This quote from the authors friend really hit home with me.
> “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey is the prompt, wrap that in a header and a signature. Not only are we talking as humans, we’re also communicating directly.
Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine.
Yeah, that's one of those sentiments where people say it but they probably don't mean it literally. Much like if your boss asks for honest feedback giving it to them with both barrels is a career limiting move.
You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes and the damage those mistakes do is limited if you follow some structural rules of how to communicate (aka politeness).
AIs only rewrite what is in the prompt with more words so it can be insipid but I'd expect to do better on average with that then sending out raw prompts. I'd suggest the real ask from the friend is "put more time into communicating with me than a short prompt".
I am not the author but I have used that quote before, and no, I mean it literally. I would prefer any words that came from your own brain over the output of a statistical model. I don't mind if it's short, or didn't take much time, or doesn't have much thought put into it, I want it to be yours. The subtle mistakes in how my interlocutor perceives the world and communicates themselves are the entire point.
When I read what someone has written, I learn things beyond its literal text from the fact that I’m reading it, which implies it was worth effort for them to put into so many words and send to me through the medium they chose and put the level of care that they chose into their wording.
The LLM erases those choices and erases the cost of verbosity so there’s much less for me to learn from a message, and much less I stand to learn about a person though repeated exchanges to help me better contextualize future messages I receive from them.
I've always assumed when I hear people talking about AI emails, they're talking about longer formal writing to groups, such as a proposal not personal 1:1 messages. Hearing this kind of surprises me but I don't know first-hand since I was able to retire just before LLMs became ubiquitous.
In my experience, 1:1 or 1:2 emails among coworkers, peers or friends tended to be as short and direct as possible anyway. Even pre-LLM, an email as long or structured as an LLM would create today would have been notably weird.
To a friend or colleague, yes. But for quotidian business transactions LLMs are such a shortcut. I pointed one to three Amazon orders that I wanted to return with reasons for each, and asked it to look up the details and generate warranty service request emails for each. A quick review copy paste send, boom done. A 15 minute task done in 5. Repeat and it adds up. But you need to know when not to take the shortcut.
I think the difference there is that a warranty email isn't aimed at a person, but a company - which, I think cstross has pointed out, was humanity's first AI.
> Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response
I run into this with AI-generated PR comments. I think where I work we are still grappling with the "right point", because LLMs can certainly provide valuable feedback, but they are not at the point where they can do so unsupervised, and to do so just feels unprofessional.
And there's another layer where it is even worse when a colleague spends the time critiquing code and someone (or something) replies to the comment with mostly useless filler. It's like being handed a small hand-crafted gift and then throwing it into the garbage in front of them.
Regarding your last point, I personally find it insulting when I receive an AI response because of the subtle deception involved. When I am talking with another human via Slack/email/etc., I am under the impression that the messages I am receiving are written by the coworker/person in question. When instead I receive an LLM's output, that trust is broken, especially if it is not made transparent that AI was used to generate the message.
The problem is everything we send that was created from a prompt is not you.
If I wanted to read something that wasn't written by another person, you might as well swap out the from field for "Claude" or "gpt-5" or w/e and stop pretending you had any valuable input.
Sure there's something to be said about having an AI help. But I'd rather that be an attachment clearly labelled and for the content to be strictly reserved for a human.
This is already how I think PRs and such should be written. There should be a field or section of the description reserved for the AI generated content, with the rest being for the human to clearly describe their intention.
But instead we're living in a world of AIs masquerading as humans. And it's only getting worse.
I'm dyslexic. I put every comment through the LLM, or other tools. Including this comment.
I understand where you're coming from but please believe me when I tell you that if I write comments myself nobody will understand them and it just turns into an argument where people claim I say things that I didn't say.
By filtering my comments through an llm, I have reduced this issue significantly.
That is a fantastic use and would likely benefit asd as well. Could you share your strategies for creating something that is still you and concise but comprehensible to neurotypicals?
What do you feel your response added to the conversation? To me, it reads as a petty attack on a person who is using assisted technology to engage with the community. Which only reflects negatively on you and makes you a jerk and a bully.
There’s a difference between fixing a few incorrect words in a text and having an essay (or email or whatever) written from a few words. I don’t think the parent comment would object w/ your use of LLMs.
So many people have spent a lot of energy dehumanizing others on the basis of their “contribution to society”. Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc. I can only hope that AI can force people to rethink whether their value is tied to their work output or not.
