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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Sometimes your essay is better off having a part that doesn't flow perfectly. If you spent all that effort doing things by hand, why not just...not sloppify things at the final stretch? You had a workable essay and just had to install a massive flashing neon sign right on top of it that says "BY THE WAY I USED AI ON THIS ESSAY."

Even if the AI text itself communicates the point, you just associated yours with the billions of AI generated essays that have zero effort put into them. Was it really worth it?

I clearly failed to estimate how triggered the world is on this topic. The essay was about an LLM driven rewrite of a software module btw. Should not be controversial.

Am I going to stop using AI assistance? No. I'm just going to do a better job of concealing it next time.

Nothing has been gained. In software it's mostly accepted in professional circles that AI was used. In writing people are still trying to resist ✊🏻

In software it's mostly accepted in professional circles that AI was used.

Not really. It's still very controversial in the tech community, with some embracing it and some rejecting it.

0% rejection in my personal experience. I work for a major tech company. Maybe the rejectors are carefully hiding their opinions or something.

They certainly are where I work, because it's been made clear that if you have negative opinions on AI you might get fired for that. It may or may not be similar where you work, but in my experience there is a climate of "get on board with this or get out" without any respect for honest differences of opinion between professionals. That certainly chills discussion.

Correct that leadership is all on AI. But my coworkers are pretty enthused independently from that. Not that I'd know if someone was hiding negative opinions.

Sure, I wouldn't expect you to know. Heck, it might be the case that your co-workers are all genuinely enthusiastic. Just noting that I have seen people hiding negative opinions and only being open with someone they trust, so it's not out of the realm is possibility.

It’s more accepted in workplaces and less by hobbyists. I know many hobbyists which rudely refuse any LLM involvement, even projects used in production that began as hobbyist, like Adwaita and Zig (here’s a big list).

I am aware of people rejecting it at small scales, but I'd guess they are a small minority of at least my social network. I haven't heard a big company come out against it, for example, but lots of examples of them embracing it. I'm open to other data, but my guess is something like 5% (loud) rejection or less.

I haven't heard a big company come out against it

There's a tonne of them that explicitly ban anything remotely SOTA for security reasons -- they do let you dick around with some terrible private-cloud instance of Copilot or whatnot so the C-suite doesn't worry about being "left behind", but it's a pretty strong repudiation of the usefulness of the thing. (from cybersecurity's point of view)

As for companies, they are indeed not rejecting AI. But that is driven by the corpo executive types, not programmers. Among actual programmers, my experience has been that it's fairly evenly split between people who are to some degree enthusiastic about AI, and people who don't find it useful. Of the latter, very few are flat out refusing to use it, but of course it's not like the rest have much of a choice given the current state of the industry. Even if they think it's an ineffective tool, not many are so strongly opposed that they will risk their livelihoods over it.

In software it's mostly accepted in professional circles that AI was used. In writing people are still trying to resist ✊🏻

Well yeah, the two fields have different priorities. With writing the human intent is important. The point is to read and understand your thoughts, not what an AI has synthesized. If I wanted the AI output, I would skip the forum entirely and just ask Claude directly. In software, the goal is to solve a problem as efficiently as possible, using whatever tools available. Human intent is only valuable insofar as it pertains to designing good goals and making sure everything actually works as intended.

AI assistance being considered fine in one field and not the other is only natural.

I don't think it's that different. In the process of writing prose, you clarify your own thoughts and understanding, and communicate with the reader from your own perspective. With AI both these benefits are lost, either partially or entirely.

Code works the same way. It's very similar to writing. You will have a radically different and deeper perspective on anything after you try to write code for it. And if your code is part of a larger system and not throwaway, it'll be read much more often than it's written, so you're also communicating with the next people to maintain it. Nobody wants to have to read slop whether it's in the form of code or prose.

Of course code also has instrumental value, in the sense that it does stuff. There are places where throwaway slop code is fine, if you know what you're getting into. Prose also has instrumental value (in the sense of "my professor asked for this essay to have 1000 words" or "I need to fill space in this marketing copy") but AI is hopefully teaching people to stop incentivizing this the hard way.

With writing the human intent is important. The point is to read and understand your thoughts, not what an AI has synthesized.

This is only one way of conceiving writing. It's equally fair to say that the point is to read something interesting, useful and thought-provoking. Personally I like films and love books but have never had the least interest in actors/directors and only the faintest interest in authors. I just like good stories. I accept that some people feel differently, but the idea that reading/writing is meant to be a kind of meeting of souls is really very foreign to me.

It’s this escalation that I am starting to see elsewhere online:

Here’s what I think -> here’s what I think, edited by AI -> here’s what I think plus one argument that AI gave that I hadn’t thought of originally, but do agree with -> here’s what AI convinced me of -> [wholesale AI response]

If you really think that slope ain’t slippery, then there’s nothing more to say.

Eh, I'm pretty sure the endgame is a handful of hive intelligences and the only distinction an individual human offers is a very particular set of high level value inputs.

What did you actually gain by including AI outputs in the essay text?

Locally it made what I wanted to say clearer, in those 5% of places where I was just struggling, for the benefit of the reader.

Globally it gave the AI hysterical a small piece to bite off and choke on and cause a scene.

So it was a loss.

Clearly next time I need to run it through Pangram and iterate until I score 0. Until mid 2027 when it won't matter anymore aside from a few neo-Luddite corners.

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