> This AI-generated story was true, in the sense that it was an aggregate of real human experiences, as derived from the LLM’s training data. There wasn’t a real, named human being undergoing the pain and loss but, sadly, there are such people.

This seems like a crazy take. If you make something up, but it's "the kind of thing that happens"- that isn't true.

I think fair enough that the author doesn't mind that, but I'd bet a lot that they're in the minority not to be bothered by articles that describe something specific that never happened as if it did (AI generated or otherwise)

Content that you trust vs content that you don't is a good distinction. And skepticism about all online content is a fairly safe baseline. It's what a lot of us were taught as kids during the early days of the internet.

That being said, "I don't care if it's all not true - I don't trust anything anyway" is the perspective people are lamenting having to adopt. The effort of human created content was a signal of trust for a very long time.

I generally agree with the points, trust on the internet has eroded to zero and we need to invent new institutions to regain that.

But this subheading "Does it matter whether we know AI was used?" is just sad. There should be a space left for people who want to do stuff without AI. Niche, probably, but still. And this is why we should try to create ways to prove that stuff wasn't made with AI - that too will probably be based on compounded trust.

In the same fashion as people don't like watching chess players cheat, people will want authentic live music, and authentic art imagined by a human. At least I will, and I know I'm not the only one. Of course there will be bad actors that cheat, but once they're caught, they're not beating their allegations (see: Hans Niemann's stigma).

Sometimes I watched YouTube documentaries that I believed contained real images, and I thought they were real. However, I noticed that some images looked weird until I realized they were AI-generated.

Now I cannot trust any AI content anymore. Historical imagery is either accurate or fraudulent.

An appropriately dismissive response would be pointing an agent at this page and asking it to write a reply.

Anyone pushing the sloppification of the web should get exclusively the kind of interaction they wish for.

Out of respect for other readers on this site, I won't.

> In my youth, “I read it in a book” was more-or-less a knock-down argument that some fact was true.

We project this illusion of authority onto the world, and use it to situate ourselves in a kind of cognitive safety zone. Then when AI comes along and shatters the illusion by showing how signs of authority can be easily mimicked, it frightens us as if the ground is shifting under our feet.

It reminds me of the feeling I got when I heard Dana Carvey sing the "Choppin' Broccoli" song on Saturday Night Live. The lyrics are pedestrian, but the music still has all of the manipulative tricks that make tears gather in my eyes. It made me distrust music as a psyop. LLMs can do that with the written word.

But to the extent that the authority is more manipulation than the substance of wisdom, AI is doing us a somewhat painful favor. As they grow up, children need their bubbles bursted.

> because they’re fed up with the amount of material on the mainstream web which is generated by large language models

Internet has been dead for a while. Mostly late adopters and late-stage toxic vortex, generations who have now maladapted to what they think are social pillars (Hello HN!). The cOnSenSuS keepers hold serious what used to be self-aware provocation. It is like second generation North Korean koolaid drinkers.

The amount of hand wringing about AI is exciting to me in a way that it should not be. I am watching a river of new ignorance entrench itself in various spaces. In particular, the reactions from OSS have been so wildly unpragmatic that I would require very little evidence to be coninced that a massive psyop is underway by the market incumbents to make OSS think that OSS is anti-technology.

The resulting unpreparedness and wildly misguided responses are creating a vast sub-ocean, an empty space where nobody will see what is coming, where there is almost nobody around because of the idiotic nature of the hostility. One does not need a submarine to evade an entire landscape of hiding ostriches. In 2015 if you thought some things were played out, in 2026 the world seems eager to create opportunity beyond imagination by willfully lobotomizing itself.

The optimism is to be in that empty space. Doing things that will not be acknowledged for some time, studying the blade and hoping to get your play together before the disease is corrected by forces external to the attracting manifolds of idiocy.

TL;DR: most content is bad, actually