10 ms·
The revolt of the reader
- turtleyacht 11d agoA lot of similar pieces have not considered a post is both the first and final work of a thing: opinions, and experience, and less of much in cited facts; with AI, that there even was a revision pass at all. I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon. Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.
- smitty1e 11d agoYou could use AI to come up with a draft, and to critique ahead of posting. The chief grief appears to be phoning in the whole process.
- duhhhhh1212 11d agoSomeone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap. Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).
- jonstewart 11d agoAI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.
- mitxela 11d agoAI comments are auto-flagged, but not posts.
- bcantrill 11d agoThat is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking." Glad those words proved prophetic! [0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-library-verification-contest-scaled-past-manual-proof-engineering/ https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...
- dcre 11d ago“Not every one of those 11,970 carries the same weight, and the paper is careful about that rather than rounding it up.” AAUGH IT BURNS
- bcantrill 11d agoRight?! When I hit "That work was genuinely valuable" I literally hollered in exasperation.
- juliansimioni 11d agoFor me it was “the results speak for themselves” and then simply a (large) number of automated tests run that never had human eyes. Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.
- CharlesW 11d ago> Indeed, Pangram has become important to so many of us that I was thrilled when Pangram Labs co-founder and CEO Max Spero joined us recently on Oxide and Friends. Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?
- bcantrill 11d agoThis is (obviously?) false, but considering how well-capitalized we are at the moment, you do have me wondering what a quid pro quo would be for; perhaps in this fictional universe Pangram has lucked into some of the PCIe clock buffers that we've been scrambling to secure enough of?
- CharlesW 11d agoBy "quid pro quo" I wasn't suggesting that Pangram's PR people's podcast placement was pay-for-play, just that they traded access for your positioning of their tech and their exec in your content marketing efforts. That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.
- mplanchard 11d agoIt is less annoying, at least to me. I can read a semi-promotional post. I just bounce right off LLM writing
- bcantrill 11d agoYeah, fair -- and definitely not: I am earnestly just a fan of what they built (and I also think it's really important as a way of getting a check against rampant LLM use).
- CharlesW 11d agoYour love shines through! I'll work on turning down my "assume the worst" knob, thank you.
- cagenut 11d agoif its not worth your time to write, its not worth my time to read this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately
- edoceo 11d agoI hate to say this but AI assisted short pitch deks from founder to angel (usually their first time) have improved with AI. But also, they follow the same formula so are sorta obvious. Still, the decks are generally more business focused than typical founders early deck being very product/solution oriented.
- CuriouslyC 11d agoYou're marginalizing yourself. I don't have hard data for writing, but I do for another area: YouTube Thumbnails. AI generated thumbnails outperform human thumbnails, often with a +2-5% delta in CTR. Yet "so many" people loudly complain about how they HATE AI thumbnails and block channels that have them. Clearly the incentive is there, and (in the case of YT) these are mobs of angry people who don't really matter but scream and bitch as if they did.
- bigstrat2003 10d agoGood for them. I don't care. I'm not going to subject myself to slop just because some other people don't mind it.
- Lerc 11d agoHow can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text? If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it. There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI. There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand the amount that they register I don't think you can draw a conclusion of the overall state.
- dwattttt 11d agoPieces that people aren't revolted by will be fine. Readers aren't revolting because of a flood of high quality writing though.
- CuriouslyC 11d agoSome people are still losing their shit over em-dashes, with no other tells, and humans can't use the not x; y construction anymore either, regardless of any other merit to the writing. LLM writing is verbose and meandering, but people are making a much bigger deal over this stuff than necessary for virtue signalling purposes. You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. No time wasted, no pretentious posturing, and you don't make the error of assuming because the piece was written by an LLM that there was no thought put into the subject or there's no value in what is being communicated.
- bigstrat2003 10d ago> You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. I am disinclined to take someone's error-prone machine generated text and run it through an error-prone summarizer. That's a waste of time (not to mention electricity), when all that needed to happen was for the original person to not be so fucking lazy and just write out his thoughts.
- Forgeties79 11d agoThis is very handwavy and dismissive. It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. We’ve all seen so many examples of the exact same cadence and verbiage that we’ve learned how to identify it pretty reliably. The ones who are “slipping past us” are actually putting in the work make not just pasting raw LLM outputs, which is the real issue here. If somebody has edited it meaningfully after the fact then it’s not the same crime.
- MarkusQ 11d ago"I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us.)" I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads-out-apparent-llm-response-in-floor-speech/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...
- overgard 11d agoIn a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading.
- jimbobimbo 11d agoI see this at work. People are "writing" specs and design proposals with bots. This is noticeable and is a huge turn off. I don't have issues with using bots to aid research, but I'm not reading the doc you slopped together.