It goes beyond that. There is inherent classism in this, because it implies that you do not question the value of wealthy people who put in relatively little actual work output due to their privileged position. Take for example the unemployed person in your example who might have literally been 100 times more productive in their career solving substantive problems than a VC who lucked out on their startup and has been cruising on a few boards for ten years.
This is by far the best definition of AI slop I ever read, and the blog post itself is the contrary of AI slop: a short post where each word matters. The creation of an output that is at the same time large and lacks fundamental motivation/understanding is what creates AI slop, not the use of AI itself. This distinction allows us to have a mental model to don't blame AI itself but its continuous misuses. This also creates a formal model to understand why continuous AI steering during AI-assisted coding is so important. The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
> The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
What are you driving at with this statement? I think there is value in both types of prompts so I'm unclear.
The tl;dr is pretty similar. Intent and care are the functional variables. A human can produce slop without AI and they can produce art with AI. AI just enables slop at an industrial scale.
There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport. People care about the creator. The source defines the work, the awe, and the emotional response.
But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.
The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.
> There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport.
I can't speak about sports, but I'll share an anecdote about art.
A friend of mine shared an AI-produced song, and I was surprised by its quality. The producer credited Suno as the only tool he used, so I was curious to see what this thing could do. Paid for the pro plan and my wife and I were having a blast coming up with songs we'd like to listen to.
They were songs that neither of us were capable of making, but they were genuinely fun to conjure (I won't say "make"--we didn't make anything) and she listens to them in the car pretty regularly now. And when we want something new, we can just conjure up some more.
Yes, I know this is only possible because of the human-created music that served as the training data. I don't intend to comment on the morality/legality of it (although it's fair conversation to have). Just noting that some of us do actually appreciate AI music.
But maybe I'm exactly the sort of sucker from Huxley's "Brave New World" that he warned about. :)
It's the novelty that you're chasing. Deeply consider what it is that you are enjoying, because it's not very different from doom scrolling or quickly stale bubble gum. Maybe AI produces pop music that supplants the long-standing music industry. I couldn't give a shit if it does. Pop music is nepotism and exploitation with the random artist who sneaks through.
I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy. I love live shows, and I love the passion that the artist brings to a live show. I will never get that from AI, so why would I listen to it? It's the same reason I will not read a book that AI makes. AI may understand the mechanisms of story telling, or what chords sound good to a human ear, but because AI cannot have a lived experience of the world it cannot create. Form without intent. Form without a nature of it's own.
I'm good. I'll pass. I think you see it too, by your commend about being the sort of sucker from 1984 and I hope that you come to realize what you are inviting in.
> I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.
I would love if we could force the big tech companies to release their models + weights since they're fundamentally products built on the collective labors of humanity (at least some of which is licensed under the GPL or the CC-BY-SA).
If I could hit a button and abolish copyright and the notion of intellectual property, I would.
>But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I would also argue that there's art in a lot of that output, in the form of intent, decision making and communication. But I admit that the value of those really depends on the eye of the beholder and the situation.
Incredible.
Lately, I’ve been going through a bit of an identity crisis.
I know I’m a passionate and not-so-bad developer, but with all this talk about AI, I couldn’t really understand if that was an end of an era for me.
But while reading this article, something clicked, it makes so much sense. It really made me feel better.
I think this quote is highly relevant, though I would guess you, as I am, are by no means a beginner, the matter of taste is the one at hand, I think. Humans matter, and furthermore, human taste can't be replaced (yet? at all? why would we want to?)
> human taste can't be replaced (yet? at all? why would we want to?)
People want to. People want to be told what to watch by an algorithm. They want music made by algorithms. They will eat whatever the reviews say they should. Reviews, etc are manipulated today. Why will future humans care what another human thinks? (I in no way endorse this view but the cynic in me sees it as almost inevitable in our AI-driven descent into idiocracy)
> If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
I'm excited for when Github starts letting me check in the chain-of-thought that produced a line of code, and git blame it like I can with commits.
Our lives are just a big collection of experiences. The wall-clock minutes that actually matter in our lives are the minutes that we spend with other people. These minutes are literally all we have; the next minute you have is literally the only thing you lose when you die.
Talking to machines is only ever something I have to do so that I can put food on the table. I never remember the minutes that I have spent talking to a machine, they are not memorable because they are not valuable.
