The generalised form of this, which we are rapidly discovering, is that AI breaks the social contract that used to exist between an author and a reader (of prose, code, anything).
That's the most succinct way I have seen someone put it, thanks! It's really the same issue, no matter if it's software, online comments, e-mails, artworks, homework, etc. We engage because we expect to be interacting with the output of another human being. AI fundamentally betrays this expectation.
Yes, and there was a good post about exactly this social contract last week https://jola.dev/posts/the-social-contract-of-writing. I find the argument compelling on the face of it and true in my experience with colleagues and the broader digital landscape recently.
> LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
I wonder how many comments are from bots in this discussion. Few days ago there was a discussion of traffic stall at the strait of Hormuz on HN. One comment from an user with over 9000 Kama went like "I just checked the traffic on the road and it is normal ...". Unfortunately other bots are not as easy to spot as this one.
Precisely. In the case of OSS it makes no sense for maintainers to spend more time reviewing AI generated code than contributors spent prompt engineering it. That's just not helpful.
> AI breaks the social contract that used to exist between an author and a reader (of prose, code, anything).
And to be clear, it is reasonable to expect an author to invest more effort than a reader, because the work in question will reach many more readers and demand time and attention from all of them.
This principle was a part of basic netiquette back in the days of Usenet. I wish I could find the document (maybe it was a FAQ?) where I first saw it stated succinctly.
