the site that the moderators are working to counter that. And, like vote rigging, it's a cat-and-mouse game, so you're never going to get a wholly satisfying explanation of how they've decisively resolved the problem. Like a lot of problems in security and antiabuse, the practical solutions are essentially economic in nature: defenders do enough work to make attacks too expensive to be worth it.
Yeah, in a small way I agree with the post, but agree with you as well. For me: human authorship is a pretty solid gate, because the vast majority of people are not doing the work described in the post’s hypothetical “argue through 6 drafts and iterations, wholesale rearrangement, critically considering the content, adjusting further”.
I don’t exactly care about whether or not the actual bits on my screen came directly from a human’s fingers on a keyboard or from an LLM, but I do care about whether or not the material is good, well-written, appropriately concise (which varies both on the content and the audience), fact-checked, and I’m sure a bunch more factors. Some humans fail at these criteria as well.
Human authorship is an imperfect proxy for quality, but saying it’s imperfect doesn’t mean that it’s worthless… quite the opposite, I’d argue. Even if there are flaws in the writing, it at least shows that the author tried, which I do personally put value on. Copy & pasting Claude output without even fact-checking… that’s inherently low effort and if that’s what I wanted to read, I’d just ask Claude myself.
I use LLMs in my workflow to varying degrees depending on the task, but their output never makes it into the wild without serious scrutiny. Sometimes their code is better than what I’d have written, which is great. Sometimes it completely misses the point and needs significant re-steering several times, to the point where it’s easier if I write it myself. For writing, I’ll happily have an LLM harness put together a document explaining a dataflow through a complex system; I ask it to include source filenames and line numbers and can do my own validation before accepting it as truth.
Effort is not a good signal for value. Never has been. Just because someone took 10 more hours to finish a task doesn't mean they did a better job or they care more about the result.
But a lack of effort is a good signal for a lack of value.
Eleven times out of ten, your initial idea is garbage. If you write it up, or let AI do that for you, the result is garbage. But if you go through the effort of structuring the idea and thinking about how to express it and how to phrase the details, you may learn what's wrong with the idea and how to improve it.
Effort is, however, an okay proxy for giving a shit.
You’re right that some folks can share more value in fifteen seconds than others might in fifteen hours (setting aside that the first set of folks might have got to that point by way of fifteen years of practice first). That’s hard to gate on. But keeping out shitposters and spammers by requiring a modicum of effort is at least somewhat effective.
Authors aren't obligated to let strangers publish content on their site, any more than you're obligated to let me exercise my free speech by spraypainting messages on your house. You're not being gatekept from the conversation. You can participate in the conversation by publishing on your own site, just like the author has.
The author is a person and they get to decide what they want out of life. Even if you disagree. If you get to decide how they live their life, can I decide how you live yours?
Why wouldn't you want spraypainted messages which bring real value to your house?
They aren't contradictary. A better analogy would be if they wrote an article like "the whole premise of banning spraypaint is daft", they still wouldn't want random strangers spraypainting their bedroom.
"Dogs should be legal to have as pets" yet "I don't own a dog"
"Banning sushi is daft" yet "I don't want sushi smeared on my house"
"Checking for human writing is daft" yet "I don' want strangers to be able to SSH to my webserver and edit the HTML files with their comments"
>I don’t care whether you wrote every word with your bare hands. I care whether the thought is yours, whether you exercised judgment, whether the result deserves my attention and whether you’ll stand behind it once it leaves your screen.
Alright, compare the following degrees of autonomy:
- I wrote it, made sure everything's correct, let the LLM proofread it/translate it to English, and checked it afterwards
- I had brief scattered notes with no coherent idea, then threw it at an LLM to make it an article in whatever way it feels best because I don't care
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a deep research agent spent ungodly amount of tokens and search and scraping requests, and put up an article (at least some grounding and it can depend on the harness quality)
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a model did it in a single call with no real-life grounding at all
You're looking at my clearly generated article. Can you tell what is mine, what is collected from the web or another source by the agent, and what is sourced from the model's own knowledge? Sourcing is exactly what the generated text obfuscates.
Those issues existed well before LLMs. Everyone who reads needs a BS detector. It's unfortunate, though, that many such detectors have been replaced with AI detectors.
I hate LLM-generated writing, because it reads like corporate-speak. There's no voice there. I hate the experience of reading it.
Completely apart from that, I also hate posts that look like a 15-year-old on /r/thisisdeep, whether or not they used an LLM to wrap a lot of words around their absence-of-much-of-an-idea.
So I can hate posts on more than one axis. I hate the lack of decent writing, and I hate the lack of decent thinking.
I can make an exception for LLM translation, if the thinking is good. Even if the writing isn't perfect, it's better than LLM-generated-from-a-prompt text, because it has something with a real voice to start from.
The fact this is AI-generated aside - I guess that's to be expected - it's a clever position to take if you completely ignore the realities of LLM-produced writing and imagine some fantasy world where AI blogs bring us profound wisdom and are unfairly targeted by pitchfork-wielding mobs.
Although there are some niche uses where LLMs assist or enhance the creative process, the vast majority of machine writing exists specifically because it takes zero effort and allows you to spam human cognition at an unprecedented scale. There is no redeeming quality to 99%+ of AI-generated LinkedIn posts, AI-generated books on Amazon, and so on.
The style-based heuristics we previously had at our disposal to filter zero-effort content no longer work here, so detecting LLM text is the next fallback.
The article is quick to shoehorn LLMs in as the last of a long list of established tools.
LLMs are fundamentally different from other writing tools because they attempt to construct meaning in a way that is not done by the author. A main purpose of writing is to convey meaning, so LLM writing defeats that purpose.
Just send me the prompt if you’re going to write with AI. No point in trying to convince me it’s great, the marginal cost for me to re-run the prompt is zero, just send the prompt - it’s like unzipping a file before you send it to me, it doesn’t help, it just decreases information density.
Nothing personal, if someone told me they’d generated a 15 page paper based on a two week LLM discussion I wouldn’t want to read it at all. My prior is that it would be the result of some sycophantic echo chamber that the LLM had reinforced.
Edit: missed your insult in the first read, I wouldn’t have replied if I’d realized the first comment was in bad faith but will leave the above for posterity.
> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
This isn’t the common case. How many of the thoughts produced while working on the words have much novelty or high quality may be an open question, but it’s rare to type or handwrite 3000 words and not have any thoughts.
> Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma
Also probably not the common case. And so far my experience is that models make decent to good editors/critics, but average originators (though with remarkable breadth and sometimes outlier originations).
> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
I get this is tongue in cheek, but it's so wrong that it needs pointing out. Even if that is a thought in their head, they clearly have to have others in order to produce the text.
But in general, checking that a human wrote it is economic as much as anything else: attention is currency limited by time and energy, AI effort is abundant and therefore low value, human effort is less abundant and therefore more valued. Pyrite can look pretty but it's not what people want.
I don't think the Stephen Hawkings example is compelling. No one argues against AI for transcription or to help paralyzed people communicate. Stephen Hawkings still wrote every word of his book.
But it does raise the question: what if he hadn't? What if Stephen Hawkings had secretly used an LLM to write A Brief History of Time? Imagine that we find a letter in which he confesses that he used an LLM to write the book. Would that lessen the value of the book? I don't think so.
I think we need to distinguish between two arguments:
A. You should avoid AI writing because it is bad.
B. You should avoid AI writing because it isn't human.
I find myself in camp A. I think a lot of AI writing is bad, but (1) it gets better when a human spends time working on it, and (2) AI is improving over time and its writing is getting better.
For me, an AI writing detector is about curation. It is hard to figure out what's worth reading, so filtering out low-effort AI writing is a good heuristic.
But what I really want is a Good-Writing Detector. I don't care how a piece of writing happened--all I care about is if I'm going to value reading it.
In contrast, camp B is never going to be happy with AI writing. It doesn't matter how good it gets; even if it is better than human writing, camp B will not approve.
I get that, even if I don't agree. There is virtue in sacrificing to support an ideal.
This was a reasonable take several years ago, when we were just getting access to LLMs.
Now though, it undercuts itself, because if the world is filled with authors using AI to express their interesting thoughts, then how come--this post included--it's always the same regurgitation and bloviation?
We know by now--have had countless examples--that people using AI to produce text do not care for the quality of that text. It's a path-of-least-resistance tool, and that's what people use it for.
If you've really thought this through and still believe it, then you should preface your writing with all the prompts you used to generate it. They're what capture your thinking, and they allow readers to interrogate those thoughts directly in their own LLM sessions (or over glasses of port wine in their debating parlors).
It most probably wasn’t though, because that would mean doing only the tedious part of writing.
Another thing though. How many times does it happen to you to start writing after having an idea, but scrapping it because you realize it’s wrong/bad/unhelpful. To me, quite often. But if you prompt an LLM, there is no time to have that realization.
Most of the time I find myself reading long-form text, it's not the case that there's exactly one task at hand. I'm trying to weigh different options to solve a problem, or explore future directions in a more general sense, or even just expand my intellectual horizons with interesting ideas I hadn't previously thought through. So accurate, concise text can still point me in the wrong direction and thus be entirely useless to me if the ideas contained within it aren't the product of meaningful effort.
Except it wasn't verified for accuracy. It never is.
The whole point of using AI to write for you is that you don't care to or can't be bothered to do any significant work yourself. If you care enough to do the research required to ensure all of the AI's output is accurate, that's like 80% or more of the work done right there, so why avoid the remaining 20%?
Nobody talks about using AI to gain a 20% productivity boost. They brag about 100% or even 1000%, which only makes sense if you're not doing any of that time-consuming "verification" at all.
Impressive how this post was composed; it has 3 sections almost entirely AI generated (with the usual AI tells), and then 1 part entirely human written.
To extend the argument, even if someone types every single word using their keyboard, they are not quite "writing". They are dictating each letter by pressing at different places on a keyboard. The computer does the writing of each letter using a predefined shape (font). And even someone is writing using a pen, they are only dictating the strokes by moving the pen in different directions, while the pen, ink and paper are bringing the letters into existence.
The author's case is not helped by fighting a strawman argument and backing it up with atypical examples of AI usage.
Those who favor human writing are looking for writing where the words are the product of a human mind rather than an LLM. The requirement for every character to be the product of a finger pressing a key is not something I've seen. Alternative input methods doesn't make a writing non-human. Spellcheck and probably even some amount of auto-complete are also generally considered to be fine. Anyone checking for keystrokes is using it as a proxy for human creation, not valuing the physical motion itself.
The pro-AI example is a writer spending hours tweaking a single AI output then later re-arranging and rewriting the piece before publishing. While this would probably still set off some AI-detectors, it does at least include some human effort. Presumably this effort will not be appreciated and readers will assume that the poster simply copied the response directly from their LLM of choice. It may seem a bit unfair to ignore the human effort in revising, but it's a reasonable assumption to make because almost nobody is using LLMs in this way.
Perhaps there's a reasonable amount of LLM use which would be considered a writing aid rather than a writing replacement, but the vast majority are simply mass producing slop so I sympathize with those who favor a blanket ban as a response.
I think it depends on the context too. Dale Carnegie (in his famous Win Friends.. book) mentioned how it's annoying to receive letters that say Dictated But Not Read. So people don't want to read (for example) a twitter reply or email that's written on their behalf rather than their own thoughts
When it comes to something like a LinkedIn post however who cares. Everyone uses AI cause the content itself is mercenary anyway right. Thought leadership.
But I have been using Sonnet to write some Youtube narrations and I think I've discovered a kind of value that is not 'AI slop'. I already posted one of them -- about the giant pink hologram in Blade Runner 2049 -- and it's been getting thousands of views and a dozens of likes when clipped into shorts. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK-TsLQkIos]
The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."
To me that is a kind of LLM writing that's "value above replacement". Like if I lost that Sonnet 4.6 script I wouldn't be able to get it again it was just a particular permutation of the neural network manifold that emerged from our discussion about the movie and the style I wanted etc.
> The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."
That sounds cool. It's also a style of SciFi writing--clipped sentences that juxtapose images and let you put together meaning. I wonder how long this sequence can go before the LLM messes up because it has limited understanding (if you will) of the underlying meaning of the images.
I once had a scriptures class where I had to hit word count on an essay and replaced every instance of “Jesus” with “Jesus the only begotten Son of God who died on the cross so that we may be saved from our sins”.
So, yes, humans can also expand text in a mechanical way. I just don’t want to read expanded text. So really the question is “is this text expanded?”. Pre-LLM very little was. Post-LLM much is and has certain distinct flavours that are detectable.
But I’m happy to say that I also don’t like human expanded text and the content in OP certainly reads expanded. It’s like inlining functions everywhere and then writing unrelated comments around them. Not interesting.
