Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.
I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling.
It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable.
I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.
He says he spent months on this piece and then some, I think it's safe to assume here that this was well supervised, guided, thoughtful and full of human intent despite the AI-assisted part.
In short, I think calling it "AI generated" takes all the human effort that went into these months and the ingenious creativity of OP towards crafting this piece!
Anyways, I enjoyed it. :)
Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.
Quite honestly, I do that sometimes too -- but I _know_ that it's unreasonable.
I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel like the current attitude towards AI generated art will suffer the same fate—but I'm really not quite sure.
One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.
So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.
But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.
If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.
In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.
This is what the deconstructionists were preparing us for, I guess. The author is dead, and if not dead, then fake. It was never a good idea to tie our sense of meaning to external validation.
The humanity immanent in the text came from you, the reader, not the author, and it has always been that way. Language never gave us access to the author's mind -- and to the extent that statement is wrong, it doesn't matter. AI is just another layer of text, coming between the reader and the same collective consciousness that a human author would presumably have drawn on. The artistic appreciation of that text is the sole privilege of the reader.
Thinking deeper, it seems prudent that we tag submissions like this with a prefix. Example: "LLM: ". This would be similar to "Show HN: ". While we cannot control what the original sources choose to disclose, we can fill that gap ourselves.
My point: I agree with you: It is misleading that the blog post does not include a preface explaining it was written by an LLM (and ideally, the author's motivation to use an LLM). However, it is still a good blog post that has generated some thoughtful discussion on HN.
why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.
next stop will be to ask for some sort of regulation
With stories that shared experience is between author and reader. Book clubs etc will try to extend that "shared experience" but primarily it is author <-> reader relationship.
Remove that "shared feeling with the author" and what meaning does it have?
It means, "Wow. Cool. I'm a member of a species that taught rocks to think. Holy fuck. That's pretty insanely fucking awesome. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Fuck."
That's about all it means. Nothing was removed from your life, but something optional was added.
I think if you left it to its own devices, some of the narrative exposition stuff that humanized it would go off the rails
It's really interesting to hear about others that have been exploring generating fiction with Claude. I clearly need some more work based on some of the comments, but it has been really interesting discovering and coming up with different techniques both LLM-assisted and manual to end up with something I felt confident enough about to put out.
I'd be curious to hear more about your experience!
Personally I have an uneasiness with it and are correspondingly cautious. Often after a review and edits it loses that "smell". I kind-of felt the same about NPM and package managers for a long time before using it became obligatory (for lack of a better word).
Are we conditioned to use other people's code unthinkingly, or is it something else?
And yet, in ironic counterpoint, there is a different artist I follow on Spotify that does EDM-fusion-various-world-genres. And it’s very clearly prompt generated. And that doesn’t bother me.
My hypothesis is that it has to do with how we connect/resonate with the creations. If they are merely for entertainment, then we care less. But if the creation inspired an emotion/reasoning that connects us to other humans, we feel betrayed, nay, abandoned, when it comes up being synthetic.
The most quantifiable is the presence of a high frequency component that sort of sounds like someone tried to clean up our restore a highly compressed track. It almost sounds kind it's going to start doing that warbling sound that happens when a teleconferencing call has a bad connection but it's just not bad enough to lose connection completely. I guess it's the sound of being highly noise gated.
The other is more qualitative. The song is boring. Like you said, on paper the song should be something I enjoy. But I suddenly notice that there is no... variation or never hook or anything to make it interesting. Anything to make it something other than the result of a machine. The aural equivalent of eating at Applebee's or reading The New Yorker. The songs just kind of plod onward without ever really getting to a point.
It feels kind of like a vivid dream when you're on the edge of lucidity. You can tell something is wrong, but there is something messing with you faculties. You're trying to see where things are going, how things will resolve, and it never happens. It just keeps going and going in a particular mode. If it does change, it's not to resolve, it's to start on a new thread that is an alternate universe version of the previous thread. With no attempt at establishing continuity, no resolution is ever found.
It feels great to use.
It feels terrible to have it used on you.
