6 ms·
It’s written by AI.
by christopherwxyz 3mo ago
It’s written by AI.
- alecco 3mo agoGrammarly and GPTZero say 0% AI.
- lproven 3mo ago[[citation needed]] I am a professional writer and have been for over 30 years. (I do not use any form of LLM ever.) This means I read a lot. This also means that I have 30+ years of experience of readers not understanding what I wrote, or not getting further than the title, or not getting the main message, or inverting it in their heads, or inserting their own message and then complaining when I diverge, and an endless list of Ways People Do Not Get It. I am also a trained TESOL teacher. Ability to capture gist is a skill we test for and measure, and many, maybe the majority, of native speakers don't have it and don't know. In recent years I constantly see people going "this is written by AI" and I have yet to see a single of of them able to coherently prove their point. It's all just feelings and hunches. So I am calling you on this: How do you know? Show your working. Demonstrate your case.
- skydhash 3mo agoI don’t think TFA is written by AI. But AI written pieces do have a certain feeling. A sort of saccatto in the succession of ideas that does not feel natural. They emphasize certain points, and you as a reader, you just wonder why is that. There is the “This thing, not just that thing”. There are also the three successive propositions (mostly in one sentences) to accentuate an idea and “Negation. Strong positive idea in the same direction”. In general try reading one (vocally) to yourself and it will feel really weird.
- jghn 3mo agoJust like em-dashes, some people have always done these though. Why are they penalized with immediate AI slop witch hunts? The LLMs didn't come up with these tics out of thin air.
- simion314 3mo ago>The LLMs didn't come up with these tics out of thin air. LLMs were trained with a lot of synthetic data to transform them from a complete this text into a chatbot, I suspect that this tons of synthetic data that forces the LLM to answer questions into a specific ways also forced them to have this "synthetic/robotic" language. Claude users would have noticed the "belter and suspenders" phrase just started popping out after an update and I am sure is nto because lots of developers used it in their blogs and Anthropic scrapped those blogs in that update.
- skydhash 3mo agoYou have to start with the reason there’s a witch hunt. I love reading. I read books (novels) almost every day and I’m almost always perusing a textbook pr an article for my jobs and my hobbies. The signal/noise for entertainment or information was fairly high, then come LLM tools. You start to be interested by the title of an article or a book cover, and then you start reading it and it’s just vapor. Nothing tangible to be gained. It’s like buying something expensive and finding out a cheap trinket under the wrapping. After a couple of times, you will develop a certain kind of heuristics for this kind of texts. It will not be perfect and will have some false positives, but that’s the only way to keep your sanity.
- jghn 3mo agoI mean I get it. It bugs me too. And yes, obviously most of the text that people point at as being AI slop is in fact AI slop. At the same time, you also have the other set of asshats that just go respond with things like "AI slop!" to everything when they can't actually be certain. Like I said, some of these AI tells are things that actual real humans do too. I like your vapor term. For me it's about the content anyways. If it's just some sort of vapid, pointless drivel then I'm not going to like it regardless of who or what wrote it. And in my experience text that strongly correlates with AI tells also strongly correlate with having sparse substance and lots of fluff. In other words, if people don't like something, just don't read it. Shouting at people for AI generated text just makes you look foolish if the text is not in fact AI generated. And the person shouting "AI slop!" has no way to prove it other than vibes.
- GrinningFool 3mo agoIt feels manipulative. The strong language always seems like it is trying to convince you it's right even when there is no need to, such as a factual presentation. Of course if you look at popular pre-AI blogs you can see strains of the same thing, so it's no surprise that llms blend together all of those "most persuasive" methods.
- girvo 3mo agoI’m not sure if it is written by an LLM, but anything being called “load-bearing” (formatted that way and all) sets off my alarm bells
- fragmede 3mo agoHopefully you don't work in construction!
- girvo 3mo agoAmusing :) but I specifically mean in a SWE context. It’s used constantly by LLMs, Claude especially. Genuinely so curious to see certain phrases come up so often, beyond what I would’ve expected for how often they’re used by people
- ekidd 3mo agoClaude's writing style is at least as distinctive as any human's personal style. It has a long list of favorite words, verbal tics and common structures. On top of that, LLM writing is often bad in a very particular way: it's weak on actual things to say, but with an overheated style. Some days, I spend over 4 hours a day reading walls of text written by Claude. If I couldn't recognize Claude's default "voice" by now, something would be wrong. It would be like a Hemingway fan not being able to recognize Hemingway. Except more so, because Claude's writing style is getting worse from version to version, descending into self parody. On the statistical side, Pangram's model identifies AI-authored text with a 1-in-5,000 false positive rate, measured against hold-out texts from before 2022. My "ear" also agrees closely with Pangram. If I think something sounds AI written, Pangram virtually always comes back with "AI, confidence: high."