After all, if I just want to read text there are reams of content marketing blog posts and SEO keyword concatenations that I could go read. Or to put it in a different way: SaaS dropshipping shemale singles near you this one mother found a puppy buy crypto toys cheap car loans zero down furniture sale foreclosure mesothelioma lawyers car Trump USAID ethereum get rich quick
Hmm. Expanded text. You have just explained why I hate the writing style of the New Yorker.
And when you put it that way, it makes me think of steganography. That's a form of "expanding" the text, and it seems like it might be a useful way to think about the problem. Somewhere hidden in that wall of text is an actual message... but I don't want to have to go find it.
I’m fond of the New Yorker’s fiction section but there is this genre of “long-form writing” purporting to be non-fiction which is just text expansion that I too dislike. I think The Atlantic is probably the top example of this and I, like you, cannot stand it. Write into the LLM summarizer machine if I feel the slightest inclination to read it, which I usually don’t.
Even if I agreed with the author (which I don’t), from a purely selfish perspective why would you want the idea you’ve ostensibly worked hard on communicated in a way that says “low effort”?
I think this ignores that we're being spammed with written content.
The craft of writing is part of the interesting part. The words you choose are important,same as brush strokes in a painting. Offloading the act of writing to llms takes away that whole part.
Nah, AI writing is bad because it breaks the implicit trust between the reader and the author. It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it. It's not merely a tool. the writing is worse, and people feel like they are being ripped off when they see it and it's undisclosed.
This is my thought, exactly. Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it: “these are my thoughts, recorded to share with you.” When reading LLM-generated text that purports to be a real person’s that contract is broken. Verification that even just the basic ideas are the author’s is impossible. It feels cheap and deceitful.
> Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it
I don't think an author is bound to their readers via contract, implicit or otherwise. I have no obligation to tell people what tools I use, or how I've arrived at a final product. That might be upsetting to hear, but authors don't owe their readers anything, just as readers don't owe authors anything.
There is a precedent for this, many auto biographies are actually ghostwritten, demonstrating that this contract you speak of has never actually existed.
I don't think a single ghostwriter has ever been convicted of fraud for writing an auto biography on behalf of another person. Do you have some evidence to back this claim or am I expected to take your word for it?
> It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it.
I basically agree, but it's more specific than that, I think. The basic promise is that the writer believes the thing you are writing. This is a feature of human speech that is so central that Grice made it part of one of the maxims of his pragmatic theory of conversation: "do not say what you believe to be false" or "that for which you lack adequate evidence."
In writing, using generative AI destroys the pragmatic basis for this conversational maxim, because it means that a consequential number of "people" you and I talk to online are not really people at all. They're entirely artificial, and the text generated was never even read by a human, certainly not a statement of a human's actual beliefs about anything. (This isn't even a human-preferring standard, the problem with LLM text is that even the LLM doesn't believe it.) Even in cases where a human does interact with the text in some capacity before it is published, it's likely that a plurality to a majority of the ideas reflected in the text come from a language model that does not actually believe them.
Writing is something that aids in the development of human ideas. It's not just that in the ideal case, a human being will have certain ideas and be able to communicate them to other people. Rather, we often have inchoate, unclear, or even contradictory ideas and opinions, and the process of writing itself leads us to figure out what it is, exactly, that we believe. So even in the "ideal" case of someone like OP who engages with LLMs more critically, and claims responsibility for every bit of text they publish, the process is still detrimental to the production and communication of true beliefs because their ideas were formed in dialogue with an agent that did not actually believe them. It's a process that is dangerous to bypass because you skip most of the thinking involved in writing without even realizing it.
How would you feel about an article if you knew the author circulated it to respected friends for review? That's another way to use LLMs. I do it all the time. LLMs are great sounding boards.
Similarly how would you feel about writing that the author passed over to an editor?
p.s., I'm just echoing the arguments of the orginal article's author, who has a talent for reductio ad absurdum.
I think the real contract being violated is a bit narrower than that. More precisely, the pre-LLM assumption was that producing a piece of content took more effort than consuming it, so the content existing at all signaled that someone cared enough to put some time into it.
AI can definitely be used as a tool in a workflow that's mostly driven by human effort. But as a reader, it's hard to tell whether a particular piece of AI-assisted writing came out of that kind of workflow without investing the effort yourself, and the prior of AI Writing == AI Slop is pretty strong. Attribution seems like a partial solution, since someone putting their name behind it will suffer reputational harm if they're producing nothing but slop.
Presumably the author believes checking food for contamination, and vehicle safety standards are also daft. Insofar as LLMs are a tool, they are not a tool that reliably produces desired output. There was just a thread on this. [1] Even setting aside any moral questions of using them, LLMs create plausible sounding BS. We're not just talking about fire, we're talking about methanol fire.
It’s worth pointing out that the author of this site has published ~100 articles over the span of two months. How much original thought has been put into these ideas? People are frustrated with AI slop because it’s low effort and wastes their time. They don’t care if it was written by hand, typewriter, whatever. The fact that no human effort is being expended is the problem. Giving your shower thoughts to AI is not writing.
Setting up the strawman of writing "by hand" only to attack it as being ableist is facile and asinine. Nobody is arguing that Hawking, or anyone else who uses dictation or other assistive technologies to capture writing, aren't writing.
I’ll gladly use AI to write if it were good at writing as much as how it is good at coding. But it’s just a terrible writer, and currently it’s easier to type things out myself compared to yelling at Claude.
TL;DR, Semi-literate people who get paid to write garbage no one wants to read are just as well served by aiming their fact-free thoughts at an LLM as they would be writing 30,000 meaningless words by hand.
Case in point, this insipid blog post which I didn't bother to read.
Wait, that wasn't the plan? Sorry, with all this fantastic new content flooding the internet, I just don't have time to read whatever this guy or his LLM are trying to say.
Low grade engagement bait that reads like a mediocre attempt at whitewashing slop. If the author's premise holds then we're saying that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.
>that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.
Well, the promise of AGI and current LLM trajectory looks like this is how it's going to be. This is part of the reason that juniors or university students feel animosity towards LLMs.
Have you looked at the recent prompts mathematicians use to disprove conjectures? One of the last ones related to graph theory was basically: continue research...enough partial results, give me a breakthrough...
That's not what the author is saying at all. You are presuming that AI is capable of generating original thoughts. The author's point is that original thought is what matters. If a skilled writer with decades of experience can generate low effort content just as well as someone using an LLM. Your use of the word "dilettante" is elitist and says that only certain people should be allowed to express themselves.
