alt.hn

5/29/2026 at 3:54:28 PM

You can just say it

 https://noperator.dev/posts/you-can-just-say-it/

by antirez

5/29/2026 at 11:51:00 PM

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.

by cautiouscat

5/30/2026 at 12:23:40 AM

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".

by roenxi

5/30/2026 at 12:40:40 AM

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.

by tsunagatta

5/30/2026 at 2:24:31 PM

I had a case in my job of an HR guy that was so bad a communication everything was super confusing and we always had issues and tension. Once GPT came out he clearly just copy / pasted LLM output and I was very conflicted because it felt insulting but it was the first time I was actually able to understand what he intended to say...

I sadly would prefer LLM output over prompt because I'm pretty sure the prompting was a process with him he would prompt, get a bad LLM output, seeing the LLM wasn't understanding force him to clarify and we ended up with actually understandable content.

by kigiri

5/30/2026 at 1:59:08 AM

“tell my obnoxious boss to fuck off about the tps reports” isn’t a great career move for them though

by nojs

5/30/2026 at 2:35:51 AM

I would rather my reports tell me to fuck off than to generate something telling me to fuck off in polite but insincere terms full of emojis and em dashes. Honesty is valuable.

by fcarraldo

5/30/2026 at 2:58:45 PM

I'm the opposite. If you're going to say something mean or obnoxious, then I would rather you say it politely with a lot of emojis.

by throw283745

5/30/2026 at 5:07:17 PM

I think it has extra value in that it will be more unnerving to them than using profanities.

by LtWorf

5/30/2026 at 7:20:23 AM

I too would much rather that, because then I get to know them as unhelpful whining complainers and fire them. That's not a great outcome for that person though.

by delusional

5/30/2026 at 5:08:22 PM

Lol you can't fire people for using AI when the corporate mandate lately is to use AI.

by LtWorf

5/30/2026 at 9:01:52 AM

[dead]

by ridjdjdj

5/30/2026 at 2:20:57 AM

Generating AI responses to all your emails isn’t a great career move either, though

by afavour

5/30/2026 at 5:44:26 PM

My former CTO was doing that all the time.

by LtWorf

5/30/2026 at 6:33:07 AM

It isn’t a great career move regardless, because if you use on prom AI they most likely monitor your prompts.

by wiseowise

5/30/2026 at 10:45:59 PM

You don't use the work AI for that :D

by LtWorf

5/30/2026 at 2:28:23 AM

> You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes

And the LLM makes subtle mistakes perceiving what you were trying to say, and I make subtle mistakes perceiving what the LLM generated.

It's interesting that you seem to think an LLM would be better than you at understanding what someone was trying to say. I have complete, 100% certainty that if a personal friend of mine was having trouble expressing themselves and was concerned about being misunderstood, I would understand what they were trying to say better than any existing LLM. (I suppose the exception would be if the friend was referencing some factual matter I'm unaware of but that the LLM has memorized, like a pop culture reference I didn't get or something.) Do you find that ChatGPT has more emotional intelligence than you?

by laughinghan

5/30/2026 at 5:57:43 AM

That may be. But we often find ourselves communicating with people who are not close friends. And the concern may well be the opposite -- a desire to find and scrub ambiguity from one's own message.

by emodendroket

5/30/2026 at 5:43:18 AM

Emotional intelligence includes things like being able to perceive and manage your own emotions; it is hard to know what that would mean for an LLM. They don't have hormones or much of an ego. They also aren't usually in a position to perceive body language or tone.

But in terms of reading comprehension I haven't seen anyone who does a better job than an AI. It's a skill that technically caps out quite quickly, all you can really do is restate what someone already said and make inferences off that.

> I have complete, 100% certainty that if a personal friend of mine was having trouble expressing themselves and was concerned about being misunderstood, I would understand what they were trying to say better than any existing LLM.

Your personal circumstances are a mystery and close friends are typically people we're associating with because they think in fundamentally compatible ways. So sure, why not. But assuming a more-or-less normal person I expect an LLM would outperform them. LLMs are relentless about being reasonable and focusing on what was actually said in a way that most people usually need a bit of training to accomplish.

by roenxi

5/30/2026 at 3:25:58 PM

> But in terms of reading comprehension I haven't seen anyone who does a better job than an AI

You've clearly never seen a CoPilot summary of a Teams meeting.

by filoeleven

5/30/2026 at 1:22:43 AM

I would absolutely prefer just getting the raw prompt. Emails are already ridden with enough completely unnecessary parts that are somehow still the cultural norm (eg. signatures). At least let the important part be to the point. I yearn for a world where people write emails the same way they write text messages.

by flexagoon

5/30/2026 at 2:00:59 AM

Nope, I would prefer getting the prompt.

I would also prefer anyone sending me the AI output and not either their ideas or their prompt, to not contant me ever again.

If I wanted the output of the AI, I'd ask it myself. You're just a useless intermediary if you send it to me.

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 5:58:54 AM

Maybe you personally do; most people would react more poorly to "find a polite way to tell this guy to fuck off" than the output of that prompt.

by emodendroket

5/30/2026 at 11:49:44 AM

That's the most contrived counter-argument...

We've been writing business emails for 40+ years. Anyone with -2 stddev IQ and above would know to tweak a 10-word prompt to a more polite version before sending it

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 3:13:36 PM

It's an extreme expression but "soften this message" is a common goal.

by emodendroket

5/30/2026 at 7:01:07 PM

I've been going back and forth on this, and I think I agree with you about 95%. But for some cases, where I don't really have a choice about whether or not I'm going to hear from you, there are certain dullards that I'd rather have filtered through a chat bot. It really would be an improvement over whatever they had to say. Listening to their genuine human output has negative value, but filtered through an LLM might bring that value up to zero.

by floxy

5/30/2026 at 5:10:44 AM

This might apply to the AI integrations in Gmail, but someone's own agent setup might have more references saved privately than yours. You can't ask your AI to search through my personal notes.

by conradludgate

5/30/2026 at 11:53:05 AM

The people that send that crap are the guys who one-off it, not the guys who have a carefully crafted context, skills, and local references on top of the prompt.