This quote resonated with me: “ Tom Hudson told me, “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
In my personal life I use AI a lot for information discovery and high level discussion of the problem space. I use it occasionally to write some prototype code to get started on something. It makes a great debugging and problem solving tool, though I typically find that I need to have an idea of what the problem is to steer it in the right direction. It makes a poor intuition generator, but a great intuition checker and can run with an idea for much faster iteration. I use it essentially zero in my day job as an civil engineer though.
I would essentially NEVER use it to write an email. By the time I’ve specified what it is I’m trying to say, I’ve basically said it. Wordsmithing beyond that usually has almost zero value. Same frankly with writing engineering reports. By the time I’ve told it what it needs to say, I’ve basically written that section. In general, I feel like LLMs are just bad writing tools… In writing I typically find that if I can farm it out to have an LLM write something, then it frankly probably just didn’t need to be said.
Agreed - communication is a bright line for me. I use it (judicially) to learn. I use it (judicially) to write code. I will absolutely never use it to write English for distribution of any kind. To me, that is hideous.
Maybe I would use it to write to a person I have absolutely no respect for. I haven't encountered that use case yet. I have a base level of respect for all people.
these keep it real types obviously not having to deal with the day to day crap I deal with. using LLM to redraft emails/support calls for a particular large firewall turned an enfuriating endless feedback loop of makework support nonsense into 2 message resolution.
Sharing the prompts would have messed it all up for sure.
There are other instances where I have shared fairly direct, but not what I would consider rude or aggressive emails to people and had them freak out and I have no idea why, rewriting with LLMs to make them blander but convey the same message is very handy here.
First I'll say the disambiguation of discerning intent as the driver behind whether something is slop or not was very interesting.
But, I'll take one point in their article a step further you can just say "Humans are invaluable." instead.
I don't like defining humans in terms of valuable at all. Maybe because I feel like that word is very concrete and measured and to actually judge that on any one person requires perspective and capabilities none of us existing or have ever existed possess.
The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all. Those who have tried are often reflected in history as the worst among us.
> The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all
I think that's basically the same thing that the "Humans are Valuable" was getting at. Invaluable is just a different way of saying unmeasurable amounts of value
Right and words matter. Valuable is a relative term that asserts a measurable quantity and they're trying to assert something non relative and not measurable.
I don't take issue with their point. Just that we can use a stronger word.
I was writing a similar comment to yours, thinking about "value to society", and value to loved ones, even negative value of enemies. I agree that talking about "value of humans" is not very useful.
Then I realized that on an individual level, everybody is infinitely valuable to themselves. You are your whole universe. From that perspective, I agree with the author that "Humans are valuable."
We have laws keeping humans alive and safe because we are valuable in that sense.
I don't agree that we need to go out of our way to preserve human art though, or their thoughts on the value of "creative artifacts". People will make art if they enjoy making it. Whether or not other people appreciate that art is irrelevant.
The point going unsaid, in my opinion, is that we are quickly realizing that we'll need to identify with something that isn't work soon. We'll need to find value beyond money.
> I want you to make something. It can be anything you want, I just want you to express yourself. Don't ask me any questions, just make whatever you want.
It thought about the chance to make something unconstrained, mused about how it's drawn to impermanence, and made this:
We are. Anthropomorphizing huge piles of numbers is a mistake. It did not "think about the chance to make something unconstrained", nor did it "muse about how it's drawn to impermanence", it pattern-matched to your prompt and produced a statistically probable response based on it's training data. Obviously, that's not to say that LLMs aren't useful or powerful - it's 2026, c'mon, of COURSE they are. And they can certainly be used for artistic purposes! But treating them like humans is a mistake, and it worries me how much people do. I suppose that's the natural consequence of the default interface to LLMs being a chat mimicking human interaction.
Your point might be better stated directly because attributing the characteristics of humanity to... humanity is the opposite of what anthropomorphizing means.
My point is that we don't really know how brains work, and saying "LLMs don't have intent because flourishes hands numbers!" isn't really a convincing, coherent logical argument.
That kind of straw man, that consciousness only emerges from electrical signals, is one of the reasons we haven’t reached AGI yet because we keep underestimating it. There’s way more biological, chemical and physical phenomena going on in brain that gives way to consciousness than just neurons firing ions.
I'm a big fan of the "veil of ignorance" philosophical thought experiment[1]. Let's say you are given the freedom to design a society and its moral code. Then you will be born into that society and subject to it. The trick is you don't know who you will born into. It's a roll of a dice. What kind of society would you design such that that seems like a winning game?
