Discussion
How much of the prose written by your average developer or tech manager today would people guess is generated?
All of it?
My impression is that the ones that are hooked run pretty much anything text-shaped through a chatbot because they genuinely think bot writing is better
Putting this another way: isn't it likely that most posts—social, forum, blog, etc.—by pro-"AI" or even centrist developers today are going to be at least partially LLM-generated?
@baldur yes, even when they are not, because we're literally retraining all the organic brains that this is how words are shaped and arranged now. I fear we passed the tipping point already, but like most tipping points, we can only precisely place it in the timeline with hindsight.
@baldur
Yes, in which case, for them, we could just cut out the middle man…
@baldur the grasshoppers are slowly turning into locusts and are wondering why we’re not joining in on the feeding frenzy
@baldur Libreoffice has been publishing slop blogposts for weeks weeks, now running on a "No AI is a feature" campaign.
@baldur if they're up to their eyeballs in generated text they'll start talking like that even when not using LLMs, which makes it hard to tell the difference
Truth to be told, most of developers I know are terrible writers. Not that LLM generated prose is exactly Nobel prize material, but at least is usually readable, even if verbose. I think nearly all the articles on the web about AI are LLM redacted; in fact most of them have clear marks of it. The more obscure the writer, or the worse the article, the more likely it is to be LLM.
@baldur My own experience with the perceived importance of written communication skills among developers would suggest that’s correct.
I once suggested to my (former) team that our hiring process should include a writing assignment. That suggestion was strongly shut down by the whole team, but I maintain that an assessment of writing skills is more useful than any “whiteboarding” exercise.
Dev types drastically undervalue writing as a skill and it’s depressing.
@baldur Probably.
As far as I know, the ratio is 0% for all the devs I currently read prose from off work.
(At work, it's getting more and more weird communicating with Claude through a large and growing number of different human names. It sometimes feels like I have like 5 coworkers in total, but one of them - Claude - signs its communication with 20+ different names.)
@datarama “communicating with Claude through a large and growing number of different human names”
That’s a good description of a disconcerting phenomenon.
Definitely have seen that evolution in my own work. Developers who it was hard to get so much as a paragraph of text from are now adding multiple paragraph comments in their code and thousand word descriptions in their git commit messages where it used to just be some ticket number and "Fix a thing."
Puts all the burden on to those of us who, you know, actually read all this stuff and spend time crafting a reply.
@lordbowlich @baldur @datarama Yeah, the slack-board is sounds more and more like claude each day, even in messages not explicitly saying "Sent by calude" at the end.
In very few cases is this actually better.
It is kinda nice that the commit messages from people not-me aren't all 3 words long now though.
@baldur Yeah, I find devs have long preferred to automate writing their documentation. In the process making said documentation harder to use!
@baldur yep, 100% this and we can see that AI trolls on forums are always using AI to answer, there's always "that line" that trumps it.