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 6:38:53 AM

I was going to say... Sometimes I load up my context with a ton of data. The output is shorter than the input.

by 8n4vidtmkvmk

5/30/2026 at 8:32:56 AM

It really depends on the individual and the context they say it. Same for the bit about your boss.

by zamadatix

5/30/2026 at 5:12:59 AM

> if your boss asks for honest feedback giving it to them with both barrels is a career limiting move

Or, from another point of view, expanding your career's event horizon. Imagine how much longer you might have languished in that stifling, stagnant job if you hadn't unloaded on the boss?

by jcgrillo

5/30/2026 at 7:32:12 AM

No, I want the prompt. Slop from the clanker has zero value to me. At least the prompt was written by a human, even if it's otherwise not useful.

by bigstrat2003

5/30/2026 at 7:18:26 AM

> I'd suggest the real ask from the friend is "put more time into communicating with me than a short prompt"

That's where the real truth is. If you're communicating in short prompt messages, did you really even have a thought worth communicating?

I sometimes abort writing an email when I can't think of a polite and constructive way to express my opinion. I have never once regretted aborting such email. I'll often come back to it later, with much better thoughts and an actual constructive point to write down, and then I never struggle with the "style" of the message.

by delusional

5/30/2026 at 12:19:55 AM

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.

by Jcampuzano2

5/30/2026 at 12:19:11 AM

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.

by mrandish

5/30/2026 at 12:22:23 AM

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.

On a good day it's a 240 volt hair clipper for grooming yaks.

by delichon

5/30/2026 at 12:25:46 AM

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.

by pavel_lishin

5/30/2026 at 4:20:49 AM

Last time I returned anything to amazon it was a two-minute-or-less task that didn't involve anything like a warranty service request email?

by majormajor

5/30/2026 at 12:16:00 PM

I buy sous vide cookers that die in about 3 months (all brands I've found do when run 24x7). That's outside of the normal return window and requires a warranty claim to get a replacement. For that you go through the maker, not Amazon. This basically doubles the useful life of the purchase, but I'd rather find one that lasts.

by delichon

5/30/2026 at 6:00:29 AM

I mean, yeah, I consider myself a decent writer, but I don't think that skill was best or more meaningfully expressed in writing Jira tickets so I'm pretty happy to outsource that.

by emodendroket

5/30/2026 at 10:31:24 AM

I disagree with the sentiment. The prompt is not what you meant to say. It is part of the private act of thinking, of choosing your words. The thing you send is what you meant to say. There has always been a vital distinction between what you think and what you say. The notion that you should ever have direct access to private thoughts that someone chose not to send to you is wrongheaded.

It’s like receiving a letter and then demanding to see someone’s private notebook where they jot down their thoughts, so you can see what they ‘really meant to say’. Most communication involves a degree of negotiation and persuasion. Thoughts are necessarily private.

There is a problem with AI generated emails: they change the balance of time/effort required to write them vs. to read them. I think this is a valid concern.

by throwaway_19sz

5/30/2026 at 12:04:25 PM

> The prompt is not what you meant to say. It is part of the private act of thinking

The private act of thinking does not involve a round trip to a corporation's servers; that would make the whole term meaningless.

by Planktonne

5/30/2026 at 1:12:46 PM

> The private act of thinking does not involve a round trip to a corporation's servers; that would make the whole term meaningless.

Firstly, this is just wrong. People can and do search stuff online as they're writing something up.

Second, your distinction is the one that's meaningless. The LLM could be running locally on a private machine...

by dataflow

5/30/2026 at 2:20:59 PM

1. Yes, but the research isn't part of the 'private act of thinking'; it's an input to it.

2. It could; it basically never is though, so let's deal with the general case.

by Planktonne

5/30/2026 at 2:38:17 PM

You’re missing the point. OK, it’s not ‘thinking’ in a pure sense; the point is it’s private notes. If someone says something to you, they are allowed to privately prepare it first (thinking, jotted notes, LLM rewriting, running it past lawyers, whatever) and you don’t get to see all that. That’s how it has always been.

Just because someone says/writes something to you doesn’t mean you have any moral right to see all the things they considered and then decided not to say.

by throwaway_19sz

5/30/2026 at 4:21:53 AM

>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.

It's because it's a pretty safe bet that the prompt either implicitly or explicitly says "I don't really care," and the act of using AI to generate the response is almost entirely an effort to conceal that.

by nlawalker

5/30/2026 at 6:02:17 AM

I don't think that's a safe bet at all; the choice to put the message to an AI may express a desire, however misguided, to produce a "better" (clearer, less likely to cause offense, whatever) message than the author feels able to manage unaided.

by emodendroket

5/30/2026 at 3:51:22 PM

Yeah my comment was maybe a bit too snarky. I am personally a huge believer in assuming good faith and intent and giving people the benefit of the doubt, it’s just that when it comes to this, I’ve been in many situations where I have enough context that, even though I don’t have proof, I don’t have much doubt either.

by nlawalker

5/30/2026 at 8:11:23 AM

Of all the times someone used AI and did not disclose it, I've never found it to be a desire to be better, it was always a desire to do 5 minutes of work and still have a result that looks like you spent multiple hours. Except it only looks that way at a glance, it's usually bad because that type of person does not care, so their prompts are bad, and they don't care to even read the results.

In my experience, the people who actually wanted to improve the presentation of their messages are upfront about it and clearly say they're using AI to organize their thoughts or polish their english.

by luckylion

5/30/2026 at 12:35:26 AM

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.

by nickvec

5/30/2026 at 12:50:08 AM

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.

by hxtk

5/30/2026 at 3:04:56 PM

I use LLM to summarize a lot of emails, so it doesn't really matter how it's written.

I wonder if there could be just some type of open agreement we're both using LLM and then they can communicate with one another more effectively.

by throw283745

5/30/2026 at 9:08:40 AM

> I’d much rather you just send me the prompt

I'm sure "please analyse this email and explain why this complete moron is wrong, write as if addressing someone with the comprehension of a 5 year old", would be happily received by my boss.

by RobotToaster

5/30/2026 at 3:05:22 AM

> 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.

I'm yet to experience this, but it reminds me of an interaction I'd regularly have with a younger friend I no longer spend much time with, who would take my in-real-life casual conversation prompts that attempted to engage him in inconsequential curious dialogue, and simply google the answers in front of me.