I simply don’t like AI writing because its prose is terrible. It gives me the ick. No other justification is needed for my dislike. Same with AI generated code for the most part. Takes a lot of work to make AI generated anything palatable, which is fine - we don’t really want to deprecate effort or skill do we?
I understand why people want you to write; because it’s good for you, because it focuses a wandering thought, because the first sentence is usually rubbish and the seventh is often better, because you learn cadence and structure and argument through repetition, because there are things you don’t know you believe until you try to explain them, and because spending an afternoon wrestling a stubborn idea into words can leave you with a stronger brain;
no, i want you to write because i want your authentic input. i don't care what you get out of it.
but none of this explains why we’ve decided that the physical production of every word, one keystroke at a time, must now serve as a test of whether a thought is human.
well, if you didn't write it yourself then it guaranteed not to be human, that's why.
It’s daft.
there is no alternative.
It takes one useful method of thinking and promotes it into the only respectable one.
it is the only one. if you didn't write it, you didn't think it. you thought the prompt, but that's not what you are sharing.
It confuses the exercise with the outcome,
the exercise IS the outcome. if you didn't exercise it, you didn't produce it.
the labour with the intelligence,
the labor is the only proof of intelligence we have.
and the movement of fingers with the movement of a mind.
if you didn't move your fingers, then your mind didn't move either.
It asks whether someone typed every word themselves when it should ask whether they had something useful to say, whether they understood it, whether they made the important decisions, whether they checked the claims,
if you didn't type (or dictate) it yourself then
you didn't say anything. you didn't understand anything. you didn't decide anything. and i have no idea whether you checked the claims.
and whether they can defend the finished work when someone else asks what on earth they were talking about.
if you had written it all yourself, maybe you wouldn't have to defend it. and if you do defend an AI text, then why didn't you write that to begin with? that was the contribution i was looking for. but then how am i supposed to know that the defense is not also AI generated?
all the same is true if you cite a lot of other peoples writing without adding anything of your own. it may be the correct message, but it doesn't tell me anything about you. but at least i know that writing came from humans and if you cite them correctly i can interrogate them directly. AI writing does none of that.
i stopped reading after the first two paragraphs. i am pretty sure i could continue refuting everything line by line.
(one more because i think i have a clever response:)
A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
yes, that is a possibility, even if not very likely. if you paste AI output however it is a certainty.
Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma. Under our emerging rules of literary customs inspection, the writing police see the first person as a human writer and the second as a suspicious package.
yes, you can do all that, that's called research. but it's only valuable if the final conclusion is written by yourself.
that's the same as writing a paper where you read lot's of other papers to research a topic. you can't just create an amalgamation of the texts you read. the conclusion has to be your own.
I dunno man. If you had something worth saying I kinda feel like you would figure out a way to say it with your fingers and a keyboard.
There is SO MUCH STUFF that you could read. You could read all day every day and not keep up with the human-written output in just a single sub-niche of writing within a niche sector. That being the case, you must use some heuristics to determine what should be read. Whether the entity publishing a piece felt it was worth human time to write that piece seems like a fine heuristic.
The privilege argument is so bad! We aren't doing this any more! The tyranny of edge cases is over. It ended some time in 2023. I am not going to feel obligated to read every piece of slop out there because 0.01% of authors have lost the use of their hands. Stephen Hawking somehow managed to write without AI.
The heuristics you are looking for are "editorial" and "curation". That's why there are things like newspapers and magazines. The world has always been awash in more low effort content than can be consumed. We rely on trusted human editors at these organizations to filter content. There is nothing new going on. Perhaps subscribe to sites with editorial that you agree with.
Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines between human and machine labor: chess computers are banned from human tournaments; race cars and bicycles are not allowed in footraces. And while I am very sympathetic to the advantages of AI writing for the impaired and non-native speakers, we make allowances all the time for this today: handicapped parking, special sporting events, and allowing dyslexics more time on written exams for example. The existence of these does not justify parking in a handicapped spot when you don't need it.
From the title, I expected a different argument, that it's going to be increasingly difficult to determine. Many people have demonstrated that careful prompting can already produce prose that passes as human, and this will only increase as models get better and inevitably are trained to bypass checkers. Maybe someday we'll have novel-writing rooms where, like grandmasters coming into a tournament, the writers must relinquish all their digital tools at the door. Because it's difficult to imagine any other system that will guarantee human authenticity.
How can there be tons of evidence for a 3 year old technology? Everyone seems to think that all writers using AI are one shotting their content. A writer can carefully edit and revise their content using AI tools just as well as manual writing. That's what I do when I use AI to write. I also never use AI to write interpersonal content. Just like I won't type a Valentines letter to my wife, I'll handwrite. I only use AI to write technical documents.
Look, I understand. There is a ton of low-value writing in the world: legal boilerplate, press releases, most documentation. That writing can and will be replaced or supplemented by AI. But look up cognitive offloading. It doesn't take centuries of research to show evidence for that, and in fact the benefits of writing for thinking have been known long before AI writing became available (the alternative being just talking or thinking without writing).
Why are comments turned off on the blog posts itself? I was planning to make 200 thoughtful comments with the cheapest AI I could find to prove a point, but the lack of an option to comment shows you already know the point: something has to gate participation in the conversation. Human authorship is a fantastic gate, which keeps me from pulling my stunt here, where that gate is firmly in place. You could achieve almost the same goals by requiring blog comments to hash to a number ending in X 0s, but requiring human writing is a strict improvement on this. A true devotee of “human writing is not fundamentally better than ai” is signing themselves up to never read a block of text written with actual effort again without some proof of effort mechanism.
I guarantee you that people are using AI to write posts here.
I do think that there is a gate against poorly written comments.
This is probably true in the sense that it's also probably true that people are, at the margins, successfully manipulating votes, but it's part of the premise of the site that the moderators are working to counter that. And, like vote rigging, it's a cat-and-mouse game, so you're never going to get a wholly satisfying explanation of how they've decisively resolved the problem. Like a lot of problems in security and antiabuse, the practical solutions are essentially economic in nature: defenders do enough work to make attacks too expensive to be worth it.
Totally.
It also brings into focus what is being moderated for. It does seem like the most effective solutions are just to make sure the commentors are human.
Yeah, in a small way I agree with the post, but agree with you as well. For me: human authorship is a pretty solid gate, because the vast majority of people are not doing the work described in the post’s hypothetical “argue through 6 drafts and iterations, wholesale rearrangement, critically considering the content, adjusting further”.
