conception
4 hours ago
I don’t even know what to do about LLM authored articles. Do the prompt engineers hitting enter understand it’s difficult to read and off putting? Could HN use a secondary AI tag/flag?
Sadly I think it’ll be just a dead, poorly written internet moving forward.
Maybe the article is interesting. I don’t know. It’s exhausting to read.
glimshe
3 hours ago
I agree but I'm not sure if I'm biased given the nonstop negative comments about AI texts, on top of every text having the same style (which would be equivalent to a human writing every page on the Internet).
Would we think this was poorly written if we read just this one text 20 years ago? I don't know the answer.
StableAlkyne
40 minutes ago
"Good" or "bad" writing cannot be decided in vacuum: it is decided by the culture examining it.
One example strongly tied to culture is cliched writing.
Things become cliche as they are get overused; no amount of cleverness in the cliche itself can overcome this. Claude's writing has rapidly become cliche because it uses the same pool of stock phrases and words. People pick up on this and have the same reaction as they do to any other cliche piece.
Let's take two works generally seen as good: if Lord of the Rings or Foundation released today, they would probably be panned as cliche because they created those tropes in the first place, which future authors copied or built upon. So yes, most would not think this is poorly written 20 years ago because this style didn't exist yet and it wasn't cliche.
Claude vibe-writing isn't "bad" because it is grammatically or structurally bad. It's bad because it's overused and signals to the reader - whether intentional or not - certain things about how much the prompter values the written piece.
evmar
4 hours ago
Totally agree. I saw the idea of “Internet Kessler syndrome” recently and I can’t stop thinking about how it captures this.