- stack_framer 11d agoI work with a guy that I swear is addicted to LLMs. He uses them for literally all communication, often dropping mountains of text for design specs that could have been written with half the words. Even on a 1:1 Zoom call, he'll type things into Claude and then read me the response! It's infuriating, and I've told him on a number of occasions, in as many polite ways as I can, that I would prefer to speak and work with him instead of Claude, but he just can't break the addiction.
- layer8 10d ago> I would prefer to speak and work with him instead of Claude That’s too soft, you have to tell him that you’ll work with him but not with Claude mediated through him, and follow through on that.
- throwaway219450 11d ago> Today, legitimate businesses are very careful about how they use bulk e-mail I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder. PR pieces and software companies don’t write tutorials to be helpful, they are advertising to you. If the LLM can do it for cheap, they really don’t care.
- krupan 10d agoNot sending you anything before you make a purchase and providing the unsubscribe option are MAJOR changes from before. Some sites even give you an option at checkout to not have them email you. That is businesses being very careful. In ye olden days you'd get email from all kinds of businesses and scammers completely unsolicited and out of the blue with no way to tell them to stop. It was overwhelming and awful. Things are much better than they used to be. Still somewhat annoying? Absolutely. But much much better.
- Forgeties79 11d ago>to use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader: we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create. Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.
- dyauspitr 11d agoThis meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.
- bcantrill 11d agoWell, give it a shot -- you'll likely find that that technique doesn't work nearly as well (at least with Pangram 4) as you think it might. When we had Max on the podcast[0], Adam explicitly asked him about exactly this (after all, you can give an LLM access to Pangram and let it iterate!), and Max reported that someone had attempted to do this -- and ended up burning through $700 in tokens and had a "sad Claude." Another interesting bit: according to Max, newer models are diverging more from human writing not less. I think that that was more anecdotal than quantified, but an interesting comment nonetheless. [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-detection-with-max-spero https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-detectio...
- dyauspitr 11d ago99% of college essays and pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part.
- smart_asslop 11d agoTalking about attempts to bypass ML detection: >This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit Whoops, disproven by bcantrill's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582629 Let's talk about the detection ability of corporate normies instead: >pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part. Goalposts: moved.
- ofjcihen 11d agoLook, in the future we may get to a point where LLMs are indistinguishable from humans in writing style. Even then, I would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas. Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you’re going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”. All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding.
- patrickmay 10d ago"Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Guindon
- singpolyma3 11d agoThe idea that readers "can tell" remains laughable. Readers routinely claim they "can tell" on things that turn out to be entirely hand authored. If you want to read something good, read a good book.
- wmf 11d agoI don't want to read human slop either.
- daze42 11d agoI agree. Most human-generated content I've run across on the internet over the past couple decades has been fairly low quality and, to be honest, most of the self-admitted LLM-generated content is higher quality. I'm continually surprised that so many consider any content written by humans to automatically be more worth their time to read. I'm much more interested in the content itself than the author that wrote it.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- kccqzy 11d agoI would love to use Pangram but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain. The error was “This email address can't be used for signup. Please use a different email.” I’m not about to create a Gmail is to use your service. To me the attack on the decentralized nature on Internet infrastructure is no less serious than the attack on the human provenance of writing itself.
- Seattle3503 11d agoI'm surprised it's not on some of the third party model routers.
- ButlerianJihad 11d agoSo what you're saying is that Pangram's heuristics misidentified a legitimate input, on your very first encounter?
- EvanAnderson 11d agoThanks for writing about that. I appreciate you taking the time to call out a bad actor like that.
- SSLy 11d agoWeird. I have recently created an account on my meme domain ($something.party) just fine.
- kccqzy 10d agoHuh. Very weird. Today I decided to put in a fake Gmail address that I did not own and I got the same error. Perhaps they did not like my residential IP.
- usr1106 10d ago> but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain. Tried 4 different domains. 3 of email services of various kind. 4th one my private domain which has absolutely no email reputation because I use it only for internal emails and sending is not even possible. In the end I dug out some old gmail address and tried to use that. The error was always the same, there had been suspicious activity from that domain. So the message is definitely incorrect. Well, there could have been suspicious activity from some gmail address, but if they don't allow gmail I guess they don't want many customers. Yeah, did not cover my tracks. The could easily notice that I was the same one trying to sign up repeatedly with different emails.
