I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling.
It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable.
I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.
It's a major bummer. When I first read the story (a few days ago, maybe?) I thought it was an interesting metaphor that didn't quite line up with the observed details of software development with AI. I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.
Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.
I think its a valid emotion to feel. I genuinely resonated with the story, but when I learned it was written by Claude it kind of left me feeling ... betrayed?
One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.
So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.
But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.
If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.
In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.
that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
> As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about.
> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop.
“You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.
“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”
“Everything.”
He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.
Ethan looked ill.
--
I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?
You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written.
The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.
But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.
Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.
Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
I will say this is one of the few pieces of prose I've read that was AI generated that didn't immediately jump out as it (a couple of inconsistencies eventually grabbed me enough to come to the comments and see your post details which mention it - I'd clicked through from the HN homepage), so your polishing definitely worked! Quite a neat little story
I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set. Not that the writing is bad but it's just derivative. I listen to stuff like "Lost Scifi" podcast almost daily for example, but there are many similar ones which are focused on reading classic stuff from the golden-age zines because it's all public domain.
The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.
Can't speak for them but FWIW it does not sound like OP is necessarily aware of the genre at all. They asked Claude to explain something via fiction, and then perhaps Claude made the "creative decision" based simply on the availability of the material.
The only thing I noticed is that the melody of the words was not equal to the quality of the writing and story arc.
It was the text equivalent of hearing a singer whom you know has perfect pitch sing atonal playground songs.
Take this sentence:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible.
Perfectly fine, a nice set up for a next sentence, but then you get hit with this:
He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years.
Bad. The rhythm is all off. Minor improvement:
For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield.
Minor change, really, but the fluidity of the language matters a lot and just that one sentence written that one way breaks the flow.
It's almost as if a second person interjected and wrote that sentence like a friends annoying girlfriend who won't let him finish a story without adding in her parts.
But two notes does not a music make, so let's compare that 1 minor change with a before and after of all three opening sentences:
Original:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
Modified:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
I guess I'm an expert on LLM-isms somehow, I thought they were still plentiful. But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste.
Your polishing work made a difference! The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.
It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
This sort of article really needs at least a vague clue as to what it is about.
It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about
I don't oppose reading AI generated content in principle, but because it's free to generate, I always am less likely to read super long prose that is AI generated. So the question is whether someone has taken the time to keep it as long as necessary but not longer. Or if there are ways to make it easier for me to commit to the experience, with a sort of TLDR
Yes, which is why some of the comments are from a day ago but the post is only a couple of hours old. We originally downranked it due to being AI-generated.
But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.
We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.
ai photos and em dashes/directional inverted commas (so probably AI writing), sorry to be rude but i dont see the point of reading this when i could prompt an AI to generate the story myself if you shared the prompts? im not trying to be crass here, if someone could share why they think this is worth reading id be all ears. after being warned across the net to not be snarky about AI i really must iterate that snarkiness is not my intention here, im genuinely curious.
edit: since im being downvoted, i clarify my interest to be in the human artistic input behind this mathematical model output
I appreciate the question and I think the answer is much longer and more nuanced than can really effectively fit into this form factor. I think this question is getting asked right now about all art forms because of AI and from a lot of different people.
My short answer to “why should I care about the mathematical model output from the human artistic input” is “I think we’re all figuring that out right now!” And I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t “you shouldn’t care at all”. Especially if the mathematical model output from the human artistic input expresses what the human wants to express at a quality level that passes that human’s “Taste Gap” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI)
I’m sure we could go back and forth about this a lot (and happy to keep this conversation going, I truly do feel like exploring and discussing, this is very interesting to me!) so happy to dig into any aspect with you :)
I will say that I think what’s happening is that we’re seeing more people explore art forms that couldn’t before because of mechanical skill gaps, and that’s interesting in the same way that synthesizers and sampling and software instruments did to music or I imagine digital art tools did to physical art, and I imagine digital photography did to photography which did the same to painting. It’s an interesting time to be alive!
I'm trying to sort out my own emotions on this.
I did not realize this was AI generated while reading it until I came to the comments here... And I feel genuinely had? Like "oh wow, you got me"... I don't like this feeling.
It's certainly the longest thing (I know about) I've taken the time to read that was AI generated. The writing struck me as genuinely good, like something out of The New Yorker. I found the story really enjoyable.
I talked to AI basically all day, yet I am genuinely made uneasy by this.
It's a major bummer. When I first read the story (a few days ago, maybe?) I thought it was an interesting metaphor that didn't quite line up with the observed details of software development with AI. I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.
Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.
I think its a valid emotion to feel. I genuinely resonated with the story, but when I learned it was written by Claude it kind of left me feeling ... betrayed?
One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.
So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.
But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.
If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.
In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.
that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
Kubler-Ross process -> "A model outlining emotional responses to terminal diagnosis or loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance"
Exactly. The stages don't always occur in order, or at all, but you can see the general progression play out any day, all day on here.
I'm happily surprised (frankly amazed TBH) that the submitter didn't get bawled out by people flagging the post and accusing him of posting slop.
> As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about.