I don’t exactly care about whether or not the actual bits on my screen came directly from a human’s fingers on a keyboard or from an LLM, but I do care about whether or not the material is good, well-written, appropriately concise (which varies both on the content and the audience), fact-checked, and I’m sure a bunch more factors. Some humans fail at these criteria as well.
Human authorship is an imperfect proxy for quality, but saying it’s imperfect doesn’t mean that it’s worthless… quite the opposite, I’d argue. Even if there are flaws in the writing, it at least shows that the author tried, which I do personally put value on. Copy & pasting Claude output without even fact-checking… that’s inherently low effort and if that’s what I wanted to read, I’d just ask Claude myself.
I use LLMs in my workflow to varying degrees depending on the task, but their output never makes it into the wild without serious scrutiny. Sometimes their code is better than what I’d have written, which is great. Sometimes it completely misses the point and needs significant re-steering several times, to the point where it’s easier if I write it myself. For writing, I’ll happily have an LLM harness put together a document explaining a dataflow through a complex system; I ask it to include source filenames and line numbers and can do my own validation before accepting it as truth.
Effort is not a good signal for value. Never has been. Just because someone took 10 more hours to finish a task doesn't mean they did a better job or they care more about the result.
But a lack of effort is a good signal for a lack of value.
Eleven times out of ten, your initial idea is garbage. If you write it up, or let AI do that for you, the result is garbage. But if you go through the effort of structuring the idea and thinking about how to express it and how to phrase the details, you may learn what's wrong with the idea and how to improve it.
Effort is, however, an okay proxy for giving a shit.
You’re right that some folks can share more value in fifteen seconds than others might in fifteen hours (setting aside that the first set of folks might have got to that point by way of fifteen years of practice first). That’s hard to gate on. But keeping out shitposters and spammers by requiring a modicum of effort is at least somewhat effective.
Idea for a captcha
Are there infinitely many primes p such that p − 1 is a perfect square? In other words: Are there infinitely many primes of the form n2 + 1?
Answer: [ ]
( ) I don't know
That's...not proving a point, that's vandalism.
Right, just like every time someone posts an AI comment on HN.
Authors aren't obligated to let strangers publish content on their site, any more than you're obligated to let me exercise my free speech by spraypainting messages on your house. You're not being gatekept from the conversation. You can participate in the conversation by publishing on your own site, just like the author has.
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The author is a person and they get to decide what they want out of life. Even if you disagree. If you get to decide how they live their life, can I decide how you live yours?
Why wouldn't you want spraypainted messages which bring real value to your house?
I mean, if you wrote an article like "the whole premise of disallowing people to spray-paint your house is daft"...
The real point isn't that they're "obligated" to allow AI-generated comments, but that they're being something of a hypocrite.
They aren't contradictary. A better analogy would be if they wrote an article like "the whole premise of banning spraypaint is daft", they still wouldn't want random strangers spraypainting their bedroom.
"Dogs should be legal to have as pets" yet "I don't own a dog"
"Banning sushi is daft" yet "I don't want sushi smeared on my house"
"Checking for human writing is daft" yet "I don' want strangers to be able to SSH to my webserver and edit the HTML files with their comments"
I am pretty sure you cannot send 1000 high value AI generated emails.
i believe the GP is probably acutely aware of that considering they were quite obviously being sarcastic
>I don’t care whether you wrote every word with your bare hands. I care whether the thought is yours, whether you exercised judgment, whether the result deserves my attention and whether you’ll stand behind it once it leaves your screen.
Alright, compare the following degrees of autonomy:
- I wrote it, made sure everything's correct, let the LLM proofread it/translate it to English, and checked it afterwards
- I had brief scattered notes with no coherent idea, then threw it at an LLM to make it an article in whatever way it feels best because I don't care
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a deep research agent spent ungodly amount of tokens and search and scraping requests, and put up an article (at least some grounding and it can depend on the harness quality)
- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a model did it in a single call with no real-life grounding at all
You're looking at my clearly generated article. Can you tell what is mine, what is collected from the web or another source by the agent, and what is sourced from the model's own knowledge? Sourcing is exactly what the generated text obfuscates.
The difference between the first and the rest is usually blindingly obvious: LLMs are really terrible at crafting their own coherent narrative.
Those issues existed well before LLMs. Everyone who reads needs a BS detector. It's unfortunate, though, that many such detectors have been replaced with AI detectors.
Part of the problem is that there’s far more BS now.
That's true. I don't know how to solve it, other than booking a long vacation until https://xkcd.com/810/.
I hate LLM-generated writing, because it reads like corporate-speak. There's no voice there. I hate the experience of reading it.
Completely apart from that, I also hate posts that look like a 15-year-old on /r/thisisdeep, whether or not they used an LLM to wrap a lot of words around their absence-of-much-of-an-idea.
So I can hate posts on more than one axis. I hate the lack of decent writing, and I hate the lack of decent thinking.
I can make an exception for LLM translation, if the thinking is good. Even if the writing isn't perfect, it's better than LLM-generated-from-a-prompt text, because it has something with a real voice to start from.
The fact this is AI-generated aside - I guess that's to be expected - it's a clever position to take if you completely ignore the realities of LLM-produced writing and imagine some fantasy world where AI blogs bring us profound wisdom and are unfairly targeted by pitchfork-wielding mobs.
Although there are some niche uses where LLMs assist or enhance the creative process, the vast majority of machine writing exists specifically because it takes zero effort and allows you to spam human cognition at an unprecedented scale. There is no redeeming quality to 99%+ of AI-generated LinkedIn posts, AI-generated books on Amazon, and so on.
The style-based heuristics we previously had at our disposal to filter zero-effort content no longer work here, so detecting LLM text is the next fallback.
The article is quick to shoehorn LLMs in as the last of a long list of established tools.
LLMs are fundamentally different from other writing tools because they attempt to construct meaning in a way that is not done by the author. A main purpose of writing is to convey meaning, so LLM writing defeats that purpose.
Just send me the prompt if you’re going to write with AI. No point in trying to convince me it’s great, the marginal cost for me to re-run the prompt is zero, just send the prompt - it’s like unzipping a file before you send it to me, it doesn’t help, it just decreases information density.
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Nothing personal, if someone told me they’d generated a 15 page paper based on a two week LLM discussion I wouldn’t want to read it at all. My prior is that it would be the result of some sycophantic echo chamber that the LLM had reinforced.