I'm fairly certain that when living in that society, you would wish to feel valued by others and that others believe you deserve a certain level of dignity and respect. Since you don't know who you will be born into, that suggests that you want a society where everyone is valued and granted dignity. That in turn extends even to people who are unfortunately not able to produce material objects with a level of skill superior to what technology can produce at some specific moment in time.
If you agree with that, then we should advocate for granting all people value and dignity "just because" and not because they happen to be better at producing bytes than an LLM. That way, even if the LLM gets better at producing those bytes, you are still valued.
That line doesn't really work, since I'm not Sam Beckett and I won't suddenly Quantum Leap into anybody's body. Why shouldn't I take an asymmetric attitude? These kind of arguments try to derive impersonal values by starting from principles of self-interest. But there's no need, because self-interest is impersonal values, in disguise. Maybe you value getting personally improved in one way or another, like getting richer or more popular or stronger or acquiring offspring, but we can play the "why" game on that until it turns into some motivating abstract impersonal goody-goody value such as "I value people".
I mean, why do you wish to feel valued by others and get respect? Is it just so that they stay out of your way and give you things? What are you going to do next, with the space and the things? This assumption, that you care what they think of you, pretty much begs the question about valuing them back. What you value is what you want to do, and the other people are involved in that, and asymmetry doesn't help get it done, except very locally (that's privacy).
Personally I often wish that all the people would go away, but I value creating knowledge, and I have to admit that I'd be crap at doing that on my own, so fine, I value people really, you can all stay.
What a strange world - I'm an atheist, and the quoted argument resonates intensely with me, as somebody who believes in the innate value of humans even in the face of objectivity.
If you believe in the objective truth of the quoted source, then that makes the claim that humans are valuable about as robust as any claim can be.
If you do not believe in the objective truth of the quoted source, you must still reckon with the fact that this is the (start of) the punchline of the opening narrative of the foundational text of the world's largest religion or religion family. (The punchline continues with the judgment that the universe, being merely good before humanity, is now very good with humanity.) That is to say, this is an incredibly widely and deeply held value by a vast number of people over millenia, not to mention the many others whose religions may contain analogous claims.
Remember, the statement "X is valuable" is always shorthand for "X is valuable to Y". In this case, at absolute worst we mean "humans are valuable to humans," if not also "humans are valuable to God".
“ Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities”
I mean, this is just begging the question. Many people disagree with this and disagree with the notion that humans are innately valuable. The blog post just seems like a lot of copium from somebody who really hopes he’s right.
Citing Genesis and an Encyclical might strengthen one’s argument for a particular demographic, but for many it will simply be unconvincing.
Like citation sources, no doubt some humans are valuable but whether they are or not is often relative.
An appeal to a religious text being presented as a robust argument borders on mockery. Especially after it follows a claim about how the position at hand is one that needs not to be qualified. Why are you qualifying it then? Is it because you (correctly) sense that you're presenting it as a fact of the world, rather than just as your opinion, and feel the gap in justification?
This quote from the authors friend really hit home with me.
> “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey is the prompt, wrap that in a header and a signature. Not only are we talking as humans, we’re also communicating directly.
Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine.
Yeah, that's one of those sentiments where people say it but they probably don't mean it literally. Much like if your boss asks for honest feedback giving it to them with both barrels is a career limiting move.
You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes and the damage those mistakes do is limited if you follow some structural rules of how to communicate (aka politeness).
AIs only rewrite what is in the prompt with more words so it can be insipid but I'd expect to do better on average with that then sending out raw prompts. I'd suggest the real ask from the friend is "put more time into communicating with me than a short prompt".
I am not the author but I have used that quote before, and no, I mean it literally. I would prefer any words that came from your own brain over the output of a statistical model. I don't mind if it's short, or didn't take much time, or doesn't have much thought put into it, I want it to be yours. The subtle mistakes in how my interlocutor perceives the world and communicates themselves are the entire point.
When I read what someone has written, I learn things beyond its literal text from the fact that I’m reading it, which implies it was worth effort for them to put into so many words and send to me through the medium they chose and put the level of care that they chose into their wording.
The LLM erases those choices and erases the cost of verbosity so there’s much less for me to learn from a message, and much less I stand to learn about a person though repeated exchanges to help me better contextualize future messages I receive from them.