Can you elaborate on this?
> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop. “You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.
“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”
“Everything.”
He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.
Ethan looked ill.
--
I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?
[Edited for clarity]
You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written.
The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.
But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.
Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.
Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.
The entire story is AI slop. Tasty and enjoyable slop, but slop nonetheless.
I will say this is one of the few pieces of prose I've read that was AI generated that didn't immediately jump out as it (a couple of inconsistencies eventually grabbed me enough to come to the comments and see your post details which mention it - I'd clicked through from the HN homepage), so your polishing definitely worked! Quite a neat little story
I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set. Not that the writing is bad but it's just derivative. I listen to stuff like "Lost Scifi" podcast almost daily for example, but there are many similar ones which are focused on reading classic stuff from the golden-age zines because it's all public domain.
The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.
> I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set
Which is totally fair, I'm honestly not! I haven't read much of that myself
It is a pitch perfect interpretation and I assumed that's what OP was going for. Manna (2010) read very similarly.
Can't speak for them but FWIW it does not sound like OP is necessarily aware of the genre at all. They asked Claude to explain something via fiction, and then perhaps Claude made the "creative decision" based simply on the availability of the material.
The only thing I noticed is that the melody of the words was not equal to the quality of the writing and story arc.
It was the text equivalent of hearing a singer whom you know has perfect pitch sing atonal playground songs.
Take this sentence:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible.
Perfectly fine, a nice set up for a next sentence, but then you get hit with this:
He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years.
Bad. The rhythm is all off. Minor improvement:
For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield.
Minor change, really, but the fluidity of the language matters a lot and just that one sentence written that one way breaks the flow.
It's almost as if a second person interjected and wrote that sentence like a friends annoying girlfriend who won't let him finish a story without adding in her parts.
But two notes does not a music make, so let's compare that 1 minor change with a before and after of all three opening sentences:
Original:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. He’d worked for a John Deere dealership in Marshfield for eleven years. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
Modified:
Tom had been an agricultural equipment technician, which meant he’d fixed tractors, combines, GPS guidance systems, and the increasingly complex control software that made modern farming possible. For eleven years he had worked for a John Deere dealership in the nearby town of Marshfield. Then the transition happened, and the dealership’s software repair business evaporated; the machines still needed repair, but the software on the machines stopped being something you repaired.
I guess I'm an expert on LLM-isms somehow, I thought they were still plentiful. But I was able to get through the text, it's pretty good, you did great work cleaning it up. There's just a bit more to do to my taste.
The story is good.
So, in the past, your stories were warrant-eed? But no longer?
I liked it. It has a similar feel to an Andy Weir "The martian" type of novel.
Your polishing work made a difference! The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.
It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
The story didn't mention what had happened to inflation in the meantime. A dozen eggs costs $32.
Huh, I got cottage core, not dystopia!
This sort of article really needs at least a vague clue as to what it is about.
It's a long article and from skimming I see chat of farming, software, GPS. I can't tell whether this is worth investing time to read if I can't even tell what it may be about
It's speculative fiction.
It's worth reading. It's about AI.
I don't oppose reading AI generated content in principle, but because it's free to generate, I always am less likely to read super long prose that is AI generated. So the question is whether someone has taken the time to keep it as long as necessary but not longer. Or if there are ways to make it easier for me to commit to the experience, with a sort of TLDR
There are always bugs in software. The question is do you have enough eyes on the data to spot them or do they linger for years.
Did this story disappear then re-appear?
Yes, which is why some of the comments are from a day ago but the post is only a couple of hours old. We originally downranked it due to being AI-generated.
But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.
We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.
ai photos and em dashes/directional inverted commas (so probably AI writing), sorry to be rude but i dont see the point of reading this when i could prompt an AI to generate the story myself if you shared the prompts? im not trying to be crass here, if someone could share why they think this is worth reading id be all ears. after being warned across the net to not be snarky about AI i really must iterate that snarkiness is not my intention here, im genuinely curious.
edit: since im being downvoted, i clarify my interest to be in the human artistic input behind this mathematical model output
I appreciate the question and I think the answer is much longer and more nuanced than can really effectively fit into this form factor. I think this question is getting asked right now about all art forms because of AI and from a lot of different people.
My short answer to “why should I care about the mathematical model output from the human artistic input” is “I think we’re all figuring that out right now!” And I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t “you shouldn’t care at all”. Especially if the mathematical model output from the human artistic input expresses what the human wants to express at a quality level that passes that human’s “Taste Gap” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI)
I’m sure we could go back and forth about this a lot (and happy to keep this conversation going, I truly do feel like exploring and discussing, this is very interesting to me!) so happy to dig into any aspect with you :)
I will say that I think what’s happening is that we’re seeing more people explore art forms that couldn’t before because of mechanical skill gaps, and that’s interesting in the same way that synthesizers and sampling and software instruments did to music or I imagine digital art tools did to physical art, and I imagine digital photography did to photography which did the same to painting. It’s an interesting time to be alive!
FWIW, I read it before I learned that it was AI-generated, and I enjoyed it and thought it's possibly insightful.