- mirekrusin 3mo agoThat reply was AI written.
- ekidd 3mo agoLol, no. I've always sounded like that, and there are decades of my writing online. Also, FWIW, Pangram scores my writing as entirely human. Claude's writing isn't easy to identify because it uses em-dashes and bulleted lists. Claude's distinctive style goes much deeper than that.
- roenxi 3mo agoClaude's default voice, yes. But I'd assume a lot of people have learned to prompt it to something other than its default style. IMO it is good practice to have a style guide to feed in with the prompt. > On top of that, LLM writing is often bad in a very particular way: it's weak on actual things to say, but with an overheated style. This point is interesting because it raises the question of what "LLM writing" actually is. If it is expanding a smaller prompt into a larger article then yes, by construction the information density is low. But it can also be used to take a semi-coherent stream of consciousness and turn it into something readable and the people using it that way might already have started to slip under the radar. This is a lot like how the criminals seem especially stupid because the ones who get caught are disproportionately the stupid ones. The easily detectable LLM writers are going to be the lazy ones.
- hnhg 3mo agoYou need to start using LLMs a lot and then you will know how we know. Edit: You know how you can recognise someone just from their gait while they walk towards you? I would struggle to describe that for an individual person but it doesn't mean I can't identify them from that alone.
- lproven 3mo ago> You need to start using LLMs a lot and then you will know how we know. $SWEARWORD no! I am an AI vegetarian: I won't touch them ever except for unavoidable ones (defaults on some search engines, e.g. when I use a web browser on its default settings – my own disable that junk) or for machine translation, which remains their only really valid use case in my book.
- sowbug 3mo agoI want Scrabble rules for HN AI challenges. If someone finds an AI-generated comment, the commenter has violated HN guidelines and the comment should be deleted. But if the accusation is wrong, there should be a penalty for the often massive disruption the accuser has caused to the discussion. (As of now, that four-word low-effort comment has generated over a thousand words in response, none of which improve this article's discussion.)
- 3eb7988a1663 3mo agoI like this idea. Wildly impractical, but I am tired of every article followed by accusations, "Smells like AI!!! I can tell by the pixels"
- jddj 3mo agoHighly doubtful
- rizky05 3mo ago[dead]
- Philpax 3mo agoI am _very_ familiar with Claudish, and to some extent, the other AIs' writing styles. This article is human-written and features human writing quirks. The very first sentence > Back in 2022 and 2023 there were two big branches of machine learning happening at Meta. is unmistakably human. That's not how a LLM would phrase this sentence, and if it did, it would have put a comma after 2023.
- emil-lp 3mo ago[dead]
- fightforcause 3mo agoYou can just prompt an llm to make causal grammar mistakes
- jkaplowitz 3mo agoLeaving out that comma is not a grammar mistake. The comma slightly changes the feel of the sentence, but it's not wrong to include or omit it. But yeah, I agree with the other commenter that AI would be less likely than a human to omit the comma.
- xyz100 3mo agoAn adverbial clause at the front of a sentence should have a comma? Or is that not what it is?
- jkaplowitz 3mo agoAdverbial clauses at the front of a sentence don't always have to have a comma. It's often taught this way to new English language learners or in style guides that want to keep things as unambiguous as possible because including the comma in that case is never wrong. But it's also sometimes optional. Here is the Chicago Manual of Style's Q&A on commas: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/C... One of the answers cites section 6.34 of the Chicago Manual of Style as follows: "Although an introductory adverbial phrase can usually be followed by a comma, it need not be unless misreading is likely. Shorter adverbial phrases are less likely to merit a comma than longer ones." For the example we're discussing, "Back in 2022 or 2023", my personal instinct as a university-educated native US English speaker would be to include or omit the comma primarily depending on how much emphasis I want to put on the timing of my statement. I also know that I tend to write overly long sentences with too many commas, so sometimes I'd intentionally counteract my own tendency and limit the complexity of the sentence by removing a comma like that if the sentence still seems good without it. Other times I'd split the sentence into two, but my sentences rarely get as staccato as AI-written ones.