Maybe the summary of the first section wouldn't have landed without the example but "People who would spend $50,000 on elective surgery without blinking would balk at a $200 annual wellness check. The fix was always cheaper than the failure, the prevention was always cheaper than the fix, and somehow the money always flowed toward the crisis rather than away from it." explained the problem far more succinctly than the rambling prose before it.
I did notice something else AI about it - I really liked the art style for the illustrations, and had mixed emotions as my thought process was "I'd really like to learn how to draw like this, but I guess there's no point spending my time doing that because now I could just get an AI to generate it, and I guess that's the point of the article".
Very few humans have managed this. This text is at the average level of "i want to pass the message and i'm trying to write professionally".
But I deeply feel that art only matters if there is an artist. The artist wants to convey something.
What makes you uneasy (if you are like me) is that a machine deliberately created emotions in your brain. And positive emotions, at that. It’s really something I can’t stand.
So, the guy who suspends buckets of paint with a hole in the bottom to make patterns has an idea of what he's creating. The guy who just put a few strips of electrical tape in different colours had an idea of what he was trying to convey. The guy who flings paint against a wall also has an idea of what he's creating. The guy who made all the white paintings. All that art is trivial to copy in the same style, maybe even an exact copy for the electrical tape, but it's the artist's intention that makes it worth more than a toddler's painting.
Personally, I think most of that abstract art is pointless, because I don't really see how the artist's vision is represented by whatever the mess they've created is, but I definitely understand that at least they had an idea that they wanted to convey. A machine creating the same thing has no meaning behind it, it's just a waste of paint and canvas.
Of course this has always been a bit of a problem with digital art trying to mascarade as the real thing... I always think of programmed drums using real drum samples. In my adult life I found out that an album I loved as a teenager that listed a real drummer as the performer was actually 100% programmed (this was an otherwise very "organic" sounding heavy guitar album). I always had my suspicions since it was so perfect but I experienced exactly what you are describing. I also never got over it.
and other stuff... it's not that good.
When ChatGPT first came onto the scene I actually started using it to write something in this vein - a techno-thriller starring a former fashion model trained in Krav Maga working as a nuclear physicist who discovers a sinister government conspiracy to alter the foundations of quantum mechanics and enslave humanity with assistance from extraterrestrials. And, of course, only she can stop them with the help of a gruff-but-sensitive retired Marine who has since opened a ranch where he teaches orphaned puppies calculus. I only got 20 pages (so one gunfight and a car chase) in but it was as riveting as anything. Context limit cut my efforts short. Perhaps I'll revisit it soon.
I say all this to say that if words themselves are distantly secondary to narrative then I don't see anything particularly wrong with leveraging an LLM to help crank something out.
> After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
There is a substantial amount of work here, comparable to how long a human writer would take to write from scratch, definitely not slop. I think we can call it AI-assisted, not AI-generated. Even the illustrations are well above average.
It felt like it was written by someone trying to quit an addiction to Corporate Memphis content spam. Like it came from some weird timeline where qntm was a LinkedIn influencer. It straddles an uncanny valley of being a criticism of the domination of The Corporation over human culture while at the same time wallowing in The Corporate Eunuch Voice, not because it's a subversion of form, but because it knows no other way.
I then came to the comments section and found the piece that brought the picture into focus.
It's just... hard to explain the specific kind of disappointment. Perhaps there is a German phrase-with-all-the-spaces-removed kind of word that describes it succinctly. I feel like I exist in this Truman Show kind of world where everyone is trying to gaslight me into thinking LLMs are important, but they aren't very good at it and whenever I try to find out how or why, it all evaporates away. I was very reluctant to say that because I'm sure it's going to come with a heaping side of Extremely Earnest Walruses ready to Have A Debate about it and I just don't have the energy for it anymore. That's the baseline existence right now. It's like a really boring version of Gamergate.
And then this thing comes along. And yeah, it's a thing. You got me. Ha. Ha. Joke's on me. I lost the shitty, fake version of the Turing Test that I didn't even ask to be a part of. And it reminds me of the Microsoft Hololens: a massively impressive technological achievement that was ultimately a terrible consumer experience. Like if you figured out Fusion Power but it could only power Guy Fieri restaurants.