- KPGv2 11d ago> To those who read broadly, the hand of the LLM is so clear it’s as if the writer’s intellectual fly is open I dunno, man, according to Hardcover, I've read 76 fiction books this year, and I can't tell. All the "AI tells" fail the vibe check. I'm a writer and I get flagged by many of them. And according to PhD linguists with expertise in the field, most AI tells are just the equivalent of old wives' tales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA I vaguely recall that researchers were able to train people to tell, but only for a minority language that AIs likely aren't particularly good at mimicking, and after training. This whole thing reminds me of how "you can recognize a vegan because they'll tell you." There, you have a ton of false negatives (i.e., since you aren't polling people to find out if they're vegan, you're only flagging the obvious vegans and missing all the regular people who happen to be vegan). Except here, it's a bunch of false positives and negatives I bet. You don't really have a way of knowing, so you're accusing some people (without complete accuracy) and missing some people (without complete accuracy). But you have no way of knowing, so you're just like "hell yeah, my vibes tell me I'm right." Research and experts disagree.
- rcxdude 11d agoI think anyone claiming 100% accuracy is wrong, but the recent Claude models, for example, have a writing style that is sufficiently distinct that claiming people can't recognize it is like claiming you can't recognize the styles of particular famous authors. Yes, particular elements of their writing are going to be used by others, and it's possible to disguise their style or emulate it deliberately, but it's pretty hard to accidentally write like them.
- gdwatson 11d agoI am bad at recognizing LLM writing off the bat, though I am getting better. It's pretty common that the writing is good enough to get me reading on a topic I am interested in; then, once I am invested in the piece, it turns out to be shallow, wildly incomplete, or simply wrong. It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.
- timcobb 11d agoI'm confused and disturbed by the need to invoke Pangram (a model) as the arbiter of slop here. Slop, like smut, is self evident. You know it when you see it. Yes, some effort may be required before realizing that something is slop, which, yeah, is annoying, but that's nothing in comparison to outsourcing your shiite detection to a model! What do you get, except the loss of self worth, by needing a model to have the confidence to call something slop? > Why do people have this reaction? Beyond having to endure aggravating stylistic tics, when reading a piece that has had substantial LLM assistance, we — the readers — don’t know what is real and what isn’t. This is well said. But, here too, I would pause and reflect on what it means to (think you) know what is real and what isn't in a pre-LLM setting. For example, authority bias predates LLMs, and can have disastrous consequences.
- CuriouslyC 11d agoThe part about false positives was telling. The author doesn't want to demonize human trash, that's not fashionable, they're only concerned about virtue signalling.
- Julesman 11d agoAI detection should NEVER be used in an educational setting where the only acceptable false positive rate is 0%. That being a rate that which will never be achieved.
- esjeon 11d agoYeah, even Pangram is a bit problematic here. It has been notoriously fragile. Minor edits can flip scores from 100%-human to 100%-AI, because Pangram is crazy sensitive to local and surfacial features of text. Simple consulting with LLMs for word choices can result in 100%-AI score. Insane.
- jan_m_savage 11d agoIn a way, The ubiquity of AI-generated material will force the world to acknowledge the superiority of the human mind. Already on Youtube there are channels proudly claiming their music was not generated by AI. Will the software industry have similar disclaimers? (some already have).
- nkurz 11d agoHi Bryan, I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human? In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-but https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i... What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?
- bcantrill 11d agoMy experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin). As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!). In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)
- Barbing 11d agoNow that you’ve seen it can be brittle (e.g. if a small sample is provided, per this single case), would it be sensible to add a disclaimer to the post? It’s a great ad for the tool (& I’d love for a perfect tool to exist!), so it’ll sell subscriptions & we wanna make sure that some teacher out there doesn’t falsely accuse a kid, or engineer doesn’t think worse of their colleague unfairly, etc. False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people. To human writing. Thank you!
- markus_zhang 11d agoFor me, writing is an activity of expressing my feelings and conveying my thoughts. I rarely left that to LLM simply because one does not contract out activities one cherishes. I (am kinda forced to) use LLM to generate maybe 40% of the code at work, that is after my review and modifications. But I pretty much wrote all of the comments by myself. I can get into the flow by writing comments.