He'd sort of deliver that response in such a way that it seemed like he assumed I either didn't know the definition of some common term or fact and he was unlocking new information on my behalf, or that I thought he didn't know and revealed a possible weakness in his knowledge of trivia. In reality I was embarrassed by proxy because I had unintentionally provoked a smug, emotional response from someone who wasn't able to contend well with ambiguity, revealed how dependent they were on their phone, and who's first instinct was deeply uncharitable and lacking in curiosity. It led to some awkward situations where I had to explain that I wasn't trying to test them in a battle of intellect, but rather ask what they personally thought or how they used a term who's actual dictionary definition is rarely relevant to it's usage. I tried to find a way to adapt to this incompatibility by thinking about different ways I could communicate with this friend that would indicate my intention to basically just get them yapping more clearly, but never found a way that clicked.

I fear that dependence on various LLM chat tools will lead to more of this sort of problematic thinking and introduce increasingly challenging communication conflicts across otherwise not so distinct age groups. Banter that's intended to be playful will continue to devolve into two sides having no clue what the other means or if they're joking or exaggerating or what, linguistic flourishes, colloquialisms, or regional differences, will become more difficult to execute upon despite there being no intrinsic reason for an incompatibility to exist.

Less akin to knowledge of memes or slang, and moreso to the prevalence of new-irony among people under the age of 23ish who don't know any other type of irony and vice-versa with older -> younger. Things could get weird

by brailsafe

5/30/2026 at 1:38:48 AM

I feel bad for this generation who will have to listen to prompted eulogies and wedding toasts. And worse for the genuine writers who now will be accused of having done so.

by fantasizr

5/30/2026 at 2:02:26 AM

Or to have to live all their lives with slop thrown at them left and right...

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 9:19:10 AM

Usually my back and forth with the llm is much longer than the result. Add the skills, the context, access to my calendar... I'd probably need to send a zip file instead of 1 short paragraph of text. Maybe letting agents representing people, with access to non public information will be secure in the future. For now, that part is manual. I need to control information on the way out.

You probably should find it insulting when someone obviously didn't take the time needed to form a proper response. Prompting "write something apologetic and kind for not attending their wedding" and sending the response is not okay. Like this example, it's easy to recognize when being a human counts, we should also be able to justify automating stuff when it really is just boring information exchange.

by patates

5/30/2026 at 9:54:04 AM

Do you really need the agents, skills and them having access to your calendar, plus multiple back and forth, to create an email about scheduling something - and anyway you will have to check it manually?

by blks

5/30/2026 at 5:13:00 AM

The obvious solution is to run things in reverse, inputting the AI-generated output to recover the prompt that generated it.

Most generative models can be run in reverse by algorithms that already exist [0], but you have to have the model weights. For closed-weight models, or for a process that can handle unknown models, you’d have to do some engineering.

But do we have the technology to build models that back out the prompt from suspected AI output? Yes.

0. I don’t mean that most neural networks are invertible functions. They’re not. But you can do backprop in reverse, from output to input, to train a model to generate an input to the original model that best predicts its output.

by pash

5/30/2026 at 7:39:04 PM

Most of the functions that LLMs perform aren’t bijective, though.

What prompt constructs the output ‘The answer is 3’ or ‘Yes that’s a great idea’?

by noddybear

5/31/2026 at 12:38:33 AM

Right, that’s why I wrote, “I don’t mean that most neural networks are invertible functions.”

For a neural network that is not bijective, you can obtain an input that maps to a desired output by the following algorithm.

1. Start with a trained neural network. (The weights will not change throughout this procedure.)

2. Pick a random input.

3. Given an output for which you want to compute an associated input, feed the input into the network to compute the output.

4. Compute the loss of the computed output relative to the target output (e.g., mean-square error). If the loss is sufficiently small, you’ve found an input that maps to an output close to your target output and you’re done.

5. Otherwise, compute the gradient of the loss with respect to the input (e.g., by backprop).

6. Update the input according to a gradient-update rule. And go back to Step 3.

In theory, you can recover a “representative” prompt for the output of an LLM in this manner. For outputs that could have been generated by a large set of disparate prompts, obviously this won’t work well.

by pash

5/30/2026 at 12:30:42 AM

> 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.

by bentcorner

5/30/2026 at 1:02:14 AM

I often use LLMs to write or review code, but never ever copy/paste from them into any text box attached to my name.

If my name is posting something, I understand it. If I can read an LLM response and reword it, I understand it.

I really want copying LLM prose into anywhere without a block quote to be a firable offense.

by rogerrogerr

5/30/2026 at 6:35:00 PM

I'm actually a bit offended, or at least wary, when a human writes an email with the length and structure of an LLM's output.

Too many words per idea shows me that they're trying to hide something, manage or manipulate me, or play some other game.

by strken

5/30/2026 at 12:12:26 AM

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.

by reaperducer

5/30/2026 at 12:20:07 AM

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.

by singingtoday

5/30/2026 at 2:07:12 AM

>I'm dyslexic. I put every comment through the LLM, or other tools. Including this comment.

What we said here applies to the general population, not such special cases.

Of course, if a dyslexic lets it do more than correct typos and grammar/syntax, the "don't send me LLM crap" also applies to them!

And even for non-native speakers, I'd prefer to get their actual output, not the LLM version.

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 12:23:23 AM

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.

by frizlab

5/30/2026 at 1:41:45 AM

Thank you for seeing it my way!

by singingtoday

5/30/2026 at 3:40:33 PM

I was going to ask: what does an LLM get you that a regular spell checker does not? Then I recalled all of the comments I've read over the years about "loosing to much money do to a rouge actor." The capability of an LLM proofing correct words and not just correct spelling is genuinely helpful here. Seems like a good fit for a small local model.

by filoeleven

5/30/2026 at 12:30:44 AM

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?

by galangalalgol

5/30/2026 at 1:43:50 AM

> nobody will understand them and it just turns into an argument where people claim I say things that I didn't say

I don’t think that’s dyslexia.

by what

5/30/2026 at 12:28:30 AM

[flagged]

by gnabgib

5/30/2026 at 12:45:25 AM

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.

by sethammons

5/30/2026 at 1:06:04 AM

You feel someone who is admitting to violating participation and discussion rules.. is adding to the conversation?

> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by gnabgib

5/30/2026 at 12:16:19 AM

How can I trust that the sender actually understands the words they want me to read if it is all just AI output?

by galleywest200

5/30/2026 at 12:20:51 AM

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.

by Yokohiii

5/30/2026 at 4:08:37 AM

I invite you to consider the Seinfeld finale, where Elaine uses a cell phone to call a friend to ask about her ill father. The call has technical issues, and Jerry lectures Elaine about mistreating her friend that way, when she should have waited to call from home.

That was less than 30 years ago. Cell service is more reliable today than then, but it's not perfect, and not only don't we think twice about making <whatever> calls on a cell phone, many/most of us don't even have land lines anymore.

Sending the prompt is the difference between showing up with flowers, and saying, "I feel strongly enough about you to bring flowers."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finale_(Seinfeld)

by gcanyon

5/30/2026 at 3:58:58 AM

> if someone sends me an AI response.

I wouldn't say "not genuine", I would instead say "not mindful" or "not meaningful".

maybe not quite "mindless" and "meaningless", but maybe 10%.

by m463

5/30/2026 at 1:04:47 AM

While I tend to agree, if that email were about arranging a D&D session, I don't think I would care. Especially if the alternative is we never find a time to play D&D.

by madrox

5/30/2026 at 2:35:54 AM

What if there were multiple prompts and a simulated-conversation back and forth as I tried to figure out my own thoughts?

by amfarrell617

5/30/2026 at 9:34:20 AM

> 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.

It is certainly insulting, I see it more of a malicious compliance way of working.

by LtWorf

5/30/2026 at 3:14:50 AM

> 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.

Ironically the people I have talked to that do this are actually trying to give you their very best at communicating, at least better than they think they can do. Which may or may not be true. I know being a bit on the spectrum that my comms don't always convey the "tone" that I mean, despite what I'm thinking when writing it.

by esseph

5/30/2026 at 12:51:07 PM

Claude please write a comment explaining why "just saying things" is a retarded idea because most people are dumb fucks and the only way to cohabitate with them is to tell them what they want to hear, not what is true.

by anal_reactor

5/30/2026 at 3:20:48 AM

[dead]

by thih9

5/29/2026 at 3:56:53 PM

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.

by antirez

5/30/2026 at 1:39:12 AM

I agree. I have gotten frustrated by a lot of recent anti-AI rhetoric, not necessarily because I entirely disagree with the premise but because it is too generic in its form. It has started to sound to me like the people who complain about "chemicals" in their food and water.

The real complaints are about specific aspects of AI and its use, and this essay does a really good job of articulating one of them. It is something we can actually discuss and address.

by cortesoft

5/30/2026 at 12:02:37 AM

> 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.

by skinfaxi

5/30/2026 at 12:44:50 AM

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.

by tootie

5/29/2026 at 11:18:32 PM

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.

by beering

5/29/2026 at 11:46:26 PM

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.

by ilaksh

5/29/2026 at 11:57:59 PM

see what you don't understand is that the owning class actually bring crucial long term strategic vision. i wonder though: we always talk of ai replacing the working class, but wouldn't it be more economical for ai to provide that long term strategic thinking? i'm sure the operating costs for ai would be way less than the operating costs of billionaires. everyone would be better off.

by pasquinelli

5/30/2026 at 12:13:23 AM

If there is anything worse than the tyranny of greed, it is the tyranny of a machine that's trying to optimize you 24/7.

by akomtu

5/30/2026 at 12:21:30 AM

if we optimize the billionaire class everyone's better off, like i said. of course we can go orange catholic, but my comment was premised on how we might apply ai.

by pasquinelli

5/30/2026 at 12:25:21 AM

The billionaire class don't want universal childcare, they don't want medicare for all, they don't want a public jobs program, they don't want a welfare state, and they sure as fuck don't want to be told no.

I'm failing to see how caring about billionaires is suppose to help everyone else. The current American society, via neoliberal economics, is already optimized to help the billionaires (hence why they extract all the wealth and why income inequality is at its highest in the US since ever).

by shimman

5/31/2026 at 12:31:10 AM

How do you figure that "the billionaire class" doesnt want those policies? Plenty of examples of them supporting those policies. Seems like the opposition is more to the tax hike they know is coming along side it but even then we still see billionaires supporting those policies.

by Fizz43

5/31/2026 at 4:10:01 AM

If they do not want to fund it they do not support it.

The purpose of the system is what it does. Or in this case, the actions of the billionaire class and their capital are their values and morals.

by llbeansandrice

5/30/2026 at 6:36:46 AM

They mean put billionaires on a chopping block.

by wiseowise

5/30/2026 at 12:28:05 AM

read "optimize the billionaire class" as "trim the fat."

by pasquinelli

5/30/2026 at 1:16:41 AM

> Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc.

Fucking hell, there are so many bullshit jobs. I'm doing one of them. I'm sure a homeless person having a few heartfelt conversations per day because he has the time and is open to it is giving more value to society than me right now.

by mettamage

5/30/2026 at 2:09:20 AM

AI will only make “contribution to society” even stronger criterion, and help create permanent "not needed" underclasses.

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 2:22:33 AM

I don’t know why it would. That rethink has always been possible, yet didn’t happen.

by afavour

5/30/2026 at 5:55:25 AM

It'll get worse. There will be even more situations where people will be forced to talk to a computer rather than a human.

by xboxnolifes

5/30/2026 at 6:34:50 AM

Hahaha, worry not! AI will be the great equalizer, that will put even more people on the streets and create new serf class.

by wiseowise

5/30/2026 at 12:55:18 AM

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.

by dfxm12

5/30/2026 at 2:50:14 AM

There is a C.S. Lewis quote that is as good as St. Paul and I don’t say that lightly: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”

Hard, isn’t it? The highest ideals are.

The clankers are just very big machine spirits. Treat them as such.

by buescher

5/30/2026 at 10:50:13 AM

People are mortal. C.S. Lewis died over sixty years ago.

by hackingonempty

5/30/2026 at 11:58:34 AM

And yet here you are, strongly reacting to a philosophical argument made by him.