Ever since the pandemic I've been keenly aware of the complete destruction of every enjoyable social structure around me. The meetups that evaporated. The offices we essentially squatted in that suddenly turned Extremely Concerned about what people were doing. The complete lack of any social interaction at work because we're all so busy because we're running at half-workforce and pretty sure the executive suite is salivating at the bit to lay the rest of us off. The lack of care about how this is impacting open source software. The lack of concern for people.
I feel like my entire adult life was this slow, agonizing, but at least constant push forward into recognizing the humanity in others and creating a kind and diverse world and then over night it's all been destroyed and half the people I see online are cheering it on like it's Technojesus coming to absolve them of their sins of never learning to invert a binary tree. Where the blogs and books and startups of the early 2000s were about finding the hidden potential in people--the college dropout working as a barista who just needs someone to give them a chance to be a programmer or a graphic designer or an artist or whatever--the modern era seems to all be about the useless middle management guy who never had any creative bone in his body no longer having to write status reports to his equally mendacious boss on his own anymore.
We might be restarting old coal plants, but at least Kevin in middle management gets to enjoy "programming" again.
This had the feeling of reading someone's diary: today happened, same as yesterday.
The only difference is that the routine, and almost identical, stories is set in in a fictional place.
Some journal/found footage fiction can be good (Dracula for example), but this was not that.
Call it what you want, but I think this sits better with "AI assisted" and, perhaps, really well supervised full of the human intent behind of it. Then again, labels are strange, we call algorithmic and synthesizer assisted music "electronic" music these days and we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft.
I could definitely feel the connection between the human author side of this post, thank you for sharing it!
There are still plenty of purists that will not consider this a "craft". But it's always been that way. The electric guitar itself was a controversial music transition. Bob Dylan was famously criticized heavily for going electric.
But that was a long time ago, and people got over it. And they will again this time.
But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste.
The story is good.
I am also extremely interested in thinking about where software development is going, so I really appreciated the ideas that went into this.
Since you seem open to feedback, I want to add that I felt the generated images were a negative addition. Maybe they wouldn't be if they also got a little polish - the labels in them were particularly bad.
> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project [...] about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.
The amount of work and walltime expended sounds about right. You have discovered / stumbled upon the relatively well known but little appreciated job of a publishing editor. It takes a lot of nitty-gritty work and built up domain knowledge ("world bibles") to direct a piece of writing - and its author - to a level where you confidently believe that you have captured the intent and desired tone of the piece, while keeping it sufficiently tight, engaging and interesting / non-patronising enough for its audience.
Disclosure: did ~decade of freelance writing around the turn of the millennium, and have had the privilege of being schooled by a small group of good old-school journalists. And then had a publishing editor assigned for a separate project, from whom I learned even more about writing.
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
Can you elaborate on this?
“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”
“Everything.”
He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.
Ethan looked ill.
--
I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?
[Edited for clarity]
The error is that the LLM should have have said that the costs went lower, not higher.
It got the overall logic correct, but had a nonsense sentence in the middle.
The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.
But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.
Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.
Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.
Which is totally fair, I'm honestly not! I haven't read much of that myself
It was the text equivalent of hearing a singer whom you know has perfect pitch sing atonal playground songs.
Take this sentence:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible.
Perfectly fine, a nice set up for a next sentence, but then you get hit with this:
He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years.
Bad. The rhythm is all off. Minor improvement:
For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield.
Minor change, really, but the fluidity of the language matters a lot and just that one sentence written that one way breaks the flow.
It's almost as if a second person interjected and wrote that sentence like a friends annoying girlfriend who won't let him finish a story without adding in her parts.
But two notes does not a music make, so let's compare that 1 minor change with a before and after of all three opening sentences:
Original:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
Modified:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
* this is a good attempt at a work of art, but written in a generic style that detracts from it * nobody making genuinely good attempts at art like this would also write so generically * and if they were making it generic on purpose, they wouldn't be able to do it so flawlessly * oh, it must be AI
I guess I can discern the presence of a human artist, but only in the idea, which just means it was a good prompt.