- baddash 11d agois this... an ad
- beej71 11d agoWhen I write technical documentation, here's how I use LLMs: * If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities. * I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors. * And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong. For all the prompting, I additionally tell it to not rewrite anything or offer any prose suggestions. It can keep all that to itself, thank you. And I verify what it gives back for correctness. (I'd encourage non-native speakers to use LLMs in much the same way. Don't sacrifice your human voice by letting the AI rewrite your words. Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.) But if I could step back for a minute: Why write anything? If your writing goal is to flood the zone and make as much money as humanly possible from ads, then hell yeah, paperclip the everliving shit out of that. But if your writing goal is to learn material or share material, then put that LLM on the back burner and don't use it to directly generate your text. It's bad for you, and the results are subpar. When I'm learning something, I can go through reams of tokens and then, once I understand it, I digest that to single a paragraph about the topic. The paragraph is as concise and as helpful as I can make it. Now, I could just share the prompts that I went through with those pages of back-and-forth with the LLM... but wouldn't you rather just read the concise paragraph that gets the point across? It's not hard to be better than an AI at writing for humans, so the minimum low bar to aim for is "better than an AI". And we can all get there with a small amount of practice. The real goal is to greatly exceed the LLMs' capabilities for sharing information. Finally, I think everyone should write a lot. Blogs, morning pages, fiction, technical books, letters, whatever. Especially when it comes to technical content, nothing makes you do your research like putting your ass out in the ether to get flamed by 5 billion people. And teachers the world over know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Pick a topic, research, and write it up more clearly and concisely than anyone else ever has. You'll learn so much, and your readers will, as well. Writing fires up your brain. Don't give that up to an LLM.
- emptybits 11d ago“Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.” Yes! Well said. If I already know someone, reading their own words, technical or businesss or personal, is meaningful to me. Warts and all. And if I don’t yet know the author then I definitely want to read their own words so I can get to know them. Either way, taking the time to think and then write is a gift and I respect that.
- kierangill 11d agoMy revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. > Orwell's version goes: > > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. > First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read. [1] https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude
- tdeck 11d agoAm I the only one that finds the second one much easier to parse?
- pavinjoseph 11d agoI had to reread the first one but I wanted to read it! The second one was understood on the first scan but was a chore to read. Does that make sense?
- buttercraft 11d agoThat was exactly my experience, and I found it to be a little bit depressing.
- jimmaswell 11d agoThe second one was very clear and to the point. Parsing it was rewarded with instant understanding and I enjoyed the word choice. The first one was just annoying; I could tell it was just listing a bunch of pointless analogies to try to make its point sound more grandiose so I immediately started skimming, and didn't come away feeling like it meant much other than "we all die in the end". The second one made an actual point and was the one that made me want to read it. The first one was the chore for me.
- runako 11d agoDisclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else. IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest. Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves. There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed. (All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)
- ChadNauseam 10d agoI don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible. Because it's entirely possible that someone would just naturally write the exact same thing as an LLM would write. And after the fact there is no way to distinguish the two. But pangram does have an extremely low false positive rate, which I think does make it useful for detecting cheating students. Assuming the base rate of cheating students is 1%, and assuming pangram has a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000 and a true positive rate of 7,000 in 10,000, that means ~98% of students flagged by pangram actually cheated. Combined with a teacher's familiarity with that student's previous work, which should rule out many more false positives, it should be a very useful tool.
- runako 9d ago> ~98% of students flagged by pangram actually cheated That 2% is a large number! Of people who will have their integrity impugned for no good reason! That's not okay! Your calculations also are mixing assignments and students. The rate of false positives of 1/10k is of corpuses, not students. 10k students might each submit 2-3 written assignments per week. Obviously, this greatly increases the impact of the false positive rate. And all of these numbers are dependent on lab conditions for usage, which are not the case in the real world. > I don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible. Yes. Which is why marketing this product as it currently is, is a deeply irresponsible endeavor.
- usernametaken29 11d agoFor me it’s AI videos or music / narration that is beyond off putting. What’s worse now it seems people are writing their YouTube scripts with Claude et al. so at times even if it is a human creator you can clearly and immediately tell the words are not their own. To those creators I have but one message: IT SUCKS. I’d rather have you ramble incoherently in your mic then reading an LLM script and I will remove you from my feed immediately. I concur with the author on all accounts. We all can tell the BS people are selling us, unoriginal ideas, shallow concepts, open ended questions that hint at exactly nothing. Don’t be an LLM echo
- GrinningFool 10d agoI don't know that we can all tell. The number of times I've seen a blog post or article's writing complimented on this site when it was clearly LLM output has been surprising.
- owebmaster 9d agoIf the title is good that's enough. More often than not, the HN discussion is much more interesting.
- quite-sfwd 11d agoThis. And the structure as well, like the repetition of the same points over and over. I'm not entirely against using AI to help content creators improve their narrative, like finding common storytelling mistakes. But that's very different than using yourself as merely an avatar for LLM content.
- CuriouslyC 11d agoEnding with a spin on "if you didn't bother to write it why should people bother to read it." Way to rail on cliche repetitive slop, with more cliched slop. Will the irony never cease.
- Young-Lord 11d agoBlocked EVERY single LLM generated blog and content farm with uBlacklist. Another great day where Google only gives me 2 results on the first page.
- ares623 11d agoCare to share the list? Or is uBlacklist the list?