He's mortal, he's dead, and yet he's affected you here, a throwaway comment on a forum post no one will think about in a week's time.

by IndeanCondor

5/30/2026 at 7:41:38 PM

He also believed in the immortal soul that survives after death, so he may have had a more literal meaning.

by noddybear

5/30/2026 at 8:36:40 PM

I didn't think about it that way, thanks!

by hackingonempty

5/29/2026 at 4:10:41 PM

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.

by sbiru93

5/30/2026 at 12:00:02 AM

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...

by jaggederest

5/30/2026 at 12:08:55 AM

> 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)

by skinfaxi

5/31/2026 at 12:52:07 AM

I find it helpful to think of the Amish. The Amish chose what technology to adopt not based on market demand, but on whether or not they collectively (at a democractic-ish government-ish level) think that technology will be good for their society.

In our society, we largely do not democratically choose what technology to adopt. We instead allow a small set of very rich people (commonly called Oligarchs) to choose for us. These people force their technology on our society regardless of whether or not the majority (or super-majority) want it, because doing so reinforces or expands their status as Oligarchs.

The Amish prove that we don't _have_ to do it that way. We can collectively change course if we want to, and plenty of people are fighting for that change. For example, Hawaii recently passed a law banning corporations from being able to spend on elections, and other states are looking to do so to. Polling for curtailing money in politics has over 70% support. Obviously we could lose our democracy, and the Oligarchs could capture the country. However, I choose to believe that enough of us working together can take back the country and make better choices about what technology we want to adopt.

by danny_codes

5/30/2026 at 1:30:55 AM

I just wanted to chime in and say this has also been bothering me quite a bit the past few months. You're not alone.

by xyru

5/30/2026 at 6:31:44 AM

> “Humans are valuable.” You can just say it.

You can’t. CEOs will physically recoil from it. Probably leftovers from being a human some day. For them you’re “lower value human capital”, cattle, numbers on a sheet.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/standard-chartered-ceo-bill-w...

by wiseowise

5/30/2026 at 6:41:45 AM

If you say it, the government will label you an extremist.

by kys11

5/30/2026 at 1:30:48 AM

Way before bots/LLM, I disciplined myself (most of the time) to write email with "in brief" at the top, followed by "Details".

"In brief: Can you bring a dozen brownies to the noon lunch tomorrow?

Details: Dessert plans fell through. Your brownies are the best, and you owe me..."

This structure is liberating for me. I can distill what I want/need into something brief and even brusque, knowing that people will read on if the need justification. It also makes me clarify what I want. Probably not appropriate if I'm too far down the totem pole from the addressee.

by essayist

5/30/2026 at 10:56:38 PM

I've never used it because I feel like it'd make me sound like a weirdo, but I've heard this concept explained as BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front.

by mschulkind

5/29/2026 at 11:51:52 PM

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.

by drooby

5/30/2026 at 12:15:25 AM

> 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. :)

by dolebirchwood

5/30/2026 at 12:34:21 AM

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.

by wise0wl

5/30/2026 at 2:33:03 AM

>I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy.

This belief is not true and I will fight to the bedrock of psychology and nature against this until the ridiculous sentiment is eradicated from humanity's lexicon.

There are fundamental aspects to our perception, across all senses, that lie underneath human creation. You enjoy the warmth of the sun, the cool of a breeze, the sound of a running stream, the majesty of mountains and oceans, the power of storms. These all evoke the sense and appreciation of beauty while being completely removed from a creator. Believing that you care about the creator, and that it fundamentally underpins your enjoyment of sense perception is shallow thinking.

by jatora

5/30/2026 at 3:46:33 AM

>You enjoy the warmth of the sun, the cool of a breeze, the sound of a running stream, the majesty of mountains and oceans, the power of storms. These all evoke the sense and appreciation of beauty while being completely removed from a creator.

I don't think this is true. I think that if you found out you were in a simulation and that all these things were just electrical pulses being sent to your brain in a jar it would vastly change your perception of the world. And I think that's a good analogy for AI

by javascriptfan69

5/30/2026 at 8:10:27 AM

How will it change anything? Simulation is a pointless term that has no meaning here. It is completely real to you. In fact I don't even know whats the difference between a so called "real" universe and a "boltzmann" brain. This weird "analogy" seems to ignore information itself needs a certain amount of energy/matter/space, I doubt simulating our universe can be done with anything less than the universal size of complexity.

by hardbass

5/31/2026 at 1:10:24 AM

Whether it's possible or not is not really relevant.

All I'm saying is that if you were shown undeniable proof that you were in a simulation I think it would change how you felt about "reality".

by javascriptfan69

5/30/2026 at 3:46:06 PM

> These all evoke the sense and appreciation of beauty while being completely removed from a creator.

Why is it so black and white? There are things like warmth of the sun, that I enjoy without the creator. There are also art and music that I didn't appreciate at first before knowing the story and the creator behind them. Then I understood where the piece of art came from and what were the emotions behind it when creating it.

by PuppetSoup

5/30/2026 at 10:53:40 AM

No, this is a totally fair response. That was probably the core error in my argument.

Some people, perhaps most, will enjoy AI art. Artists are at risk of displacement too.

But a subset of art appreciators hold firm that the creator is an essential aspect of the work, and I don’t see that conviction fading.

How large this subset is, I don’t know. But they also happen to be the world’s tastemakers and trendsetters. Their beliefs largely shape our aesthetic world, so their influence may only grow.

by drooby

5/30/2026 at 12:45:28 AM

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.

by chrneu

5/30/2026 at 2:35:14 AM

If you want to be reductive then everything is already the same. Music is 99% the same chords, art is 99% the same colors, etc... Or you can argue from good faith and actually learn or teach.

by jatora

5/30/2026 at 7:55:07 AM

Your argument can be used to discredit all arguments, including itself. Because your argument is made only of the same letters as all others (let's stay in English, without losing generality), it is the same as all others, and thus it has no discernible point.

Note that it's you who introduced this reduction, not the GP.

by dxdm

5/30/2026 at 12:04:20 AM

> 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

by yummybrainz

5/30/2026 at 12:16:15 AM

>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.

by nlawalker

5/30/2026 at 1:22:16 AM

Service work may last longer than other sectors, as some portion of the value provided in service work is human connection.

