If this is straight out of an LLM I am impressed
Who decide what is obvious or not?
My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)
There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.
And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting.
There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.
> Your intellectual fly is open
which makes more sense.
Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.
One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA president, who refused to even acknowledge it, on the grounds that it was written too well and so must have been AI assisted. I don't know if that was true, and don't much care, because I do know it contained valid issues that deserved a response.
Not.. really?
I kinda see the point you seem to want to make, but the "no U" opener makes it hard to do that.
Beside that, HOAs - from what I heard of them - will use any reason they can make up to ignore what you want from them, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with LLMs.
The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader.
And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item.
I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead.
So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it.
It's just digital pollution.
No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.
Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
[1] https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reaction-to-ai-blog...
I also use AI to colorize old black and white pictures when discussing historical events in my blog, as well as the occasional AI enhancement of an old grainy and/or blurry photo.
This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are uncopyrightable facts, the only part of the article which can be copyrighted is the stylistic writing.
Let me quote from a recent legal opinion on AI summaries (The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al 2025):
>>> Exhibit 11 to the CIR complaint provides website links to articles that CIR alleges were unlawfully abridged by defendants in their ChatGPT and Copilot outputs. (CIR, FAC Ex. 11.) Examining the similarities between those outputs and the corresponding CIR articles, including the “total concept and feel, theme . . . sequence, pace, and setting,” Williams v. Crichton, 84 F.3d 581, 588 (2d Cir. 1996), the Court concludes that the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar to CIR’s copyrighted works as a matter of law.
The alleged abridgments are detailed summaries, usually in bullet point form, of the facts contained in CIR’s articles. Those summaries—which differ in style, tone, length, and sentence structure from CIR’s articles—are not “substantially similar” to CIR’s copyrighted works. They present the “facts in a different arrangement”—bullet point lists or short summary paragraphs—“with a different sentence structure and different phrasing.” Nihon, 166 F.3d at 71. In short, the abridgments in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar, qualitatively or quantitatively, to the original CIR articles as a matter of law. The Court therefore grants OpenAI’s motion to dismiss CIR’s claim of direct infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 insofar as it relates to the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11.<<<
And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory.
On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.
When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
You can get pretty good results if you take the time to tune it. Tropes and the like still sneak in but if you take the time to edit and rework things, it ends up being a pretty good workflow (especially for stuff that's more procedural, not artistic).
Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot.
Funny in either case.
I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:
1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
2. The prose style is horrible to read.
If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)
I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.
LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
Arch-TK•53m ago