batzilla
Simon WillisonRandom thought concerning personal AI ethics: it's rude to publish something that would take someone longer to read than it took you to write it
Steve Chambers 
@simon You can publish whatever you want, there is no expectation it will be read. If someone sent me a long email written by AI I would be incensed.
Maxilo Overit@simon Talking to AI is always like that. But there are a lot of slower readers, so be careful how you extend this thought.
Joe Fabisevich 
@simon Unless you also provide an AI generated summary. [taps forehead]
Scott Perry@simon is this basically a subpart of Brandolini's law?
Robert Weißgraeber🇪🇺@simon „please provide the prompt instead of GPT’ed obfuscation, so i can read it
and come to my own conclusion“
and come to my own conclusion“
Faye@simon Not taking into account dyslexic people? 😅
Fabian N. T.@simon A bit similar as how I feel about the "developer centric" (DX over UX) mindset in our industry: It's rude if you trade gains in developer convenience with increased resource usage on the client side.
Matthew Martin@simon Is that so? Let me post a refuting link to a 300 page PDF that I didn't read either.
Brian Skinn@simon Completely agree. I'd even make it a multiplier. Read time >= 0.1 * write time is rude, say.
There was already far more of a content firehose than anyone could possibly absorb *before* GenAI came on the scene.
Now you have to waste additional time filtering meaningful items out of the ocean of AI-generated schlock.
Francisco Tolmasky@simon Nah, because they’ll just put it through their own AI to summarize it. That’s what AI actually solves: you give your AI an sloppy list of points you want to say, it wraps it up in a socially acceptable paragraph form, then that gets unwrapped back into an easily digestible list by an AI on the other end. “Paragraphs” just become a protocol format to prove you can afford an AI.
Cassandrich
Shauna GM
Good Night
ManniCalavera@simon That ship has sailed with video content and speech messages.
ocdtrekkie@simon This is why AI written email bugs me I think. Why should I have to read something you couldn't be bothered to actually write?
Adrian Schönig 
@simon At the very least, proofread what you generated with AI.
John Shirley@simon yes that's true. Rude is an understatement. The person publishing AI junk is displaying a contempt for others.
masukomi@simon anything you write, will always take longer to read by someone with English as a second language.
With regards to text the only question to ask is if the thing you're asking others to read is worth time and effort to consume. To help others make that decision _before_ reading i put an "average reading time" calculation at the top of each post. That's for average English reader but ESL people can extrapolate from that.
@masukomi ESL is such an interesting use-case for this stuff - I would hope that even the most ardent LLM skeptic would appreciate the enormous difference this kind of tech can make there
Emile Snyder
Jonathan HendryA self-modifying recursive paper?
nintegge@simon good point 🤔 it should be an expression of algorithmic empathy
Michael Porter@simon Oh, good advice in general 😊
LisPi@simon Isn't that the case for basically any niche writings?
Many of my follows could write encryption stuff that'd take me weeks to actually grok (due to having to actually learn all the requirements).
Hans ZaunerWell, the reader can use AI to boil the text down to one sentence before reading. 😅
Pontificator.OMF@simon so... If I self-host the AI, and it types really slowly, requiring lots of edits afterwards, that's ok?
A. Lynn@simon yes!
However, I'm concerned by how few people replying understand this suggestion. Publications are time-intensive for people to write.
The marketing blurb for a book? The average person reads it within seconds. Writing an appropriately appealing one takes hours.
A news article? Minutes to read. Hours to write.
An ESL reader won't take longer to go through a short story than the author did unless the reader is looking up most of the words in a dictionary or another reference. Even then, it's iffy. That's assuming the author wasn't building an original world, uncommon character, or new technique for days or weeks beforehand.
A line of alt text for an online image generally requires thought and a few tries to be well written. Screen readers don't see that effort.
The difference in time requirements for anything more serious than a casual chat text is huge. (As for casual chat... what good are the words of a digital robot?)
That's partly why algorithm-generated writing is so dangerous to publishers. It pushes out human writers who can't or who refuse out of artistic/journalistic integrity to keep up with unrealistic demands.
Expecting a publication to be written inhumanly fast is beyond rude. That dehumanizing of writers is destroying authors' will to publish anything of importance.
Adam [ 🎹 🥘 🧑💻 🏒 ♟️ 💞 ]@simon @RuthMalan yet the truth is, we have broken the sound barrier and there’s no going back, how will we ever know the difference again
Per Axbom@simon Ha, I love this take.
Tom Boutell@simon ... Huh. Yeah. That rules a lot of interesting things in and a lot of tedious things out.