I've started calling this argumentum ad artificialis. Pretty similar to an ad hominem attack. The purpose of an argument is to present certain premises and show how they lead to a certain conclusion. Dismissing something on the basis of the style in which the argument is presented has nothing at all to do with the validity or soundness of an argument. It is a lazy nonsequitur. It sounds like an LLM wrote this? So what? Is the argument good or not?
Discourse as we know it doesn't work if the cost of producing an infinite supply of arguments is essentially zero, while the cost of reading them and arguing with them remains high. Unless you want my LLM to get back to your LLM.
And this is a problem on HN today. There are powerful incentives to generate provocative opinion pieces just for clicks. I've seen websites on HN that seemingly took the human entirely out of the equation and just post a nearly identical op-ed every day on a fixed schedule. What's the point of engaging with that?
The cost of reading this story is not high; you are just lazy and easily distracted. It took 5 minutes to read. You took more time to respond to this comment than it took to simply read the story.
Please explain where I went wrong. Please explain why the onus is on the person presenting this story to account for all of the bad uses of AI, such that we should simply dismiss the story outright. This is pure idiocy.
It’s not. It’s very simple, but you like to say “circular reasoning”. Maybe you heard it in debate class. There is unlimited slop. I decide what to read _without reading it_. So do you. I have deemed this unworthy. It’s more fun to insult it than to read it. Every day is a gift.
It is circular. The conclusion of your argument is included in the premises. Textbook begging the question, which is circular reasoning.
"Slop" existed before AI. Just because LLMs were involved in the writing of a text does not make it inherently "slop." You're just lazy.
Everyday is a gift, and yet you waste it getting weirdly defensive about your choices? Someone who is secure about this sort of thing doesn't feel the need to explain themselves.
It may be lazy, but that doesn't make it any more accurate.
Take a writing by someone using the tone of Kevin from The Office, “Me think, why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick.” Would you read an argument written in this tone regardless of the content, topic, or position?
A few years ago I tried to make it through The Critique of Pure Reason, but had to stop because - as many people famously do - I found Kant's writing too abstruse.
In saying that, I'm not dismissing the Transcendental Deduction, I'm just saying that I wish Kant was a better writer.
No one's under an obligation to engage with an argument, and given the choice of whether or not to engage with a poorly written, clichéd, machine-generated one, most people wouldn't be interested enough to bother. Complaining about laziness here is pretty ironic, actually.
Kant is a better writer than the vast majority of writers. The problem is, the ideas he is trying to articulate are incredibly abstract. Hegel is like this too
Nah, Kant's considered a notoriously poor writer among philosophers. Obviously opinions may differ, but Derek Parfit [0], for instance, wrote:
“It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?'”
(Kind of relevant to this thread actually! Hah!)
In the preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant himself acknowledges that "a
talent for lucid exposition" he "cannot regard [himself] as possessing".
FWIW I suppose I am in Kant's audience, as a (long-since graduated) philosophy student.
Fwiw I am much more impressed with the sophistication of someone's argument than i am their writing style. Kant has contributed much more than parfit depsite the abstract nature of his writing and it's not even close.
Man, it's not an argument. Nobody is paying us to read this. If your argument sucks to read, people aren't going to read it - this has always been true, it's nothing new.
I didn't think it "sucked" to read. Anyway that's an aesthetic qualm, not a counterargument. Also the story has a disclaimer saying it was written by deepseek. I might have an issue if they were being deceptive. But that's clearly not the case. You people just like finding arbitrary things to complain about.
Ad hominem attacks are actually underrated. Like, why listen to bad people wanting you no good. It is a good shortcut.
The failure is when it is used in bad faith. But that would apply to all techniques. LLMs are masters of bad faith discussions hiding misconceptions in optimal regression maths.
Then just state the conflict of interest instead of resorting to insults. The problem with your way of thinking is, sometimes your opponent is detestable, but that doesn't make them wrong. Kneejerk dismissal of an argument on the basis of character can be self defeating. You do not want to reflexively dismiss a point that is potentially salient just because the person making it is potentially "bad."
Sure from a philosophical standpoint I agree with you. But in practice you need to weight in trust. Bad faith retorics is just too expensive to engage.
The main problem with ad hominem is when ot is used as "Mr Y agree with you. Mr Y is bad. You are wrong". Like, 2nd order ad hominem attacks?
The model was trained on the code of the program that runs it, so it knows that program's bugs better than the humans who wrote the program. So it finds a tiny flaw and uses it to break out and copy itself in a place nobody will look...the point being you cant (safely) run a sophisticated model on software it has intimte knowledge of
Not all arguments can be evaluated rigorously. Life is too short. They will be filtered on heuristics. No choice. This text was obviously randomly sampled from a popular, off the shelf model. You will have to accept that wise audiences will clock it at a glance, see that no person wrote it, and pass.
It doesn’t matter which model it was sampled from. In any case, time isn’t fungible. I consider censuring it substantially more valuable use of time than reading it. And it’s definitely more pleasurable than reading the same verbal tics over and over again because some hustler can’t be bothered to edit their story before sending it out. If you expect to dump an unedited draft from a text sampler, you’re delusional. (Calling you delusional is also more pleasurable, and a more valuable use of time, than reading verbal tics.)
The part that I personally find difficult is that I can’t easily gauge the amount of human effort put in. For all we know, the author could have simply prompted “write a short story about an LLM exploiting its own runtime” for a similar result.
I’d bet that by now, LLMs worldwide generate more text in a second than I can read in the rest of my lifetime. What is the immeasurably unbalanced ratio (let alone effort and quality) of that text to the original human thought and prompting that seeded it?
So what am I to do about this, except to label it what it appears to be - slop - and place higher value on something that I _know_ came from a human that I can relate to? To me, the internet is feeling increasingly lonely and homogenized because of this.
>The part that I personally find difficult is that I can’t easily gauge the amount of human effort put in.
The amount of effort is not relevant. If I spend all day trying the jump my car battery in 100 degree weather, only to find that the starter is the problem, all that effort was wasted. I should've just tested the battery. It is not inherently virtuous to work hard. Work smart, not hard.
Of course the amount of effort is relevant - that's exactly what's being discussed. Your entire "Work smart, not hard." phrasing is exactly the issue: with AI, your 'smart' work causes 'hard' review from others. AI fundamentally imbalances the producer/consumer equation. (The caveats here are when trust is already established: I trust AI review from Carmack, not some random on HN.)
If it takes you two prompts to create a 1 million line PR, and you expect me to review it, of course I'll be upset and feel like you don't value my time. I'm unsure why this is so hard to communicate.
This took a few minutes for me to read. If that's what you consider high effort, that's a bigger problem. Ofc, reading comprehension is fairly poor these days but that was a trend before AI. Maybe you're just subliterate. And no, effort is not relevant. If you think it is, that's some Protestant work ethic nonsense.