I've always assumed when I hear people talking about AI emails, they're talking about longer formal writing to groups, such as a proposal not personal 1:1 messages. Hearing this kind of surprises me but I don't know first-hand since I was able to retire just before LLMs became ubiquitous.
In my experience, 1:1 or 1:2 emails among coworkers, peers or friends tended to be as short and direct as possible anyway. Even pre-LLM, an email as long or structured as an LLM would create today would have been notably weird.
To a friend or colleague, yes. But for quotidian business transactions LLMs are such a shortcut. I pointed one to three Amazon orders that I wanted to return with reasons for each, and asked it to look up the details and generate warranty service request emails for each. A quick review copy paste send, boom done. A 15 minute task done in 5. Repeat and it adds up. But you need to know when not to take the shortcut.
I think the difference there is that a warranty email isn't aimed at a person, but a company - which, I think cstross has pointed out, was humanity's first AI.
> Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response
I run into this with AI-generated PR comments. I think where I work we are still grappling with the "right point", because LLMs can certainly provide valuable feedback, but they are not at the point where they can do so unsupervised, and to do so just feels unprofessional.
And there's another layer where it is even worse when a colleague spends the time critiquing code and someone (or something) replies to the comment with mostly useless filler. It's like being handed a small hand-crafted gift and then throwing it into the garbage in front of them.
Regarding your last point, I personally find it insulting when I receive an AI response because of the subtle deception involved. When I am talking with another human via Slack/email/etc., I am under the impression that the messages I am receiving are written by the coworker/person in question. When instead I receive an LLM's output, that trust is broken, especially if it is not made transparent that AI was used to generate the message.
The problem is everything we send that was created from a prompt is not you.
If I wanted to read something that wasn't written by another person, you might as well swap out the from field for "Claude" or "gpt-5" or w/e and stop pretending you had any valuable input.
Sure there's something to be said about having an AI help. But I'd rather that be an attachment clearly labelled and for the content to be strictly reserved for a human.
This is already how I think PRs and such should be written. There should be a field or section of the description reserved for the AI generated content, with the rest being for the human to clearly describe their intention.
But instead we're living in a world of AIs masquerading as humans. And it's only getting worse.
Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response.
If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.
I'm dyslexic. I put every comment through the LLM, or other tools. Including this comment.
I understand where you're coming from but please believe me when I tell you that if I write comments myself nobody will understand them and it just turns into an argument where people claim I say things that I didn't say.
By filtering my comments through an llm, I have reduced this issue significantly.
That is a fantastic use and would likely benefit asd as well. Could you share your strategies for creating something that is still you and concise but comprehensible to neurotypicals?
Thank goodness you used an LLM to improve these valuable comments today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326830
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317615
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317610
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317578
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317568
What do you feel your response added to the conversation? To me, it reads as a petty attack on a person who is using assisted technology to engage with the community. Which only reflects negatively on you and makes you a jerk and a bully.
There’s a difference between fixing a few incorrect words in a text and having an essay (or email or whatever) written from a few words. I don’t think the parent comment would object w/ your use of LLMs.
How can I trust that the sender actually understands the words they want me to read if it is all just AI output?
You don't. The sender is just pushing responsibility back to you.
Probably the best response would be "No." The least anticipated one, creating a chance of actual communication.
So many people have spent a lot of energy dehumanizing others on the basis of their “contribution to society”. Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc. I can only hope that AI can force people to rethink whether their value is tied to their work output or not.
It goes beyond that. There is inherent classism in this, because it implies that you do not question the value of wealthy people who put in relatively little actual work output due to their privileged position. Take for example the unemployed person in your example who might have literally been 100 times more productive in their career solving substantive problems than a VC who lucked out on their startup and has been cruising on a few boards for ten years.
AI has been around in various forms for a little while now. Have you seen anything to suggest that this is even a possibility?
Weigh this against the context that people have had centuries to figure this out.
This is by far the best definition of AI slop I ever read, and the blog post itself is the contrary of AI slop: a short post where each word matters. The creation of an output that is at the same time large and lacks fundamental motivation/understanding is what creates AI slop, not the use of AI itself. This distinction allows us to have a mental model to don't blame AI itself but its continuous misuses. This also creates a formal model to understand why continuous AI steering during AI-assisted coding is so important. The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
> The sum of all the prompts provided, if they form a cohesive view of the software intent, constitutes the seed and specification that can generate good, useful code. Try to put together instead the sum of all the short prompts that prey the AI to retry "it does not work, retry", and see what you obtian.