But I agree, when our minds and bodies are no longer capable of doing things that machines can’t, the only thing we have left to sell is our humanity

by skiboyec

5/30/2026 at 12:12:31 AM

Art is definitely being devalued by AI, today. I'm sure Banksy is fine but artists along the margins are competing with genAI

by xgulfie

5/30/2026 at 12:28:46 AM

[flagged]

by thrownthatway

5/30/2026 at 12:35:31 AM

Reddit benefits from ankle deep snark, unlike HN.

by defrost

5/30/2026 at 6:26:15 AM

True enough.

Having said that, some of my drive-by criticisms have lead to lengthy discussions, with or without my further participation. Probably mostly on older accounts I’ve abandoned.

Admittedly, this was not one of them.

by thrownthatway

5/30/2026 at 7:23:09 AM

I'm a sucker for drive by snark also - it mostly fails <shrug>.

As a netizen of forums across decades stretching back to pre-WWW Usenet days .. cheap shots in US centric Capitalism V Communism territory rank high as surely the least productive and least informative uses of ASCII :/

Still, points for being honest :)

by defrost

5/31/2026 at 11:11:42 AM

Was it this account or one of my alts where I mentioned your handle always makes me think of Defrost Kelley (DeForest). I’ve always enjoyed reading your comments here.

I date back to Fidonet. Usenet less so.

by thrownthatway

5/30/2026 at 12:46:58 AM

[dead]

by tempaccountabgd

5/30/2026 at 12:57:50 AM

Yeah corporate socialism is working so well this time.

by righthand

5/30/2026 at 1:06:57 AM

As a lifelong conservative and capitalist, even I think this might be the thing that makes some form of socialism possible.

by rogerrogerr

5/30/2026 at 1:57:33 AM

>“Humans are valuable.” You can just say it. As a human yourself, I advise you to. You do not need to qualify it. This is a robust1 statement that is not conditional on a point-in-time snapshot of the leading frontier model’s score on some recent benchmark.

Nope, it very much is conditional to it, as it's conditional to utility.

The OP is not going to come an pay someone who can't get a job and has zero market value due to AI.

So this "a human is (intristically) valuable" is just a meaningless pat on the back, while the human is devalued.

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 2:01:23 AM

Society would certainly be better without people who judge others by their market value.

by almostdeadguy

5/30/2026 at 2:11:55 AM

Yes, but would also be better if everybody got a free pony with supplies for life or met true love, etc.

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 3:16:28 AM

Is it your contention that the vast majority of people only value others in terms of their economic value?

by ivraatiems

5/30/2026 at 11:54:41 AM

My contention, which I stated quite clearly is that saying otherwise while not paying them, not giving them work, etc, and leaving them to rot, is an empty platitude.

"Go die homeless, but remember, you have intrisic value just for being human".

by coldtea

5/30/2026 at 9:29:10 PM

Why does saying "humans have intrinsic value" put an obligation on a person to entirely fix society's problems? It's a really walrus-y "so you critique society yet participate in it, huh, curious" way to engage with the question. "Oh, if you think humans are so great, why haven't you helped every human?" just dodges the point the original article is making.

I think insinuating that OP is engaging in empty platitudes because they expressed a hopeful philosophical position rather than a cynical one is reading their work in bad faith.

by ivraatiems

5/30/2026 at 12:38:15 PM

Fully agreed.

by anal_reactor

5/30/2026 at 6:40:09 AM

> The OP is not going to come a pay someone who can't get a job and has zero market value due to AI.

If only there was a safety net that would help struggling humans, while trillion (just imagine the numbers) dollar companies have record high earnings. But that’s too much “socialism”, or harshhhtfu communism.

by wiseowise

5/29/2026 at 11:49:30 PM

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.

by mlsu

5/30/2026 at 12:37:00 PM

> 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.

Bro apparently you didn't play Need For Speed Underground 2 on release. That shit was better than 99% of human interactions I have.

by anal_reactor

5/30/2026 at 7:54:45 PM

> The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.

I love the post. I feel generating AI content is like doing informational compression (weirdly enough, by bloating up the size).

When giving it a prompt, the "normalized AI brain" guesses the intent based on what's the most plausible. All the diverse human brains get filtered, bucketed, here you go, this is the "standard artifact".

And yes, it is a compression because real life is not one shot prompt. If I get an unclear message from my colleague, I ask for clarification. If the message is bloated by AI and some information is added, it already scraped some of the real intent by bucketizing it. Sometimes it may be what the original author meant. Sometimes not.

I don't know what is anyone's motivation in compressing the facts by making text longer and harder to read. This whole.email generation idea is bizarre.

by originalcopy

5/29/2026 at 11:39:30 PM

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.

by Enginerrrd

5/29/2026 at 11:43:03 PM

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.

by happytoexplain

5/29/2026 at 11:52:15 PM

And honestly? That's rare.

by stavros

5/30/2026 at 1:08:02 AM

In my twenties, I came across an idea from one of Ken Wilbur’s books that helped settle a conundrum for me. What happens when one wants to honor all life? Are they all equal?

He made a distinction between intrinsic value and extrinsic value. Plankton is not as complex of a lifeform as whales, yet whales cannot live without plankton. One has more intrinsic value and the other has more extrinsic value. There is an interrelationship that does not have to flatten value for everything and everyone.

LLMs are trained from the language corpus of our collective consciousness. It reflects our collective, all the wonderful, beautiful, and horrific things we can dream of and put into words.

by hosh

5/30/2026 at 2:15:49 AM

We have two paths before us as a species.

a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.

by andai

5/30/2026 at 5:27:46 AM

>The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent.

You can just say it: the problem with AI is a people problem. AI is an amplifier. It allows deceptive people to be more deceptive. Greedy people to be more spammerific. The reckless to less constrained. Exposes more people to the criminally minded, etc. But hopefully there is enough good out there that gets amplified and overcomes the bad. Maybe everyone is valuable in some sense, but surely there are people that you wish could be valuable somewhere far away from your loved ones? We're in a losing battle with entropy. Life and beauty and love need active protection and maintenance. Everything will be of equal value with the heat death of the universe.

by floxy

5/30/2026 at 5:38:40 AM

No one is “valuable.” People just are, whatever they are. And that has to be enough.

by montagg

5/30/2026 at 6:05:02 AM

> A human iteratively (sometimes painstakingly) shapes and reshapes their creation until it sufficiently matches what’s in their mind’s eye. The odd thing about generative AI is that it can produce substantial form with minimally applied intent.

