I am not native, my English is far away from perfect. I am using LLMs for checking my texts or grammar. I always trying to edit it properly, but sometimes I missing parts like that because I don't really have this "language feeling" as natives. Apologies for this
Friendly feedback: write in your native language and use https://deepl.com to translate. I am fluent in both German and English. I find Deepl does a much better job at capturing the direct translation of what I’m saying than using Claude/ChatGPT, etc. Results may very for your language…
Very nice work! Sorry that the AI comments partially overshadowed it.
Let my karma burn for saying this:
Maybe it is time to let this go man. These comments are really the new incarnation of "grammar policing". (1)
They don't add anything of value, did the author use an LLM to fix his prose but no useless slop was added in the process: who cares ? Is the article useless slop: fine, downvote it to oblivion.
(1) For those not old enough to remember that wonderful practice please use your nearest LLM to find out or, you know, visit a library and do your own research.
Thank you!
Text is not the main part of this repo. The main part is the technology and the list of experiments (and some useful knowledge I got from this project, haha). I have always been bad at writing or editing text (in both my native language and English), but without text it is impossible to share this project online.
Text was the last and most difficult part for me. It is not perfect (and this project is not perfect as well), but I believe it does the job of communicating my ideas
100% agree. We're on Hacker News. We should be open to people who aren't native English speakers using LLMs to help them communicate their ideas and more importantly, cool projects without getting dragged for AI speak in the text.
I don't know what the author's native language is, but I assume it's something I'd need machine translation for anyway. Having it in good (if not Nobel prize level great) English is much easier - and will probably be easier to find again via search.
Because it's a strong signal of AI slop. Why put in more work than the "author" did?
If the author generated text that required no effort, and has no understanding of the contents of the material generated, and no self-awareness of their behavior and how the audience will receive it, it definitely doesn't warrant wasting a single second reading it.
Now, granted, maybe they did review it, maybe they did understand it, maybe they did know how it would be received and merely made a mistake, but how are we to know? It quacks like a duck.
That's like inhaling a virus to see if it's contagious. Reading text generated by a model tuned with RLHF is a dangerous pastime. It's all too easy to reach past a human's critical thinking and push the pleasure buttons. Uncanny valley is uncanny for a reason. As social monkeys we instinctively screech danger warnings at each other; AI slop gets the same treatment as an alligator pretending to be a log.
Saying that something is thought terminating is thought terminating, it's the laziest "I win" bullshit approach ever. A more nuanced approach: don't produce slop and people won't dismiss it as lazy bullshit either.
No, that's not true at all. Thought-terminating cliches cause you to stop thinking; they give a quick shortcut that let's you be dismissive. That's what "AI slop" is, when someone bestows the moniker on a piece of prose that has "It's not this, it's that" in it.
Look, there's is a wide variety of work being produced with AI, all the way from exceptional professional work to total trash done by amateurs. Painting all over those efforts with the same brush of "AI slop" attempts to avoid the thought necessary to process the nuance in each individual situation. In fact, folks that use "AI slop" enjoy being able to dismiss AI output as quickly as possible; they seem to be quite happy to forgo whatever insights might be present in such work. But let's not for a moment pretend it's not a crappy heuristic.
Through this lens, dunking on a piece of prose because it has some trace of LLM processing seems both useless and uninsightful, which is why I'm rallying against it as thought-terminating. Do the thinking to determine whether what you're reading is valid. Saying that it has tells that an LLM might have contributed is not sufficient evidence to do that, and it's also something anyone can do, it requires no skill or insight, and makes for boring discussion. Zero curiousity, 100% dismissive.
Yes, it’s dismissive, intentionally and abrasively so. Because the author is being disrespectful to the reader, expecting them to put more effort into it than they did. I will happily be uncurious about a text the author couldn't even bother to proofread and clean up. Life is finite, LLMs could generate more text than I could ever possibly read, there has to be a quality filter we all apply and I’ve drawn my line in the sand.
You’re arguing in favor of what I view as pollution. I’m not lacking thought, it didn’t terminate, you just value slop for reasons I don’t.
It's not low effort. The author had to write in English, not their native, and then used LLM to polish it. The sentence itself conveyed a real point. They cared how their article came across. That's much more effort than the boring "Claude was here" comment that took a second to write but costs real energy to appear, and once again spurred a worthless debate.
> Is the article useless slop: fine, downvote it to oblivion.
You can’t downvote submissions on HN, only flag them. Identifying when text was written by LLMs is a useful signal. Maybe you don’t like these repeated comments, but I’d bet the people making them hate even more that they feel they wasted their time reading it.
This attitude will just cause people to write the same thing with AI and then ask it to strip out all the tells. I found it works just fine, but then you push usage underground, making it harder to detect, which isn't in your best interest, assuming you want to be able to detect and avoid low-effort writing.
Okay, I’m the first to get annoyed at LLM-ese. But language requires the ability to say that something is A and not B. There are certain phrasings of that that are painfully Claude-esque, but ffs the one you quoted is the type of thing an actual human being is just as likely to say.
Claude has a specific version that typically starts with “it’s” or even more often “that’s”. It takes the construction “That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.” and applies it to absolutely everything.
In a way, the AI-text-policing is a golden age. Allasudden, folks actually give a shit about style??? Before AI was there _ever_ comments on HN "bro, the semicolons ... I just can't"?
Everyone's on high alert. Maybe writing will get better!
Claude was here.