We're all entitled to our opinions, but then just say that, don't go to great lengths to misunderstand and justify technology that you don't even use yourself to justify why the regulation is bad, just say "I think regulation is fundamentally bad".
Gruber has long been a talented, excellent writer. I hugely doubt he uses AI at all, nor does he plan to.
His first take on this situation was cutely naive, thinking they were going to inject secret hidden unicode characters. But ultimately he has a massive hate on for the EU -- they were mean to Apple once -- and it comes out in any topic that overlaps.
> Gruber has long been a talented, excellent writer. I hugely doubt he uses AI at all, nor does he plan to.
He notes in various other posts that he uses AI/LLMs and chatbots quite extensively. (I don't recall what for exactly, but not for writing his pieces.)
Good point, and I should have been clearer that I don't think he uses or will use it for writing. He's far too skilled of a writer to need it, and at best it would be a handicap.
This is not it, no. He is not using AI and it is not I think remotely in his nature to surrender that control. He is engaging with this on principle. Again I am not sure I agree with him, but then it’s a hypothetical because I am not going to get an LLM to write for me either.
Well, it cant be that he is super worried on behalf of people who publish AI slop. That’s not a credible motivation. In fact, he complained a lot about the new ChatGPT app so I can’t believe your claim that he is not using AI.
Seems like he really likes to use LLMs and is worried that quality will be degraded. But he will never demonstrate such degradation scientifically, we don’t have anecdotes even.
His complaint about the ChatGPT app is that it’s a shitty non-Mac-ish Mac app. Complaining about shitty non-Mac-ish Mac apps to people who hate shitty non-Mac-ish Mac apps is more or less how he became a full time writer.
That's ... even worse? So we're all here in the comments trying to figure out what the author means, and what their overall point is, while clearly they don't even use the damn thing? Oof... What a waste of time for everyone involved.
Why? I really don't understand this. Why can't a tech writer take a deep but neutral intellectual interest in something? Isn't it important that some do? Do people have to be stakeholders or clearly on one given team, pro- or anti-, for their opinion to matter? Is it that tribal?
It seems fully logical to me that someone who writes for a living (who, as it happens, developed the very markup language LLMs use for everything) should be invested in understanding the automatic plagiarism and word calculating machine from an intellectually honest position.
I personally am pretty severely big-two-AI-firms, increasingly anti-big-tech, but I am learning and researching uses of LLMs because for myself I really need to understand how to use them in an intellectually and (as far as is possible) ethically sound way. Learning because as a boring old freelance programmer I have to; foolish to pretend otherwise.
So I completely understand his position — that the AI industry is hot air and crooked and scammy and weird, and some of the people involved genuinely rather dark-sided, but the technology exists and if it hints at threatening your livelihood, you need to understand it.
From reading his work for the best part of twenty years or so (and emailing him intermittently over that time) it would seem to me that he's a lot less bearish on the tech industry than me, and a lot less fond of the EU than I am; he's more optimistic than I am. But he writes because he has to write. I should think that would make him highly invested in understanding what LLMs do.
> Why? I really don't understand this. Why can't a tech writer take a deep but neutral intellectual interest in something? Isn't it important that some do? Do people have to be stakeholders or clearly on one given team, pro- or anti-, for their opinion to matter? Is it that tribal?
I don't think it's weird to ask that people commenting on x doing y with tech z at least try tech z, no?
Imagine this pamphlet: Basting a steak in a cast iron skillet with butter and herbs is a perversion of grilling a steak on charcoal. Signed, a life-time vegan who hasn't cooked a steak in their life.
Then imagine people jumping in the comments to discuss. Isn't it a waste of time?
> I don't think it's weird to ask that people commenting on x doing y with tech z at least try tech z, no?
On what specific basis do you assume he hasn't tried it? He's definitely blogged about the desktop apps, after all.
Or are you arguing that a writer doesn't have a meaningful or valid opinion on LLM-generated writing until they have tried to pass some off as their own?
This just seems weird to me. I mean, I have an opinion on this and I am personally never going to use an LLM to do published writing. On an intellectual level I can still see that there is nuance in it for others (for once I agree with him about an EU regulation).
I'm confused. You said "he doesn't use AI" and I took that as a general "he never used AI". If I was mistaken then ignore this whole thread, that's my bad.
Ahh — that was in the context of a suggestion AI-slop-writing I was replying to (quite an accusation for an established blogger IMO).
But one of the issues with HN threads is that you can sometimes lose the sense of what you're replying to by clicking further down the thread, and I have committed worse misunderstandings than this, so absolutely no need to apologise (and I probably need to consider this when I am replying) :-)
You've somewhat mischaracterised what I have said.
I suggested he as a tech writer has reason to be invested in understanding how they work. It's not really a sustainable position to not understand, is it?