What are you driving at with this statement? I think there is value in both types of prompts so I'm unclear.
See also Hank Green's take on the definition of slop: https://youtu.be/dT5IJExTUR4?si=mjkHK024MUqCId0k
The tl;dr is pretty similar. Intent and care are the functional variables. A human can produce slop without AI and they can produce art with AI. AI just enables slop at an industrial scale.
There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport. People care about the creator. The source defines the work, the awe, and the emotional response.
But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.
The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.
> There is a class of human output that will retain value regardless of AI capability: art and sport.
I can't speak about sports, but I'll share an anecdote about art.
A friend of mine shared an AI-produced song, and I was surprised by its quality. The producer credited Suno as the only tool he used, so I was curious to see what this thing could do. Paid for the pro plan and my wife and I were having a blast coming up with songs we'd like to listen to.
They were songs that neither of us were capable of making, but they were genuinely fun to conjure (I won't say "make"--we didn't make anything) and she listens to them in the car pretty regularly now. And when we want something new, we can just conjure up some more.
Yes, I know this is only possible because of the human-created music that served as the training data. I don't intend to comment on the morality/legality of it (although it's fair conversation to have). Just noting that some of us do actually appreciate AI music.
But maybe I'm exactly the sort of sucker from Huxley's "Brave New World" that he warned about. :)
It's the novelty that you're chasing. Deeply consider what it is that you are enjoying, because it's not very different from doom scrolling or quickly stale bubble gum. Maybe AI produces pop music that supplants the long-standing music industry. I couldn't give a shit if it does. Pop music is nepotism and exploitation with the random artist who sneaks through.
I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy. I love live shows, and I love the passion that the artist brings to a live show. I will never get that from AI, so why would I listen to it? It's the same reason I will not read a book that AI makes. AI may understand the mechanisms of story telling, or what chords sound good to a human ear, but because AI cannot have a lived experience of the world it cannot create. Form without intent. Form without a nature of it's own.
I'm good. I'll pass. I think you see it too, by your commend about being the sort of sucker from 1984 and I hope that you come to realize what you are inviting in.
AI repeats itself. You aren't enjoying anything new, you're enjoying a version of an average.
In however many years we'll wake up and wonder why everything is the same....oh wait.
this is exactly why people dont like this. it creates an echo chamber in art which kills what art itself is about. it normalizes noise.
> I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.
I would love if we could force the big tech companies to release their models + weights since they're fundamentally products built on the collective labors of humanity (at least some of which is licensed under the GPL or the CC-BY-SA).
If I could hit a button and abolish copyright and the notion of intellectual property, I would.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-culture_movement
>But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I would also argue that there's art in a lot of that output, in the form of intent, decision making and communication. But I admit that the value of those really depends on the eye of the beholder and the situation.
Art is definitely being devalued by AI, today. I'm sure Banksy is fine but artists along the margins are competing with genAI
Incredible. Lately, I’ve been going through a bit of an identity crisis. I know I’m a passionate and not-so-bad developer, but with all this talk about AI, I couldn’t really understand if that was an end of an era for me.
But while reading this article, something clicked, it makes so much sense. It really made me feel better.
I think this quote is highly relevant, though I would guess you, as I am, are by no means a beginner, the matter of taste is the one at hand, I think. Humans matter, and furthermore, human taste can't be replaced (yet? at all? why would we want to?)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...
> human taste can't be replaced (yet? at all? why would we want to?)
People want to. People want to be told what to watch by an algorithm. They want music made by algorithms. They will eat whatever the reviews say they should. Reviews, etc are manipulated today. Why will future humans care what another human thinks? (I in no way endorse this view but the cynic in me sees it as almost inevitable in our AI-driven descent into idiocracy)
> If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
I'm excited for when Github starts letting me check in the chain-of-thought that produced a line of code, and git blame it like I can with commits.
Our lives are just a big collection of experiences. The wall-clock minutes that actually matter in our lives are the minutes that we spend with other people. These minutes are literally all we have; the next minute you have is literally the only thing you lose when you die.
Talking to machines is only ever something I have to do so that I can put food on the table. I never remember the minutes that I have spent talking to a machine, they are not memorable because they are not valuable.
This quote resonated with me: “ Tom Hudson told me, “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
In my personal life I use AI a lot for information discovery and high level discussion of the problem space. I use it occasionally to write some prototype code to get started on something. It makes a great debugging and problem solving tool, though I typically find that I need to have an idea of what the problem is to steer it in the right direction. It makes a poor intuition generator, but a great intuition checker and can run with an idea for much faster iteration. I use it essentially zero in my day job as an civil engineer though.