Edit: missed your insult in the first read, I wouldn’t have replied if I’d realized the first comment was in bad faith but will leave the above for posterity.
That's fine. This is a statement about yourself, not me.
If you’re working on it for 2 weeks, why not just write it yourself (perhaps chatting with an AI on the side to develop your thoughts)?
Because it is more efficient, of course. Same reason why I use Codex/Claude Code for programming, and not only the chat window.
> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
This isn’t the common case. How many of the thoughts produced while working on the words have much novelty or high quality may be an open question, but it’s rare to type or handwrite 3000 words and not have any thoughts.
> Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma
Also probably not the common case. And so far my experience is that models make decent to good editors/critics, but average originators (though with remarkable breadth and sometimes outlier originations).
Counterpoint: https://sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/there-are-no-lossless-tran...
> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
I get this is tongue in cheek, but it's so wrong that it needs pointing out. Even if that is a thought in their head, they clearly have to have others in order to produce the text.
But in general, checking that a human wrote it is economic as much as anything else: attention is currency limited by time and energy, AI effort is abundant and therefore low value, human effort is less abundant and therefore more valued. Pyrite can look pretty but it's not what people want.
I don't think the Stephen Hawkings example is compelling. No one argues against AI for transcription or to help paralyzed people communicate. Stephen Hawkings still wrote every word of his book.
But it does raise the question: what if he hadn't? What if Stephen Hawkings had secretly used an LLM to write A Brief History of Time? Imagine that we find a letter in which he confesses that he used an LLM to write the book. Would that lessen the value of the book? I don't think so.
I think we need to distinguish between two arguments:
A. You should avoid AI writing because it is bad. B. You should avoid AI writing because it isn't human.
I find myself in camp A. I think a lot of AI writing is bad, but (1) it gets better when a human spends time working on it, and (2) AI is improving over time and its writing is getting better.
For me, an AI writing detector is about curation. It is hard to figure out what's worth reading, so filtering out low-effort AI writing is a good heuristic.
But what I really want is a Good-Writing Detector. I don't care how a piece of writing happened--all I care about is if I'm going to value reading it.
In contrast, camp B is never going to be happy with AI writing. It doesn't matter how good it gets; even if it is better than human writing, camp B will not approve.
I get that, even if I don't agree. There is virtue in sacrificing to support an ideal.
This was a reasonable take several years ago, when we were just getting access to LLMs.
Now though, it undercuts itself, because if the world is filled with authors using AI to express their interesting thoughts, then how come--this post included--it's always the same regurgitation and bloviation?
We know by now--have had countless examples--that people using AI to produce text do not care for the quality of that text. It's a path-of-least-resistance tool, and that's what people use it for.
> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
But when they do that, you can tell.
If you've really thought this through and still believe it, then you should preface your writing with all the prompts you used to generate it. They're what capture your thinking, and they allow readers to interrogate those thoughts directly in their own LLM sessions (or over glasses of port wine in their debating parlors).
I think we're just in an transition point.
When I get materials that are clearly AI generated, I look at them as if there was less effort put into it.
But that is irrational. If it was verified for accuracy, and edited for conciseness, and addresses the task at hand, does it matter?
It most probably wasn’t though, because that would mean doing only the tedious part of writing.
Another thing though. How many times does it happen to you to start writing after having an idea, but scrapping it because you realize it’s wrong/bad/unhelpful. To me, quite often. But if you prompt an LLM, there is no time to have that realization.
Most of the time I find myself reading long-form text, it's not the case that there's exactly one task at hand. I'm trying to weigh different options to solve a problem, or explore future directions in a more general sense, or even just expand my intellectual horizons with interesting ideas I hadn't previously thought through. So accurate, concise text can still point me in the wrong direction and thus be entirely useless to me if the ideas contained within it aren't the product of meaningful effort.
Except it wasn't verified for accuracy. It never is.
The whole point of using AI to write for you is that you don't care to or can't be bothered to do any significant work yourself. If you care enough to do the research required to ensure all of the AI's output is accurate, that's like 80% or more of the work done right there, so why avoid the remaining 20%?
Nobody talks about using AI to gain a 20% productivity boost. They brag about 100% or even 1000%, which only makes sense if you're not doing any of that time-consuming "verification" at all.
Impressive how this post was composed; it has 3 sections almost entirely AI generated (with the usual AI tells), and then 1 part entirely human written.
Pangram found the breaks properly too.
To extend the argument, even if someone types every single word using their keyboard, they are not quite "writing". They are dictating each letter by pressing at different places on a keyboard. The computer does the writing of each letter using a predefined shape (font). And even someone is writing using a pen, they are only dictating the strokes by moving the pen in different directions, while the pen, ink and paper are bringing the letters into existence.
There's an idea here but I don't think it's clear enough. Ironically.
At any rate even if you wish to judge the idea rather than the way someone wrote it down then I still think LLMs don't help.
Because the one thing I definitely agree with, the bull of the effort behind putting an idea in writing isn't the act of writing itself.
The author's case is not helped by fighting a strawman argument and backing it up with atypical examples of AI usage.
Those who favor human writing are looking for writing where the words are the product of a human mind rather than an LLM. The requirement for every character to be the product of a finger pressing a key is not something I've seen. Alternative input methods doesn't make a writing non-human. Spellcheck and probably even some amount of auto-complete are also generally considered to be fine. Anyone checking for keystrokes is using it as a proxy for human creation, not valuing the physical motion itself.
The pro-AI example is a writer spending hours tweaking a single AI output then later re-arranging and rewriting the piece before publishing. While this would probably still set off some AI-detectors, it does at least include some human effort. Presumably this effort will not be appreciated and readers will assume that the poster simply copied the response directly from their LLM of choice. It may seem a bit unfair to ignore the human effort in revising, but it's a reasonable assumption to make because almost nobody is using LLMs in this way.
Perhaps there's a reasonable amount of LLM use which would be considered a writing aid rather than a writing replacement, but the vast majority are simply mass producing slop so I sympathize with those who favor a blanket ban as a response.
I think it depends on the context too. Dale Carnegie (in his famous Win Friends.. book) mentioned how it's annoying to receive letters that say Dictated But Not Read. So people don't want to read (for example) a twitter reply or email that's written on their behalf rather than their own thoughts
When it comes to something like a LinkedIn post however who cares. Everyone uses AI cause the content itself is mercenary anyway right. Thought leadership.