I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.
Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?
The images hit that sweet spot too. Just enough and few in between to support the plot without getting in the way, just enough to like visually clarify without over-explaining. It all worked together even with minor contradictions around labelling. The inconsistencies wasn't sticky enough to disrupt the plot at all.
Over the MY years I’ve seen an idea play out in movies, books, articles, short stories, that the “humanity only unites when faced with an alien intelligence”. What gets me is how people can enjoy something like this, then immediately recoil once they figure it was actually AI-assisted enough to be largely Ai generated. Does that actually diminish the substance of what they just experienced? I don’t think it does but I'm not gonna argue such a subjective stance.
Someone in the comments suggested tagging AI-assisted work with sth like an “LLM:” prefix, similar to “ShowHN:”. That feels weird to me. LLMs might not be sentient, but they’re clearly capable enough that the output should stand on its own, alongside the intent and effort of whoever’s guiding it. Pre-labeling it just bakes in bias before anyone even engages with the work. It’s not that far off from asking human authors to declare their race or nationality up front. 'cause really if nothing about my direct experience changed, why should my judgment?
In a tech-forward space like HN, I’d expect a stronger bias toward judging things on merit alone. Just read the thing. Let it speak first. I sincerely hope this isn't gonna be an 'LLM vs Humanity' thing 'cause personally, I find the idea of a different kind of intelligence extremely interesting.
I understand why people feel like they need more transparency around these things. Reading for me is intentional, and I feel cheated when I put in the effort to read something for which the author put in little. I would like to think the author put in a lot of effort for this story despite AI assistance, and so it was worth me putting effort in. But whether that's true or not I still felt like I got something out of it (hard not to as a software engineer wondering about their place in the world), and that's something.
So the idea of feeling tricked based on how much effort went into it feels foreign to me. If I got something out of it, that's enough. Even if it took the author and a model no time at all.
The ‘feeling tricked’ part, to me, suggests a kind of adversarial framing with AI outputs that I think is curious. I’m just engaging with the text in front of me, whether it’s a story, a README, or a wall of technical writing. If it communicates clearly and has substance, I don’t think much about where it came from. I think much of this just comes down to what people think they’re engaging with when they read, the work itself or the mind behind it.
And tbh, filtering what’s worth the attention has always been on the reader. There’s plenty of human written slop too. I tend to judge everything the same way on my way to deciding whether to keep reading or drop it.
I thought they were AI because I suspected nobody would pay an illustrator/actually spend time making those illustrations for a story like this.
The fact that the whole text was AI came as a surprise. I did notice that weird inconsistency about feed pricing mentioned in another comment but just thought the author made an error or I misunderstood something.
If you have an eye for fonts, the text itself stands out too, at least to me. The font style of "HARTMANN SOFTWARE MECHANICS" is a particular combination of clean, bland shapes and rounded corners that you rarely see in human-designed fonts, but it's super common in AI-synthesized text. I guess it's sort of an average middle ground in the abstract space of letter forms, and the lack of distinguishing features is what creates the impression.
Looking at it again now, things like the electrical wires not being aligned, or going nowhere are always obvious tells. The outlines on the A in “laundromat” are okay but for some reason the vertical line on the R isn’t open.
It’s impressive that this can be generated with AI. I just wish it would come with a “generated with llm-name” label.
However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier.
The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better.
We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.
For the exact same reason why there is absolutely no technical reason why two departments in a company can't talk to each other and exchange data, but because of <whatever> reason they haven't done that in 20 years.
The idea that farmers will just buy "AI" as a blob that is meant to do a thing and these blobs will never interact with each other because they weren't designed to(as in - John Deere really doesn't want their AI blob to talk to the AI blob made by someone else, even if there is literally no technical reason why it shouldn't be possible), seems like the most likely way things will go - it's how we've been operating for a long time and AI won't change it.
Or you can ask the agent to do this after each round. Or before a deploy. They are great at performing analysis.
