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I can't decide whether this person writes in the type of style that was apparently overrepresented in LLM training, or whether they heavily used AI to spruce up
by breakingcups 3mo ago
I can't decide whether this person writes in the type of style that was apparently overrepresented in LLM training, or whether they heavily used AI to spruce up their writing. I'm learning towards the latter.
- Waterluvian 3mo agoI get it's in vogue to take stabs at whether or not AI was used. But I think the more useful approach is to instead be critical of the end product, if you have criticisms of it.
- bronson 3mo agoThis IS a criticism of the end product.
- Waterluvian 3mo agoThis actually gave me an amusing idea: a book review club that strictly reviews the cover art, book binding, hand feel, paper weight, font, etc. of the book.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago[dead]
- red_trumpet 3mo agoHow weird a book club that actively ignores the style of writing would be!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ranger_danger 3mo agoI don't think most people would consider the writing style of a postgres article to be the 'end product' of that article.
- eatonphil 3mo agoPangram says the text is entirely AI generated but I don't know how trustworthy Pangram is. (I would love to hear what others think about it.)
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoIt has extremely low false positive rate in various tests (e. g. https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1), I've never seen it mark something I knew was human written as AI.
- CharlesW 3mo agoFavorable benchmarks for Pangram exist, and it is one of the better AI detectors. But it's never been trustworthy as proof of authorship/misconduct, and it's getting less useful as models (and people's ability to steer them) improve. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/pangram-ai-detection-accuracy/687381/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/pangram-ai-de...
- ballon_monkey 3mo agoAt some point you're going to have to accept content is AI generated. There's heaps of stuff you probably read daily you don't even realise is AI generated.
- iterateoften 3mo agoThese low effort constant comments about style or formatting are against Hackernews guidelines for discussions and something needs to be done to clean up the comment section. Getting to a ridiculous point
- theappsecguy 3mo agoIt's not about style or formatting, people are tired of reading slop.
- horsawlarway 3mo agoThese comments are worse than the slop.
- bspammer 3mo agoThey aren't actually. They make me feel like I'm not going crazy - that I'm not the only person noticing that the quality of the average article on hacker news has dropped off a cliff in the last 6 months. Links from different people with different cultures, life experiences, and languages have the same tone of voice, the same sentence structure, and the same breathless, boring, staccato yet arrhythmic, emotive yet soulless style. I hope everyone keeps pointing it out. Even better, change the site guidelines to make AI generated articles a flaggable offense. It's already been done for comments.
- breakingcups 3mo agoHear hear. I can't believe people are content to consume slop like this.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- aeturnum 3mo agoIf comments about how "this blog post could have been a link to this github repo" are in-bounds, so are comments about how "this could have been a link to a LLM session." HN has always tried to work out if a submission is novel and interesting work or is just a slick coat of paint on mundane work (sometimes if good work is obscured by insufficiently clever presentation). Highlighting that content was generated by an LLM and asking if that impacts how to understand it is entirely in keeping with our culture and standards.
- tux3 3mo agoSpruce up is unreasonably charitable. I'm more irritated that the authorship information is misleading. craig-kerstiens is not available on Huggingface, and yet not a single sentence in this article seems to have been typed on a keyboard. When Claude writes things like "as someone who has spent a lot of time doing X", I think this is also a kind of failure of alignment. LLMs shouldn't write as if they had personal experience. It's something a person might say in the training data, but I just think LLMs shouldn't claim life experience they don't have, even if that's a statistically likely sequence of tokens.
- __s 3mo agoYou don't need to be charitable, Snowflake laid off technical writers citing AI to replace them: https://snowflake.help/snowflake-layoffs-2026-technical-writing-team-cut-for-ai-efficiency-or-risk-to-documentation-quality https://snowflake.help/snowflake-layoffs-2026-technical-writ...