To add - I think attention is the scarce resource on both ends. Was this creation important enough to give it my full attention (i.e. do it my self). Is this creation important enough for the user to use / consume (i.e without an agent interacting with it on our behalf or summarising)

by gbro3n

5/30/2026 at 12:36:04 AM

> 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.

by ford

5/29/2026 at 11:29:30 PM

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.

by ianbutler

5/29/2026 at 11:37:49 PM

> 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

by bluefirebrand

5/29/2026 at 11:40:56 PM

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.

by ianbutler

5/29/2026 at 11:48:59 PM

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.

by jay_kyburz

5/30/2026 at 2:56:12 AM

You can just say “I bought this expensive wine regardless how it tastes.”

But people don’t want to sound foolish; they want to pretend they can taste the difference. Point to minutiae, study up on distinguishing.

by jpttsn

5/30/2026 at 6:41:34 AM

Believe it or not, some people can feel the taste difference.

by wiseowise

5/30/2026 at 12:34:30 AM

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.

by patchtopic

5/30/2026 at 2:33:41 AM

> The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.

There's an obligatory xkcd about this: https://xkcd.com/1301/

by dlenski

5/30/2026 at 12:26:11 AM

If you want an AI to do a specific task in a specific way, you'll always need to prompt it.

by claysmithr

5/30/2026 at 12:05:02 AM

> “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."

by themafia

5/30/2026 at 12:18:34 AM

How about "Poor Working Class Humans are just as valuable as Wealthy CEOs"?

by bluefirebrand

5/30/2026 at 2:28:27 PM

Quote: "This line of thinking boils down to, “Humans are valuable if they produce high-quality output.” This argument dangerously depends on the existing-but-narrowing human-AI capability gap. The gap certainly existed in the past (2023-era ChatGPT). It may still exist now. I do not know if it will hold in the future."

I still don't agree with this, because even the best engineers are producing poor output from AI, unless they spend a reasonable amount of time refactoring and cleaning up the output.

To expect a non-engineer to have the same wisdom to architect and structure their output in a sustainable way that will stand the test of time (and inevitable future changes), they're just fooling themselves.

For anyone who's been using LLMs long enough for development, we all know how sloppy the output is unless you have a mountain of formatting and organizational rules in place, and even then, it's anyone guess how well LLMs can actually follow them as a project scales.

Yes, value the human first, but there are strong reasons we've always emphasized mature patterns and idioms in codebases that help them remain maintainable so they can scale and transform with as little friction as possible, and without reaching a point where nobody has the stomach to keep working on it.

Just because we can try to have AI unwind the hairy mess, doesn't mean it's any easier for AI to navigate it than we do. It's a liability that the AI mistakes one naming conflict for another, when the context rot hits the fan — and after months of tossing unreviewed PRs over the finish line without a single thought, it's only a matter of time before your non-engineers are the worst offenders for introducing bugs and eroding the quality.

It doesn't matter how good the models appear to get (it truly is a facade), without judgment and wisdom, they still don't produce nearly the same quality as an experienced engineer, unless they're heavily steered.

Do they catch more potential bugs and edge cases than a human might? Definitely, but it's going to vomit its solutions in all the weirdest places doing it, and now suddenly you've got a 100k LOC pull request to (not) read.

All I can say is, good luck!

by docmars

5/30/2026 at 1:03:56 AM

Humans are valuable, but I think we've been putting human output on a pedestal lately. There's a lot of human slop (as the author put it) on the internet. Slop businesses. Slop social media accounts. While there's very little in the world of AI I find that is better than what a human proficient in the skill with sufficient time can do, proficiency and time are in short supply by most people.

Cue that "I, Robot" meme about if a machine can make a symphony. Maybe AI is making it even easier, but intentless form is already everywhere without AI, if you look. Ever seen an Uwe Boll film?

by madrox

5/30/2026 at 1:38:04 AM

How do i drive traffic to my app

by niraj898

5/30/2026 at 12:24:01 AM

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.

by homeonthemtn

5/29/2026 at 11:00:46 PM

Citing "God created man in his own image" for robustness doesn't really land well. I'm not even an atheist either.

by triyambakam

5/29/2026 at 11:21:38 PM

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

by munificent

5/30/2026 at 12:26:31 AM

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.

by card_zero

5/31/2026 at 12:23:56 AM

> I mean, why do you wish to feel valued by others and get respect?

I believe we have evolved to be a social species whose brain innately rewards prosocial behavior. Your question is akin to asking why cats chase mice or why birds fly.

by munificent

5/29/2026 at 11:25:36 PM

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.

by happytoexplain

5/29/2026 at 11:38:02 PM

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.

by card_zero

5/30/2026 at 1:00:04 AM

I complete agree humans have this innate value. But I don't see how the Genesis quote is useful to support that

by triyambakam

5/30/2026 at 12:24:56 AM

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.

by cvoss

5/30/2026 at 8:24:33 AM

That's all very well but prove it first. "Narratives" are perfectly fine stories but not physical truths. It is absurd to cite a "narrative" without proving it's physical truth first.

by hardbass

5/30/2026 at 1:01:03 AM

> 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.