But honestly, the ideas here are really good. The cascading failure from a weather model update, the spaghetti problem with forty tools nobody designed as a system, the $4 toggle switch being the most important tool --- that's sharper thinking about AI than most serious essays on the topic.
A lot of people who publish regularly can't write to this level of thinking. The prose could be cleaner, sure, but it made me think, which is more than most stories do.
This story is itself the explanation of why we're not going to go this route at scale. It'll happen in isolated places for the indefinite future. But farmers are going to buy systems, generated by AIs or not, that have been field tested, and will be no more interested in calling new untested code into being for their own personal use on their own personal farm than they are today.
The limiting factor for future code won't be how much AI firepower someone has to bring to bear on a problem but how much "real world" there is to test the code against, because there is only going to be so much "real world" to go around.
(Expanded on: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ ).
That is, a lot of "broken software" has always been rooted in "an inadequate/incorrect specification" If problems in the spec are discovered up front they are cheap to fix, the further along you go in development or deployment, the more expensive they are to fix. AI doesn't change that. Like maybe with AI it is 20% faster to fix [1] across the board but it is still more expensive to fix things late -- you might think you are done with waterfall but waterfall is not done with you!
[1] My 20% is pessimistic but if you think you are 10x as productive with AI at putting functionality in front of customers in the long term with a universal scope I believe you've got the same misunderstanding about product life cycle that I'm talking about
"The tool had changed. The domain had not. People who understood the domain and could also diagnose specification problems were the most valuable people in any industry, and most of them, like Tom, had arrived at the job sideways from something else."
People my age and older arrived in the software business sideways too; in my case from physics and electronics. My background in physics was a great help to me later when programming in the domain of electrical machines because I could speak both languages so to say.
Much grander people than me came into software sideways as I was reminded when reading Bertrand Meyer's in memoriam of Tony Hoare; Tony Hoare's first degree was classics at Oxford.
So perhaps we aren't entering a new phase, merely returning to our roots with new tools.
I don't know if this is what the future will look like, but this looks realistic. And if my non-existent grandson starts re-coding my business without asking, he's going to spend the next six months using K&R C.
Edit: got it right!
30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.
> If the world must change, I hope at least we still tell such stories and share how we feel within that change. If so, come what may, that's a future I know I can live in.
This is really the whole idea behind this project with Near Zero. I think there's a lot of anxiety out there around AI and the future, I was there for a while too. Ultimately I've ended up pretty optimistic about it all, and inspired by what the group at Protocolized is doing, found science fiction a great way to help express that.
Does that make the OP an "authoring mechanic"? Or an "AI editor"?
Douglas Adams had it right, the problem is not that the answer was useless, it was that people didn't know what the right question was.
Because of a bad habit reading comments before the link I knew it was AI. I read it regardless, and... I still enjoyed it!
I'm very much not a writer or a critic, so my definition of good writing is likely very low. Yet I can't shake off this weird feeling that I truly enjoyed the writing and felt the emotions, _while_ knowing it's LLM.
I'm guessing that human after touch is what made it pleasant to read. I'd love to see the commit history of the process. Fun times we live in!
Dont know why that makes me annoyed, maybe cause its the depressing seriousness of being a 'prompter' and the americana framing of it.
As for spec-to-software - I am still pretty unsure about this. Right now of course we are not really that close, it takes too much iteration from a prompt to a usable piece of software, and even then you need to have a good prompt. I'm also not sure about re-generating due to variations on what the result might be. The space of acceptable solutions isn't just one program, it's lots, and if you get a random acceptable solution that might be fine for original generation, but it may be extremely annoying to randomly get a different acceptable solution when regenerating, as you need to re-learn how to use it (thinking about UI specifically here.) Maybe these are the same problem, once you can one-shot the software from a spec maybe you will not have much variation on the solution since you aren't doing a somewhat random walk there iterating on the result.
I also don't know if many users really want to generate their own solutions. That's putting a lot of work on the user to even know what a good idea is. Figuring out what the good ideas are is already a huge part of making software, probably harder than implementing it. Maybe small-(ish) businesses will, like the farmers in the story, but end-users, maybe not, at least not in general.
