We mourn our craft

Re:We mourn our craft by maplethorpe on Sunday February 08, 2026 @10:31AM (#46935136)

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all.

I agree!. One criticism I've heard is that half my colleagues don't write their own words anymore. They use ChatGPT to do it for them. Does this mean we've "lost" something? On the contrary! Those people probably would have spoken far fewer words into existence in the pre-AI era. But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none. How can anyone say that's something we've lost? That's something we've gained!

It's not only the golden era of code. It's the golden era of content.

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Re:We mourn our craft by layer8 on Sunday February 08, 2026 @10:37AM (#46935198)

I hope this is sarcasm. :)

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Re:We mourn our craft by phatfish on Sunday February 08, 2026 @10:37AM (#46935189)

Quality is better than quantity.

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Re:We mourn our craft by testdelacc1 on Sunday February 08, 2026 @10:37AM (#46935190)

We have more words than ever. Nice.

But all the words sound more like each other than ever. It’s not just blah, it’s blah.

And why should I bother reading what someone else “writes”? I can generate the same text myself for free.

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Re:We mourn our craft by yoyohello13 on Sunday February 08, 2026 @12:27PM (#46936459)

> But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none.

Are you for real? Quantity is not equal to Quality.

I'll be sure to dump a pile of trash in your living room. There wasn't much there before, but now there is lots of stuff. Better right?

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Re:We mourn our craft by maplethorpe on Sunday February 08, 2026 @09:30PM (#46940929)

I'm finding it hard to reconcile HN's love of AI generated code with HN's dislike of AI generated content. Why is the code good but the content bad?

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Re:We mourn our craft by yoyohello13 on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:06AM (#46941768)

I think both are bad when the focus is quantity over quality. The vast majority of AI generated content is lazy and of low quality. This is just a natural consequence of making things easy. Gate keeping is actually good sometimes. Doesn’t mean there isn’t good, well curated content out there that AI was used to help make, but I think the vast sea of crap that AI enables is not worth the few gems that come with it.

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Re:We mourn our craft by account42 on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:25AM (#46944067)

A yes, "content". The word that perhaps best embodies the impersonal and commercialized dystopia we live in.

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