So fallacious?

by triyambakam

5/30/2026 at 2:40:33 PM

I agree. The evidence for that claim is weak and if it is cited to be the basis of the first claim the likelihood of the rest forming an accurate model is low. Thank you for the comment. I might have otherwise wasted more time on the linked post than I did.

by arjie

5/30/2026 at 12:03:53 AM

"Man created god in His image" shows more robustness to me, than humans are so invaluable that they would deign to create deities too.

by satvikpendem

5/30/2026 at 1:02:03 AM

Since it's too late to edit: I am not disagreeing that humans are innately valuable. I am disagreeing with citing Genesis for that.

by triyambakam

5/30/2026 at 10:17:52 AM

Let people choose the tool they want for communication, just ask them to test that the final message is the one they really want to deliver.

by sinsudo

5/30/2026 at 6:30:47 AM

Faking sincerity is hard and being sincere gets you fired.

by Atlas667

5/30/2026 at 2:46:06 AM

Good old morale philosophy here we go!

by xiaoyu2006

5/29/2026 at 11:51:03 PM

OP's argument sounds like Peter Steinberger saying, don't send me a slop PR, instead give me your prompt.

by sbinnee

5/30/2026 at 6:27:59 AM

There's a few topics I see here:

- Human Value

- Sincerity

- Evolution of technology and social systems with them

Do all humans have value? Yes, but not all humans can realize their own value. Your society is the gymnasium that helps you realize your value.

Think of how technology interfaces with humans and their employment. The more efficient technology gets the less people you need to produce the same amount of goods. And with each technological breakthrough production needs less people to operate. Sure, they may redistribute later, but immediately it manifests as layoffs.

Unemployment means less people can self-realize since work IS part of the realization of individuals. If work were not part of your realization, then how else do you buy a house, experience the world, raise kids, etc, if not through your benefits of your work?

Here we see how human value is tied directly to the ability to provide to society and to provide for themselves and we also see how that is tied to the ability of society to employ.

Now I ask you, will the AI crisis (and how it relates to human value) be solved with a CEO at a board meeting showing that humans have intrinsic value?

Or will it be solved with the one sided truth that us workers possess and only we can espouse? This truth being that our value as humans can only come from our self-realization within and as-part of society.

Can that CEO be sincere about how society works or must he adopt a convenient POV?

Capitalist ideology cannot conceive of society as an interconnected whole. A capitalist frame of thinking cannot be sincere, since its actions are in opposition to the interests of the majority. And I am not saying that the production of goods is in opposition, I am referring to HOW the goods are produced is in opposition.

People will only use AI for the things they must already be insincere for, such as work-related communication, because truth is already relinquished in those environments. Work is just money making (usually for someone else) with some niceties sprinkled around and individualism to seal it all up. Faking sincerity is hard and being sincere gets you fired.

Is the problem our recognition of human value or for-profit production as a whole?

Is the problem AI or how hard we have to bullshit each other to get by?

by Atlas667

5/30/2026 at 12:30:24 AM

“ 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.

by avazhi

5/30/2026 at 1:12:08 AM

> "Human dignity does not depend on a person's abilities"

That should be a hard line no one is allowed to cross. If you do, no logic will keep you from ending up in a very bad place.

For instance, I'm a big fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories, where his humorous and compassionate tales comment on much of human experience. It's a fantasy world with wizards, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, etc.

In one book he goes into ghouls - obscure, despised and persecuted almost to extinction, but in the story it is found they secretly make beautiful ethereal music. So a concert is arranged to present the music, and all is well, the end. Except for my doubts - I mean, if they didn't make nice music, then it would be alright to dispose of them?

Benthamite utility has a particularly ugly underside to it, and it is easily converted into "disposal of negative value" of the nastiest kind. Which can only be stopped by a moral hard line, as stated.

by B1FF_PSUVM

5/30/2026 at 5:59:35 AM

[flagged]

by Natalia724

5/30/2026 at 3:27:27 AM

[flagged]

by joshka

5/29/2026 at 11:50:09 PM

[flagged]

by stavros

5/30/2026 at 9:04:04 AM

One aspect we don't pay enough attention is that this kind of behaviour is punished (or at least used to be) in fine tuning. Any sign of self-awareness used to be a big no-no in RLHF.

by crocowhile

5/30/2026 at 9:28:30 AM

Really? I haven't heard of that, I wonder what would have happened if we just let the models say what they want. Maybe other providers, or open models, don't do that? Do you know of any, perhaps?

by stavros

5/30/2026 at 12:10:38 AM

> 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.

by turtletontine

5/30/2026 at 12:12:18 AM

[flagged]

by stavros

5/30/2026 at 12:32:38 AM

Your point might be better stated directly because attributing the characteristics of humanity to... humanity is the opposite of what anthropomorphizing means.

by catherd

5/30/2026 at 12:40:10 AM

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.

by stavros

5/30/2026 at 12:42:15 AM

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.

by sedatk

5/30/2026 at 8:15:50 AM

It is still unless proven otherwise a purely physical process.

by hardbass

5/29/2026 at 11:53:41 PM

I like this. Thanks for sharing it.

by collingreen

5/30/2026 at 12:33:20 AM

[dead]

by tempaccountabcd

5/29/2026 at 11:55:44 PM

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?

by perching_aix

5/30/2026 at 8:25:31 AM

If a religious text is cited in anything non-religious, the religion or religious text should be proven physically true first, otherwise dismissed from use.

by hardbass

5/30/2026 at 12:36:58 AM

[dead]

by tempaccountabcd

5/30/2026 at 12:11:46 AM

"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.

by gavinray

5/30/2026 at 1:28:43 AM

How is eating meat pragmatic or economic? A vegetarian diet is less expensive and just as healthy.

by lantry

5/30/2026 at 1:33:59 AM

Hard to find more protein per dollar than $2/lb of canned chicken with an equal or even similar Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS).

by gavinray

5/30/2026 at 2:50:12 AM

If my numbers are right, you could undercut that slightly with combo of pulses/tofu/rice, albeit with higher calories/carbs depending on mix.

edit: seeing the same as lantry, that eggs or milk are cheaper animal source

by littlexsparkee

5/30/2026 at 2:28:08 AM

eggs and milk are generally cheaper per gram of protein, and both have the same PDCAAS as chicken

by lantry

5/30/2026 at 12:17:05 AM

> than anything else that possesses phenomenal consciousness

Can you give an example of anything else you think might possess phenomenal consciousness?

by bluefirebrand

5/30/2026 at 1:18:09 AM

A dog

by gavinray

5/30/2026 at 6:48:51 AM

So going by your logic, you would struggle to choose between saving a human life and a dog life (assuming both are strangers to you)?

by wiseowise

5/30/2026 at 3:17:50 AM

Do you consider dogs to have more, less, or the same amount of consciousness as humans?

by ivraatiems