It's rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich
It's rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich
Just because the final output comes from AI doesn’t always mean a human didn’t put real effort into writing it. There’s a big difference between asking an LLM to write something from scratch, telling it exactly what to say, or just having it edit and polish what you already wrote.
A ton of my replies here - including this one - are technically “AI output,” but all the AI really did was take what I wrote, clean it up, and turn it into coherent text that’s easier for the reader to follow.
spoilerOriginal text: Just because the final output is by AI doesn’t always mean human didn’t put effort into writing it. There’s a difference between asking LLM to write something, telling LLM what to write or asking it to edit something you wrote. A large number of my replies here, including this one, are technically “AI output” but all the AI did was go through what I wrote and try and turn it into coherent text that the is easy for the recipient to consume.
I don’t think the LLM made your response better in a meaningful way. Sure, it cleaned up the grammar a little bit, but the rephrasing in a few places is not necessary.
Trust yourself to communicate without help from external software.
there are many use-cases, and you’ve neglected one: linguistic analysis can be used to identify a person and to link them to other accounts. i’m not saying it’s likely or apocalyptic, but it is true and present. using an LLM to “sanitize” your outputs can prevent this.
from a privacy perspective, everyone should do this using a locally hosted LLM. from a person-that-uses-the-internet perspective, i would absolutely hate it if every article and every comment looked like an identical brand of ai slop.
While your use case may not suffer from the problem depicted in the post[^1], I don’t think it’s worth weakening the proposed etiquette for. If having a system that can reduce the generated garbage a person can inflict upon another means slightly-worse worded texts - that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
[^1]: It does exhibit other generative AI issues - like the environmental impact or like how it makes you reliant on companies just waiting to start enshittifing the field - it does not suffer from the issue of forcing humans to read meaningless slop that no one bothered to write.