As a datapoint, your first two paragraphs are interesting enough to read, and then my eyes glaze over a lot in the AI block. I forced myself to read it anyway, and indeed it makes less interesting points with less interesting words. It feels like shoveling poop back and forth for no reason to go through the whole AI block, but for example, “original judgment vs. vocabulary pattern-matching”—this is a much less interesting thing to say than your interesting question of “what do we care about in novice research vs. outsider maybe-slop”.
I agree with both you and Raemon—the AI portion is hugely worse than the hand-written comment. And I suspect it generalizes—AI can be as good or better than human writing, with somewhat less effort, it’s not often that sufficient effort is taken.
I still suspect that identifying AI won’t be sufficient, but I fully concede the point that the vast majority of AI writing is less useful than the majority of human writing.
I do use AI for most coding, where “good enough” is in fact good enough, but I see that I’ve got further to go in figuring out how to guide and correct it for writing.
It sounded like when you first wrote your comment like you saying “this is mostly better, or, at least succeeded in saying what I meant”, was that a thing you changed your mind on or did you not mean to convey that?
It’s a thing I changed my mind on, based on your comments and my re-reading it more critically (and really, reading it thoroughly at all). It’s a perfect reminder to me of one of the main failure modes of LLM assistance—it’s good enough at first glance that it’s easy to forget to apply the same level of self-critique and thought one does for direct writing.
I don’t have a good way to detect this failure mode in myself, let alone others, but it’s very apparent when I look, and is probably common enough that “is it substantially AI” is an ok proxy for “is it low-quality”. This is a reversal of my previous position, though I still suspect it won’t last for long.
As a datapoint, your first two paragraphs are interesting enough to read, and then my eyes glaze over a lot in the AI block. I forced myself to read it anyway, and indeed it makes less interesting points with less interesting words. It feels like shoveling poop back and forth for no reason to go through the whole AI block, but for example, “original judgment vs. vocabulary pattern-matching”—this is a much less interesting thing to say than your interesting question of “what do we care about in novice research vs. outsider maybe-slop”.
I agree with both you and Raemon—the AI portion is hugely worse than the hand-written comment. And I suspect it generalizes—AI can be as good or better than human writing, with somewhat less effort, it’s not often that sufficient effort is taken.
I still suspect that identifying AI won’t be sufficient, but I fully concede the point that the vast majority of AI writing is less useful than the majority of human writing.
I do use AI for most coding, where “good enough” is in fact good enough, but I see that I’ve got further to go in figuring out how to guide and correct it for writing.
It sounded like when you first wrote your comment like you saying “this is mostly better, or, at least succeeded in saying what I meant”, was that a thing you changed your mind on or did you not mean to convey that?
It’s a thing I changed my mind on, based on your comments and my re-reading it more critically (and really, reading it thoroughly at all). It’s a perfect reminder to me of one of the main failure modes of LLM assistance—it’s good enough at first glance that it’s easy to forget to apply the same level of self-critique and thought one does for direct writing.
I don’t have a good way to detect this failure mode in myself, let alone others, but it’s very apparent when I look, and is probably common enough that “is it substantially AI” is an ok proxy for “is it low-quality”. This is a reversal of my previous position, though I still suspect it won’t last for long.