- pshirshov 11d ago> do you think readers can’t tell? No. I have good anecdata: readers cannot reliably distinguish my own prose from LLM-written one apart from cases where LLMs use odd metaphors or one of their specific patterns. I've been specifically experimenting with that.
- conmod278 11d agohttps://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-computerized-philosopher-can.html https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput... Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus and asked whether readers could pick Dennett's real answers to ten philosophical questions from four machine-generated alternatives, with no cherry-picking beyond mechanical length filters. Even Dennett experts averaged only 5.1 out of 10 (well below the 80% the authors predicted), blog readers got 4.8, and lay participants barely beat chance — though experts did rate Dennett's answers as more Dennett-like overall. Schwitzgebel stresses this isn't a Turing test (one-shot text is far easier to fake than extended interaction), but argues it foreshadows a future where machine outputs are humanlike enough that their moral status becomes genuinely uncertain, motivating his "Design Policy of the Excluded Middle": build machines that clearly lack moral status or clearly have it, not ambiguous ones in between. My own take is : don't focus on the symbols on paper. focus on the facts about the world it is talking about. Isn't objectivity all about the facts? In future AI will have all the memory about what I have already read and it will just furnish the delta new information in the blog/writing so that I don't spend time on refreshing what I already know.
- Alwayshasbeeb 10d ago>Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus This sounds like a completely different scenario. How many users who post LLM written blog posts are tuning the weights of their LLMs on a large corpus of their own original writing? I wouldn't doubt that this produces far more convincing and pleasant output than the disgusting slop from out of the box Claude.
- ahepp 10d agoWhat kind of prompting are you using to get those results? Anything I have claude or codex write carries a ton of distinctive characteristics. Obsession with "bit-for-bit identical", "it's not the X it's the Y Z" and so on. It's driving me nuts, I constantly have to prompt it to "explain in plain, simple English"
- Bratmon 11d agoThis entire article is the bad toupee fallacy. Readers think they don't like LLM-authored text because they only recognize bad LLM-authored text as LLM-authored. Blind trials have actually shown that readers generally prefer LLM authored books to human-authored ones on the same subject.
- cbg0 11d agoThe "trials" you're referring to is probably this study on 1000-word short stories https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/bot-or-not-can-people-tell-the-difference-between-stories-written-by-a-human-or-by-an-ai-system/45E6DC0BB90AA648654D5AE243F6C667 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio...
- iamflimflam1 11d agoI did some experiments with very simple AI detection. You can get a very long way with simple ngram probabilities. https://meatbag.atomic14.com/ https://meatbag.atomic14.com/ https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-letter-counts https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-le... It’s very hard to make reliable though. Different models have different characteristics and you can prompt your way out of being detected.
- hypfer 11d agoThis is exactly how we should approach problems. Not through just throwing more resources at it (fighting GPU compute with GPU compute) but by being clever. Thanks a lot for sharing! Feeding it samples of a long-going conversation with Gemini 3.1 Pro is interesting. The first message seems to get flagged instantly, but later ones sometimes pass as human. Or at least more human-ish. If I read the blogpost correctly, you've only "trained" on prompt<->response and not interactive sessions?
- bcantrill 11d agoInteresting! Amusingly, if I feed that detector this blog post, it identifies it as confidently robot (97 out of 100 test passages). And running through my last five blog entries, they are all over the map, with three deemed at least "likely robot." Looking further back in time (and taking a somewhat random example), a blog entry from 2008, "Concurrency's Shysters"[0], is also deemed as similarly confidently robot (also 97 out of 100); do you expect this high a false positive rate? [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/03/concurrencys-shysters/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/03/concurrencys-shyster...
- iamflimflam1 11d agoIt really depends - it’s trained on fairly limited data (things I could generate from Claude opus 5 and ChatGPT (pre-Astra). It’s now quite hard to get non AI training data…
- elianwrites 11d ago[flagged]
- vladsiu 11d ago[dead]
- rdiddly 11d agoThis reader revolted after the second unnecessary (and exclaimed!) parenthetical. You can't please some people.
- westcoast49 11d ago> we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create. What about answers that an LLM gave to a question that we ourselves asked? Should we “labor” to understand that answer? I think the argument, as presented in this and other similar pieces of critique, is too simplistic. I do understand the criticism, but I think it should be framed in a different manner. The problem, when we read a long form piece by an author, is that we imagine that there’s another “mind” at the other side. We imagine that we are following the reasoning within the mind of a fellow human being, the writer. There’s an implied sort of “intimacy” to it. And the breach is when we are fooled into thinking that we are engaged in human communication, only to discover that there is a machine on the other side. When we ask questions to an AI, this problem does not exist, because we are fully aware that the entity on the other side is not a human being. Yet there is no doubt that the reply from an AI can contain information that is very much worthy of our time, and of our “labor” and effort to understand it. So I think this ultimately will be about disclosure. As long as we are being made aware of the percentage of AI use in a text, explicitly or implicitly, I think we will actually grow to accept it.
