I’ve been on HN long enough to know that the upvotes are primarily driven by reactions to the headline. The actual content only gets viewed after upvoting, or often not at all.
> Also HN readers: upvote the most obvious chatgpt slop to the frontpage
Eh, this one was interesting as documentation of real work that people were doing over years. You don't get that many blog posts about this sort of effort without, usually, a bunch of self hype (because the company blogging also sells data analysis AI or whatever) that clouds any interesting part of the story. The slop in it is annoying but it's also noise thats relatively easy to filter out in this case
Those phrases definitely stick out quite badly. But this post wasn’t pure slop.
It had high quality info about a large ML effort inside an old school auto company, which is very interesting. I was just a bit disappointed no one thought to edit those out.
If you have genuinely interesting and valuable results to report, but you ask AI to do the final writeup for you and it comes across in that generic AI slop style, is it slop? Kind of a gray area for me. It certainly feels lazy and disrespectful to me as a reader, but on the other hand if they don't spend an afternoon proofreading and revising, maybe they can spend that afternoon instead building stuff. I don't know, our whole concept of the purpose of the written word is falling apart.
Appreciate this measured response.
It’s more thoughtful than my reaction, which is to close the article and strongly consider flagging.
That reaction is visceral, but I’ll try to rationalize it:
Words & language are what separate us from the animals. They’re fundamental to what it means to be human. It’s fantastic that machines can now also use these tools, but when you rely on those machines to communicate your ideas you are effectively substituting the LLM’s weighted agglomeration of others’ ideas for a good chunk of your own.
It’s not just disrespectful to the reader, it’s disrespectful to your own mind.