But I have been using Sonnet to write some Youtube narrations and I think I've discovered a kind of value that is not 'AI slop'. I already posted one of them -- about the giant pink hologram in Blade Runner 2049 -- and it's been getting thousands of views and a dozens of likes when clipped into shorts. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK-TsLQkIos]
The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."
To me that is a kind of LLM writing that's "value above replacement". Like if I lost that Sonnet 4.6 script I wouldn't be able to get it again it was just a particular permutation of the neural network manifold that emerged from our discussion about the movie and the style I wanted etc.
> The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."
That sounds cool. It's also a style of SciFi writing--clipped sentences that juxtapose images and let you put together meaning. I wonder how long this sequence can go before the LLM messes up because it has limited understanding (if you will) of the underlying meaning of the images.
I once had a scriptures class where I had to hit word count on an essay and replaced every instance of “Jesus” with “Jesus the only begotten Son of God who died on the cross so that we may be saved from our sins”.
So, yes, humans can also expand text in a mechanical way. I just don’t want to read expanded text. So really the question is “is this text expanded?”. Pre-LLM very little was. Post-LLM much is and has certain distinct flavours that are detectable.
But I’m happy to say that I also don’t like human expanded text and the content in OP certainly reads expanded. It’s like inlining functions everywhere and then writing unrelated comments around them. Not interesting.
After all, if I just want to read text there are reams of content marketing blog posts and SEO keyword concatenations that I could go read. Or to put it in a different way: SaaS dropshipping shemale singles near you this one mother found a puppy buy crypto toys cheap car loans zero down furniture sale foreclosure mesothelioma lawyers car Trump USAID ethereum get rich quick
Hmm. Expanded text. You have just explained why I hate the writing style of the New Yorker.
And when you put it that way, it makes me think of steganography. That's a form of "expanding" the text, and it seems like it might be a useful way to think about the problem. Somewhere hidden in that wall of text is an actual message... but I don't want to have to go find it.
I’m fond of the New Yorker’s fiction section but there is this genre of “long-form writing” purporting to be non-fiction which is just text expansion that I too dislike. I think The Atlantic is probably the top example of this and I, like you, cannot stand it. Write into the LLM summarizer machine if I feel the slightest inclination to read it, which I usually don’t.
I like this “steganography” interpretation.
Even if I agreed with the author (which I don’t), from a purely selfish perspective why would you want the idea you’ve ostensibly worked hard on communicated in a way that says “low effort”?
I think this ignores that we're being spammed with written content.
The craft of writing is part of the interesting part. The words you choose are important,same as brush strokes in a painting. Offloading the act of writing to llms takes away that whole part.
Nah, AI writing is bad because it breaks the implicit trust between the reader and the author. It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it. It's not merely a tool. the writing is worse, and people feel like they are being ripped off when they see it and it's undisclosed.
This is my thought, exactly. Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it: “these are my thoughts, recorded to share with you.” When reading LLM-generated text that purports to be a real person’s that contract is broken. Verification that even just the basic ideas are the author’s is impossible. It feels cheap and deceitful.
> Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it
I don't think an author is bound to their readers via contract, implicit or otherwise. I have no obligation to tell people what tools I use, or how I've arrived at a final product. That might be upsetting to hear, but authors don't owe their readers anything, just as readers don't owe authors anything.
There is a precedent for this, many auto biographies are actually ghostwritten, demonstrating that this contract you speak of has never actually existed.
Ghost writing is fraud.
I don't think a single ghostwriter has ever been convicted of fraud for writing an auto biography on behalf of another person. Do you have some evidence to back this claim or am I expected to take your word for it?
> It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it.
I basically agree, but it's more specific than that, I think. The basic promise is that the writer believes the thing you are writing. This is a feature of human speech that is so central that Grice made it part of one of the maxims of his pragmatic theory of conversation: "do not say what you believe to be false" or "that for which you lack adequate evidence."
In writing, using generative AI destroys the pragmatic basis for this conversational maxim, because it means that a consequential number of "people" you and I talk to online are not really people at all. They're entirely artificial, and the text generated was never even read by a human, certainly not a statement of a human's actual beliefs about anything. (This isn't even a human-preferring standard, the problem with LLM text is that even the LLM doesn't believe it.) Even in cases where a human does interact with the text in some capacity before it is published, it's likely that a plurality to a majority of the ideas reflected in the text come from a language model that does not actually believe them.
Writing is something that aids in the development of human ideas. It's not just that in the ideal case, a human being will have certain ideas and be able to communicate them to other people. Rather, we often have inchoate, unclear, or even contradictory ideas and opinions, and the process of writing itself leads us to figure out what it is, exactly, that we believe. So even in the "ideal" case of someone like OP who engages with LLMs more critically, and claims responsibility for every bit of text they publish, the process is still detrimental to the production and communication of true beliefs because their ideas were formed in dialogue with an agent that did not actually believe them. It's a process that is dangerous to bypass because you skip most of the thinking involved in writing without even realizing it.
How would you feel about an article if you knew the author circulated it to respected friends for review? That's another way to use LLMs. I do it all the time. LLMs are great sounding boards.
Similarly how would you feel about writing that the author passed over to an editor?
p.s., I'm just echoing the arguments of the orginal article's author, who has a talent for reductio ad absurdum.
edit: added p.s.
I think the real contract being violated is a bit narrower than that. More precisely, the pre-LLM assumption was that producing a piece of content took more effort than consuming it, so the content existing at all signaled that someone cared enough to put some time into it.
AI can definitely be used as a tool in a workflow that's mostly driven by human effort. But as a reader, it's hard to tell whether a particular piece of AI-assisted writing came out of that kind of workflow without investing the effort yourself, and the prior of AI Writing == AI Slop is pretty strong. Attribution seems like a partial solution, since someone putting their name behind it will suffer reputational harm if they're producing nothing but slop.
Presumably the author believes checking food for contamination, and vehicle safety standards are also daft. Insofar as LLMs are a tool, they are not a tool that reliably produces desired output. There was just a thread on this. [1] Even setting aside any moral questions of using them, LLMs create plausible sounding BS. We're not just talking about fire, we're talking about methanol fire.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49042354
It’s worth pointing out that the author of this site has published ~100 articles over the span of two months. How much original thought has been put into these ideas? People are frustrated with AI slop because it’s low effort and wastes their time. They don’t care if it was written by hand, typewriter, whatever. The fact that no human effort is being expended is the problem. Giving your shower thoughts to AI is not writing.
Setting up the strawman of writing "by hand" only to attack it as being ableist is facile and asinine. Nobody is arguing that Hawking, or anyone else who uses dictation or other assistive technologies to capture writing, aren't writing.