- ares623 11d ago[flagged]
- layer8 10d agoI disagree. The problem is not that there isn’t a mind behind the AI (a claim not everyone might agree with anyway). The problem is that the writing is pretty bad. Another problem is that it is all the same “voice”, as opposed to the individual voices of the people who allegedly produced the writing. That isn’t a problem of it being a machine either, as there’s nothing in principle preventing a machine from accurately emulating a wide variety of writing and thinking styles.
- westcoast49 10d agoThe deeper question is why we register it as bad. It has the "same voice" you say. But that is also, kind of, the same as saying that there is no humanity behind it, no identity, no "mind". For lexical articles, like text given as an answer to a single prompt or question, AI writing can be excellent. Because, there we do want an answer that represents the average or combination of all human knowledge about the topic. We're not looking for personality, or another mind. When we read long-form text, on the other hand, what we are engaging in, is mind-transfer. We then expect there to be a recognizable mind at the other end. And this is, in my opinion, what typically falls apart when we ask an AI to write a complete long-form text.
- siscia 11d agoIt is not clear to me what the author is SPECIFICALLY against. Only saying "LLM writing" is honestly lazy writing. Specifically what? I get the glaring cases, I get the idea that if the prose is generated then maybe also the idea, I get the feeling when reading a complete LLM authored piece. But that doesn't help the piece, because - beside those glaring cases - most writing today is a mix between authors ideas and LLM prose.
- jsnell 10d agoWhat do you mean by "most writing", how are you scoping it? Most HN comments aren't LLM prose. Nor are most HN frontpage submissions. But by reputation, most substack articles or or linkedin posts are. This is a case where we normalisation of deviance has not yet started biting. And as long as the community manages to make it clear what the norms are and enforce them, we can keep it that way. Now, if 25% of the frontpage was LLM prose at all times, the site is probably unrecoverably dead. Which is why at least I personally flag anything that I think is ai-written and Pangram concurs. (And write a comment to the effect, or upvote an existing one.) And it doesn't matter if you say that the ideas were your own, and just the prose was LLM. We can't tell what the idea mix was. But we can tell whether you weren't willing to do your own writing. If you want people to put in the time to read your ideas, human writing is the signalling you need pay for.
- mikelgan 10d agoGreat piece and interesting data. The rate of LLM-based writing rejection among developers is even higher than I thought it would be. To me, the glaring question is: What are we doing? The act of writing exists to 1) externalize and organize one's own thoughts for the purpose of considering and revising those thoughts; and 2) share one's own thoughts with other minds. When we hand writing to a machine, we hand thinking to a machine, denying both our humanity and our role in the conversation.
- osr00 10d ago"you probably shouldn’t let it write it for you if you actually expect the rest of us to read it." definitely resonates with me. Where I kind of disagree is that I don't think most readers will revolt. I think the mountain of LLM slop has actually changed people's behavior in more ways than one. Some are already relying on LLMs to summarize articles: then it doesn't matter to them who wrote it, they're just consuming machine-condensed content with no way to tell if a human or an LLM wrote the original piece. Or if their summarizer hallucinated.
- kome 10d agoso, yet another post encouraging the use of AI tools lol... great. that's the literal meaning of the post.
- bguberfain 10d agoNowadays we use LLMs mostly for doing agentic-based work. LLMs new Pareto frontier only make the headlines if they push the boundaries on benchmarks that are deterministic tasks. So models are encouraged to focus on these deterministic tasks that are, in nature, structured texts. I think that this makes models more “plastic” or “polished”, as opposed to natural and pleasant to read. User-based benchmarks, like LLM Arena, are for me the best we can do in order to rank models in this way, but come with its own drawback (subjective evaluation, prone to spam or techniques to promote a giving model).
- ahepp 10d agoI was so optimistic about using LLMs for "write once, read many" English language documents, but the more I've used the tools, the more pessimistic I get. More and more, I try to ask it for low prose responses because its writing just seems like such a low signal to noise ratio I'm curious about why LLM writing fails. Particularly whether LLM writing is fundamentally flawed, or if it's just distinctive and since it often reflects low effort, that distinctive voice is associated with low quality. I find its reliance on extremely consistent rhetorical patterns concerning. The fact that it always finds a way to talk about how "It's not the X, it's the Y Z" no matter what topic you feed it, makes me concerned that the tail is wagging the dog
- classified 10d ago> I'm curious about why LLM writing fails. Apart from the tasteless manipulations of the providers, it's mostly training data. LLMs output the average of their training data, and the overwhelming majority of humans are bad writers.