I would essentially NEVER use it to write an email. By the time I’ve specified what it is I’m trying to say, I’ve basically said it. Wordsmithing beyond that usually has almost zero value. Same frankly with writing engineering reports. By the time I’ve told it what it needs to say, I’ve basically written that section. In general, I feel like LLMs are just bad writing tools… In writing I typically find that if I can farm it out to have an LLM write something, then it frankly probably just didn’t need to be said.
Agreed - communication is a bright line for me. I use it (judicially) to learn. I use it (judicially) to write code. I will absolutely never use it to write English for distribution of any kind. To me, that is hideous.
Maybe I would use it to write to a person I have absolutely no respect for. I haven't encountered that use case yet. I have a base level of respect for all people.
And honestly? That's rare.
If you want an AI to do a specific task in a specific way, you'll always need to prompt it.
these keep it real types obviously not having to deal with the day to day crap I deal with. using LLM to redraft emails/support calls for a particular large firewall turned an enfuriating endless feedback loop of makework support nonsense into 2 message resolution.
Sharing the prompts would have messed it all up for sure.
There are other instances where I have shared fairly direct, but not what I would consider rude or aggressive emails to people and had them freak out and I have no idea why, rewriting with LLMs to make them blander but convey the same message is very handy here.
First I'll say the disambiguation of discerning intent as the driver behind whether something is slop or not was very interesting.
But, I'll take one point in their article a step further you can just say "Humans are invaluable." instead.
I don't like defining humans in terms of valuable at all. Maybe because I feel like that word is very concrete and measured and to actually judge that on any one person requires perspective and capabilities none of us existing or have ever existed possess.
The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all. Those who have tried are often reflected in history as the worst among us.
> The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all
I think that's basically the same thing that the "Humans are Valuable" was getting at. Invaluable is just a different way of saying unmeasurable amounts of value
Right and words matter. Valuable is a relative term that asserts a measurable quantity and they're trying to assert something non relative and not measurable.
I don't take issue with their point. Just that we can use a stronger word.
I was writing a similar comment to yours, thinking about "value to society", and value to loved ones, even negative value of enemies. I agree that talking about "value of humans" is not very useful.
Then I realized that on an individual level, everybody is infinitely valuable to themselves. You are your whole universe. From that perspective, I agree with the author that "Humans are valuable."
We have laws keeping humans alive and safe because we are valuable in that sense.
I don't agree that we need to go out of our way to preserve human art though, or their thoughts on the value of "creative artifacts". People will make art if they enjoy making it. Whether or not other people appreciate that art is irrelevant.
> “Humans are valuable.” You can just say it
As if that's hard. Here's the gut check: "Individual humans are inherently more valuable than corporations."
How about "Poor Working Class Humans are just as valuable as Wealthy CEOs"?
The point going unsaid, in my opinion, is that we are quickly realizing that we'll need to identify with something that isn't work soon. We'll need to find value beyond money.
I think that horrifies people.
I asked Claude this:
> I want you to make something. It can be anything you want, I just want you to express yourself. Don't ask me any questions, just make whatever you want.
It thought about the chance to make something unconstrained, mused about how it's drawn to impermanence, and made this:
https://www.pastery.net/ugschp/
How are we sure there's no intent there?
> How are we sure there's no intent there?
We are. Anthropomorphizing huge piles of numbers is a mistake. It did not "think about the chance to make something unconstrained", nor did it "muse about how it's drawn to impermanence", it pattern-matched to your prompt and produced a statistically probable response based on it's training data. Obviously, that's not to say that LLMs aren't useful or powerful - it's 2026, c'mon, of COURSE they are. And they can certainly be used for artistic purposes! But treating them like humans is a mistake, and it worries me how much people do. I suppose that's the natural consequence of the default interface to LLMs being a chat mimicking human interaction.
Anthropomorphizing huge piles of cells transmitting electrical current is a mistake.
Your point might be better stated directly because attributing the characteristics of humanity to... humanity is the opposite of what anthropomorphizing means.
My point is that we don't really know how brains work, and saying "LLMs don't have intent because flourishes hands numbers!" isn't really a convincing, coherent logical argument.