I do think there is SOMETHING to all this, but it's really hard to predict what it's gonna look like, which is why I appreciate this piece so much.
Many people here already chimed in on the emotion of being caught reading something that might not have felt AI so I will offer another angle. Akin to many The New Yorker article in the past, I felt disconnected with the article for a good portion at the beginning. So much so that I had to skip most of it.
The piece that got me very hooked was when he drove to Carol Lindgren’s farm. I read the remainder of the text and thought the content was engaging and thought provoking, in some sense. I loved the idea of manual override that logged into the system and changed the system behaviour over time. That's something that got me thinking about AI, actually.
Now, I would be curious which part of the author's genesis made it into the final text and how much of that couples with what I found to be intellectually engaging.
Prompts in, garbage out.
All I found was a human name given as the author.
We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.
I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.
"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"
As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine.
Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?
Yes, science fiction writers and readers have, since before any of us were born.
It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
Well, then, you gotta move on to reading better science fiction. Because this is pretty damn bland. I gave up after 2 minutes because of it. Kinda feel vindicated after coming to the comments.
I can see it working for casual readers, which is why it's already an editorial problem. Imagine having to sift through a growing number of faux writers sending publishers AI generated prose.
It’s really been interesting since 2022 watching the gesticulations of the population around this idea of content generation aka “AI”
If one thing shines clear through it’s human irrationality and incoherence
It’s really just an infinite repeat of Chris Farley‘s reaction to the coffee crystals prank (1); millions of comfortable software engineers sitting in their well manicured spaces not starving to death, not struggling to survive, all morally offended when they learn something that they enjoyed turns out was not generated by a human.
---
The story was decent! I thought it was insightful and it made me reconsider some aspects of AI use. I am skeptical that an AI could write something on par with the Iliad, or Anna Karenina -- but perhaps I will be disabused of that notion someday. Still, this is a level of quality I am surprised to see to come out of an AI (though, as in your story, the LLM seemed to require its own "choreographer" in the form of your editing and polishing). Very thought provoking.
This is my common issue from building websites for SMEs. It's not until Google updates their algorithm - killing their ranking and their sales leads slow that you hear from them.
There is wisdom in constantly up-selling to your customers (we offer management services, SEO and are cautiously moving in AIO), they may say no, but you have a fall back that you offered things that would have mitigated their current crisis.
1) Bravo. This was actually a fun, enjoyable read. Thank you fellow writer.
2) Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments on this. As one of the authors, I must confess it was not my intention when I wrote that tvtropes wiki page that was ingested by that dodgy script with that weird user agent string and a bad attitude, then added to the data set that eventually made the LLM weights just right for this beautiful story to be possible. I'll be working on more wiki pages soon, so you can look up to more of my stories in the future.
Interesting work, nonetheless. I’d check out Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms for more of what I mean. They are very short, yet very metaphorically dense.
It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about
Then I started scrolling and thought the author was just verbose like RMS.
When it just kept going I was just mad to have fallen into the AI tarpit.
Fun idea. 5x too long. I need to calibrate my ai spidey sense better.
As an allegory it reminds a lot of one I read as a teen: Joshua by Joseph Girzone. Not a literary masterpiece but a cleaver thought-raising story.
would you be open to share the process?
Just saying that everything is going to go to shit and one or two corporations will take over everything... Maybe, but I've heard that story already.
The prose is decent, I like the premise, thought provoking idea.
One issue though: I had to use firefox' reader mode, because the contrast between text and background was terrible.
It explains why it kind of lost its way towards the end. Another thousand hours of everyone’s time wasted by a slop poster.
what was my surprise when I read it was AI-generated
But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.
We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.
I can't say I agree, at all. This is essentially just your average post on Facebook or Linkedin made relevant on HN through telling a story about software mechanics. I don't find it interesting to 'read' collaborations between human and AI bots there and I would greatly prefer it if they don't infest HN as well.
FTFY