- HappyPanacea 10d agoThis argument doesn't work, the average majority of humans are bad at math but recent LLM aren't.
- bfbf 10d agoBut people who are bad at maths are unlikely to be writing about maths. A crude example might be if you search for “2+2=” in the training data, you’re much more likely to find “4” as the next character. Obviously llms are far more complex than this, but I think this proves the point. The fact you had to add the “recent” qualifier there highlights that llms in general were bad and had to be provided with corrective targeted training data to improve. (And they still can’t count the R’s in strawberry!)
- rmunn 10d ago> And they still can’t count the R’s in strawberry! Really? I do not have the time to survey the modern LLMs to see if your assertion is correct, but if it is then I'm surprised; I would have thought that that one would have shown up so often in their training data that they would be able to answer that question, even if they would then be unable to (for example) count the R's in raspberry, or in some other word where "count the R's in _____" was not widely found in recent online discussion.
- cladopa 10d agoSo you believe that writers are not making the necessary effort and write using LLMs, so you then use an automatic LLM to filter it as a reader(because you don't care as a reader and don't want to make the effort manually). So this way there will be a lot of false positives like with school assignments. I think a better solution would be to have a network of people that you trust manually read and label texts instead, so this way no machines are used and you don't need to read a text that 100 of your trusted friend/trusted readers flagged as artifitial. By the way, this man does not care about AI slop. He cares about AI usage. In the same way there is very good code created with the help of LLMs, albeit a minority like Linus Towards says, there will be very good writing created with the help of LLMs.
- MattyRad 10d agoThe [content-based] trust layer of the internet is what we have deferred to this point, and what needs to be created (which is easier said than done, of course). Personally I think a web-of-trust Keybase-style solution could work... But buy-in is difficult... you'd need some sort of "seed" strategy to make the app useful alack of 100 (a huge number) trusted friends.
- simplegeek 10d agoGood article. As I reflect about it, I genuinely wonder (not in jest) whether pangram software uses AI to generate code? Secondly, what patterns do they look for in the text? Genuinely curious.
- lionkor 10d agoI don't care if the text is AI generated. I care that it's written well, and that it's accurate. If an LLM helps you do that, then use it.
- 27183 10d ago> If your position is that we should be fine with an LLM crafting prose from your prompt, spare us all the wasted cycles and just give us your prompt. This is an excellent point. It should apply to LLM generated code as well. If you send your colleague a vibeslopped PR, please also include all the prompts you used to generate it. Check that mess into version control right beside the code changes. Later, when we have to untangle all the spaghetti, then at least we'll have some archeological record of intent.
- rikroots 10d agoOh, it's about avoiding LLM-generated slop. I was hoping it would be about the increasing trend over the past 20 years for writers to stop trusting their readers, and instead insist on telling the readers how they should read and interpret a piece of writing, as the reader is reading that work. Framing and triggers and stuff. Which I find really, really annoying, and leads - in my view - to safe, unadventurous and, yes, boring writing. Of course I wrote an essay about this[1]. Here it is: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/how-not-to-train-your-reader https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/how-not-to-train-you... [1] - Trigger warnings: discusses poetry; touches on using LLMs in the research phase of essay writing and poetry review.
- artemonster 10d agoI stop reading when I encouncer LLMisms.
- kgarten 10d agoI enjoyed the piece. Yet, what I don't understand is the author's endorsement of Pangram ... I don't like that without interacting with authors they just labeled texts (articles, novels etc.) as AI generated (they got a lot of publicity with it). Yet, given that the work is probabilistic and there's never 100 %, I find that irresponsible. I would have expected that they would have had at least the decency to tell the authors before they published their "accusations" publicly. Also, there are relatively easy ways to prevent being recognized and I assume as now the use of LLMs changes our way of writing and speaking, it will get harder and harder for these detection tools. We will see more false positives (as for the future there will be no text 100 % authored by humans to train on). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hrpQxfYvF6CBGWfJX/pangram-ai-detection-software-can-be-evaded https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hrpQxfYvF6CBGWfJX/pangram-ai... As English is my second language, I find the help of an LLM in editing text very useful. Yet, I agree with others that I don't want to read completely LLM generated texts.
- Seattle3503 10d agoPangram 4.0 was released after your blog post. I've found it to be an improvement over 3.3
- Sneha_k24 10d ago[dead]
- patrickmay 10d ago> A confession: with particularly egregious pieces, I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us. I would subscribe to a YouTube channel that did this.
- Rapzid 10d agoI was looking into some AI code agent regressions Copilot and Claude silently slipped in behind remote FFs with shifting cohorts(just to drive us insane, cause fuck us right): https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/80015 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/80015 It's tsunami of AI vomit drowning out a few human posters. I can 100% empathize with OSS maintainers banning AI submissions.