That kind of straw man, that consciousness only emerges from electrical signals, is one of the reasons we haven’t reached AGI yet because we keep underestimating it. There’s way more biological, chemical and physical phenomena going on in brain that gives way to consciousness than just neurons firing ions.
I like this. Thanks for sharing it.
OP's argument sounds like Peter Steinberger saying, don't send me a slop PR, instead give me your prompt.
Citing "God created man in his own image" for robustness doesn't really land well. I'm not even an atheist either.
Here's a non-theistic argument:
I'm a big fan of the "veil of ignorance" philosophical thought experiment[1]. Let's say you are given the freedom to design a society and its moral code. Then you will be born into that society and subject to it. The trick is you don't know who you will born into. It's a roll of a dice. What kind of society would you design such that that seems like a winning game?
I'm fairly certain that when living in that society, you would wish to feel valued by others and that others believe you deserve a certain level of dignity and respect. Since you don't know who you will be born into, that suggests that you want a society where everyone is valued and granted dignity. That in turn extends even to people who are unfortunately not able to produce material objects with a level of skill superior to what technology can produce at some specific moment in time.
If you agree with that, then we should advocate for granting all people value and dignity "just because" and not because they happen to be better at producing bytes than an LLM. That way, even if the LLM gets better at producing those bytes, you are still valued.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
That line doesn't really work, since I'm not Sam Beckett and I won't suddenly Quantum Leap into anybody's body. Why shouldn't I take an asymmetric attitude? These kind of arguments try to derive impersonal values by starting from principles of self-interest. But there's no need, because self-interest is impersonal values, in disguise. Maybe you value getting personally improved in one way or another, like getting richer or more popular or stronger or acquiring offspring, but we can play the "why" game on that until it turns into some motivating abstract impersonal goody-goody value such as "I value people".
I mean, why do you wish to feel valued by others and get respect? Is it just so that they stay out of your way and give you things? What are you going to do next, with the space and the things? This assumption, that you care what they think of you, pretty much begs the question about valuing them back. What you value is what you want to do, and the other people are involved in that, and asymmetry doesn't help get it done, except very locally (that's privacy).
Personally I often wish that all the people would go away, but I value creating knowledge, and I have to admit that I'd be crap at doing that on my own, so fine, I value people really, you can all stay.
What a strange world - I'm an atheist, and the quoted argument resonates intensely with me, as somebody who believes in the innate value of humans even in the face of objectivity.
Yeah, it was a bit like when Chesterton is saying something robust, if you know what I mean. Wrong, but with a whole boulder of truth hidden in it.
Robust as in assertive, I suppose.
If you believe in the objective truth of the quoted source, then that makes the claim that humans are valuable about as robust as any claim can be.
If you do not believe in the objective truth of the quoted source, you must still reckon with the fact that this is the (start of) the punchline of the opening narrative of the foundational text of the world's largest religion or religion family. (The punchline continues with the judgment that the universe, being merely good before humanity, is now very good with humanity.) That is to say, this is an incredibly widely and deeply held value by a vast number of people over millenia, not to mention the many others whose religions may contain analogous claims.
Remember, the statement "X is valuable" is always shorthand for "X is valuable to Y". In this case, at absolute worst we mean "humans are valuable to humans," if not also "humans are valuable to God".
It is a forceful argument when carried through.
"Man created god in His image" shows more robustness to me, than humans are so invaluable that they would deign to create deities too.
“ Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities”
I mean, this is just begging the question. Many people disagree with this and disagree with the notion that humans are innately valuable. The blog post just seems like a lot of copium from somebody who really hopes he’s right.
Citing Genesis and an Encyclical might strengthen one’s argument for a particular demographic, but for many it will simply be unconvincing.
Like citation sources, no doubt some humans are valuable but whether they are or not is often relative.
An appeal to a religious text being presented as a robust argument borders on mockery. Especially after it follows a claim about how the position at hand is one that needs not to be qualified. Why are you qualifying it then? Is it because you (correctly) sense that you're presenting it as a fact of the world, rather than just as your opinion, and feel the gap in justification?
"Humans are valuable"
For what, and to whom?
This is a very anthropo-centric and hubristic view, in my opinion.
I dont think a human life inherently has any more value than anything else that possesses phenomenal consciousness
This of course makes me somewhat of a hypocrite as I eat meat, but you make some tradeoffs in moral resolve in the name of pragmatism and economy.
> than anything else that possesses phenomenal consciousness
Can you give an example of anything else you think might possess phenomenal consciousness?