Plagiarism will always be plagiarism.
I’ll gladly use AI to write if it were good at writing as much as how it is good at coding. But it’s just a terrible writer, and currently it’s easier to type things out myself compared to yelling at Claude.
TL;DR, Semi-literate people who get paid to write garbage no one wants to read are just as well served by aiming their fact-free thoughts at an LLM as they would be writing 30,000 meaningless words by hand.
Case in point, this insipid blog post which I didn't bother to read.
Wait, that wasn't the plan? Sorry, with all this fantastic new content flooding the internet, I just don't have time to read whatever this guy or his LLM are trying to say.
Low grade engagement bait that reads like a mediocre attempt at whitewashing slop. If the author's premise holds then we're saying that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.
>that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.
Well, the promise of AGI and current LLM trajectory looks like this is how it's going to be. This is part of the reason that juniors or university students feel animosity towards LLMs.
Have you looked at the recent prompts mathematicians use to disprove conjectures? One of the last ones related to graph theory was basically: continue research...enough partial results, give me a breakthrough...
Not exactly skillful prompting...
That's not what the author is saying at all. You are presuming that AI is capable of generating original thoughts. The author's point is that original thought is what matters. If a skilled writer with decades of experience can generate low effort content just as well as someone using an LLM. Your use of the word "dilettante" is elitist and says that only certain people should be allowed to express themselves.
I simply don’t like AI writing because its prose is terrible. It gives me the ick. No other justification is needed for my dislike. Same with AI generated code for the most part. Takes a lot of work to make AI generated anything palatable, which is fine - we don’t really want to deprecate effort or skill do we?
I understand why people want you to write; because it’s good for you, because it focuses a wandering thought, because the first sentence is usually rubbish and the seventh is often better, because you learn cadence and structure and argument through repetition, because there are things you don’t know you believe until you try to explain them, and because spending an afternoon wrestling a stubborn idea into words can leave you with a stronger brain;
no, i want you to write because i want your authentic input. i don't care what you get out of it.
but none of this explains why we’ve decided that the physical production of every word, one keystroke at a time, must now serve as a test of whether a thought is human.
well, if you didn't write it yourself then it guaranteed not to be human, that's why.
It’s daft.
there is no alternative.
It takes one useful method of thinking and promotes it into the only respectable one.
it is the only one. if you didn't write it, you didn't think it. you thought the prompt, but that's not what you are sharing.
It confuses the exercise with the outcome,
the exercise IS the outcome. if you didn't exercise it, you didn't produce it.
the labour with the intelligence,
the labor is the only proof of intelligence we have.
and the movement of fingers with the movement of a mind.
if you didn't move your fingers, then your mind didn't move either.
It asks whether someone typed every word themselves when it should ask whether they had something useful to say, whether they understood it, whether they made the important decisions, whether they checked the claims,
if you didn't type (or dictate) it yourself then
you didn't say anything. you didn't understand anything. you didn't decide anything. and i have no idea whether you checked the claims.
and whether they can defend the finished work when someone else asks what on earth they were talking about.
if you had written it all yourself, maybe you wouldn't have to defend it. and if you do defend an AI text, then why didn't you write that to begin with? that was the contribution i was looking for. but then how am i supposed to know that the defense is not also AI generated?
all the same is true if you cite a lot of other peoples writing without adding anything of your own. it may be the correct message, but it doesn't tell me anything about you. but at least i know that writing came from humans and if you cite them correctly i can interrogate them directly. AI writing does none of that.
i stopped reading after the first two paragraphs. i am pretty sure i could continue refuting everything line by line.
(one more because i think i have a clever response:)
A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
yes, that is a possibility, even if not very likely. if you paste AI output however it is a certainty.
Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma. Under our emerging rules of literary customs inspection, the writing police see the first person as a human writer and the second as a suspicious package.
yes, you can do all that, that's called research. but it's only valuable if the final conclusion is written by yourself.
that's the same as writing a paper where you read lot's of other papers to research a topic. you can't just create an amalgamation of the texts you read. the conclusion has to be your own.
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I dunno man. If you had something worth saying I kinda feel like you would figure out a way to say it with your fingers and a keyboard.
There is SO MUCH STUFF that you could read. You could read all day every day and not keep up with the human-written output in just a single sub-niche of writing within a niche sector. That being the case, you must use some heuristics to determine what should be read. Whether the entity publishing a piece felt it was worth human time to write that piece seems like a fine heuristic.
The privilege argument is so bad! We aren't doing this any more! The tyranny of edge cases is over. It ended some time in 2023. I am not going to feel obligated to read every piece of slop out there because 0.01% of authors have lost the use of their hands. Stephen Hawking somehow managed to write without AI.
The heuristics you are looking for are "editorial" and "curation". That's why there are things like newspapers and magazines. The world has always been awash in more low effort content than can be consumed. We rely on trusted human editors at these organizations to filter content. There is nothing new going on. Perhaps subscribe to sites with editorial that you agree with.
Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines between human and machine labor: chess computers are banned from human tournaments; race cars and bicycles are not allowed in footraces. And while I am very sympathetic to the advantages of AI writing for the impaired and non-native speakers, we make allowances all the time for this today: handicapped parking, special sporting events, and allowing dyslexics more time on written exams for example. The existence of these does not justify parking in a handicapped spot when you don't need it.
From the title, I expected a different argument, that it's going to be increasingly difficult to determine. Many people have demonstrated that careful prompting can already produce prose that passes as human, and this will only increase as models get better and inevitably are trained to bypass checkers. Maybe someday we'll have novel-writing rooms where, like grandmasters coming into a tournament, the writers must relinquish all their digital tools at the door. Because it's difficult to imagine any other system that will guarantee human authenticity.
How can there be tons of evidence for a 3 year old technology? Everyone seems to think that all writers using AI are one shotting their content. A writer can carefully edit and revise their content using AI tools just as well as manual writing. That's what I do when I use AI to write. I also never use AI to write interpersonal content. Just like I won't type a Valentines letter to my wife, I'll handwrite. I only use AI to write technical documents.
Look, I understand. There is a ton of low-value writing in the world: legal boilerplate, press releases, most documentation. That writing can and will be replaced or supplemented by AI. But look up cognitive offloading. It doesn't take centuries of research to show evidence for that, and in fact the benefits of writing for thinking have been known long before AI writing became available (the alternative being just talking or thinking without writing).