- nialv7 10d agoi think long form podcasts with experts in certain fields is going to replace (non-fiction) reading for me. at least when you can see the human being talking, what comes out of their mouths cannot be AI generated.
- goekjclo 10d agoYeah its interesting reading this and right afterwards looking at this 297 point AI slop submission. Fucks sake. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541888
- apparent 10d agoSeems like it's a cat and mouse game that won't end anytime soon. LLMs are constantly getting better at writing, so at some point people won't be able to tell reliably tell the difference anymore. I wouldn't laude Pangram so highly at this point, since we're not at the final round yet.
- AnimalMuppet 10d agoI'm not absolutely opposed to AI in principle. If it writes things worth reading, I'm not opposed to reading them. The problem is when it writes things that have the appearance of making sense but actually don't, when it writes what could be better put in 10% of the words, when it writes with no coherent logic. I don't have the time or the mental energy to wade through that on the faint chance that there might be a gem in there somewhere. But I have the same objection to human writers who do the same things. Write something worth reading. I don't have time for it otherwise.
- apparent 10d agoI agree completely, but how does that relate to my comment (saying it's cat and mouse, the game may never end, and Pangram's current success isn't indicative of future value)?
- AnimalMuppet 10d agoIt's saying I don't actually care. I don't care if Pangram can detect AI writing in the future. I don't care if it can't. I'm saying the question does not matter to me. I don't care about not reading AI. I care about not reading slop. But I guess I could care about one outcome of this game. If Pangram loses the ability to detect AI writing, but AI writing continues to be this nonsense that has no real point or logic to it, and so more garbage gets published that I want to not read, yeah, I guess I would care about that.
- bawolff 10d agoi think the biggest tell is that LLMs talk like a politician. They blather on while beating around the bush. It takes 5 paragraphs to convey one sentence of information. I dont care about llm use on any ideological grounds, or believe its a voiding of the social contract like the author of this piece does. I think its just a tool. However a lot of people use the tool really badly.
- matheusmoreira 10d ago> Or, better yet, consider doing what generations of writers have done before you, and treating that prompt as a skeleton that you use to write your piece yourself! Pangram complains about "paraphrased" content though. Sigh...
- deleted 10d ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 9d agoThe interesting part is that on one hand everything is proudly announcing how their Claude token's usage is going for coding projects, while at the same time complaining about reading AI articles. Well, I would rather not review AI code as well.
- woolion 9d agoI wholly empathize with the posts. Recently my writing process has become much longer as asking for LLM polish leads to spending more time rewriting to clean up the LLM smell, so I'm unsure of what the future LLM-as-editor will be. The big problem with the linked poll by Cynthia Dunlop is that it's all self-reported. The fact that the sample is not representative of the general population rather but might be closer of 'early adopter'/'power users' is interesting. But the idea that "I prefer authenticity to polished crowd-pleasing content" is something that people love to believe about themselves, but is hardly ever supported by facts. As someone who spends a lot of time painting (maybe more time thinking about it than doing it, but still), it is quite evident that this is a fable. AI content is now everywhere in the streets -- just yesterday I went to a fair and food stands were divided into 2, the ones that hadn't updated their menu in 10 years or more, and the one that had generated it with ChatGPT. Museums are shameless at using AI images for their signs, and way too often even for their content. People do not prefer crappy human art, and those who self-report they do fail very hard at 'image Turing tests'. I think the general point is true, but it does not give any timescale of when the dark age might end, when the tools will adapt etc.
- voidhorse 9d agoThe biggest tell is that, most of the time, verbatim LLM output still doesn't actually make much sense if you read it carefully. Consider this excerpt from a README someone linked in the comments: > A compiler for the interface your agent already has: the shell. MCP makes an agent carry every tool's schema on every turn; declick compiles an API, an MCP server, or a database once into named verbs the model loads one at a time, and every verb returns one envelope with five exit codes. A team pushes a compiled adapter to a shared folder or git checkout once and every other machine pulls it. Ten engines, zero runtime dependencies, Node 24. What the hell would it even actually mean to have a "compiler for the shell"? How do you "compile" a database into a "named verb"? What would this mean? These notions don't meaningfully cohere together. Why exactly is an "envelope with five exit codes"? Are we getting all of the exit codes at once? That wouldn't make any sense. LLM writing is full of this kind of arbitrary collision of concepts that sound like they plausibly go together thanks to frequent co-occurrence but that have no coherent logical meaning when you apply even a modicum of critical scrutiny. This is why I find it astounding that anyone believes these things are "intelligent" and not still just fundamentally a matrix machine completing words.
- zlokki 8d ago[dead]