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I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned th

I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct. I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.

mlinhares 8d ago
That’s not common and effective, it’s buzz feed style articles.
zamadatix 8d ago
Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name to believe things as obvious as "a long form news article cramming every AI trope it can fit from start to finish" being AI written. At this point I'm surprised when a news article isn't largely AI written, let alone one using the default tone! I don't even mind it as much as others seem to, it's just turning into more and more of a rarity for a news article to not be these last few years and so is now what sticks out.
- wrsh07 8d ago
  You have to name pangram because the other ai detectors are quite bad
- dwedge 8d ago
  > Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name I kind of assumed it is, given how it suddenly seemed to start getting namedropped in multiple comment threads. And it's often in response to someone saying content is obviously LLM (with examples) and the shill wedges pangram into the conversation "omg you're right, I didn't believe you but I checked this new product and wow it agreed with you" as though that adds anything to the discussion at all.
  - arjie 7d ago
    I mention pangram because it’s good at what it does. Otherwise, people like to claim “That’s just how I’ve always written. I always say That’s the seam and the seam undercuts the other pillar. It’s not just correct, it’s also verified lol; it’s just how I speak” and it’s obvious bullshit. Depending on the politics of the poster, people will also support this kind of garbage, but it’s all drivel. The authors are so often dishonest that it’s hard to believe that the things they’re saying are anything but a random hallucination.
  - wgd 7d ago
    Pangram gets brought up a lot because if I read an article and think it's blatant AI slop and want to communicate that fact, a natural impulse is to provide some sort of objective corroboration rather than just asserting that I have superior taste and thus am able to tell. Also Pangram is basically the only AI detector that's actually put in the work to build an accurate classifier, so if you try to discuss AI writing detection without being specific that you mean Pangram you'll get half a dozen commenters screaming about how awful some of the snake-oil salesmen like GPTZero are.
nicce 8d ago
All these "is this AI" checkers should be banned, as they never can reach 100% accuracy.
- wrsh07 8d ago
  This is a truely bizarre claim. Imagine if one said: "Weather forecasts should be banned because they can never reach 100% accuracy"
  - nicce 8d ago
    They are completely different things with different consequences. Someone can point to the sky and prove that the sun is there.
    - joshmoody24 7d ago
      You're responding to a comment about weather forecasts, not current weather. Pointing to the sun is not a forecast.
  - PunchTornado 8d ago
    Imagine writing an article in 5 days. Working hard. Posting it online and then everyone says it is ai and laughs and dismisses it because a tool says it is AI.
    - wrsh07 7d ago
      Imagine wasting several thousand people's time
    - Matumio 7d ago
      Like in this comic about art: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/064.html https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/064.html
- teiferer 7d ago
  They are overrepresented in HN discussions for sure as there is an over-reliance on them that just aims to shut down discussions. Which is ironic since they are a tool folks are trusting blindly supposedly used to argue against tool use with blind trust.
wrsh07 8d ago
Fwiw, I only did the first 300 words (signed into pangram) and it seemingly correctly noted that there were 2 (mostly) human-authored sentences in there What's wild to me is that: 1. People are responding to this article like it's hitting a nerve 2. In most Ubers you already don't talk to the driver (yellow cabs are higher variance in NYC). Doesn't seem like anything's being lost in that case. 3. There are enormous safety benefits to waymo, mobility benefits for youth (and elderly) that are afforded by this technology. It's not clear why people argue "Uber" is better than waymo. A few years ago there were arguments against Uber! (A technology which, again, provides a huge benefit, especially if you live in an area where people were previously expected to go out for drinks and then drive home) I think it's fair to point out real issues at these companies. But we should be clear-eyed about which technologies we want to accelerate vs slow down
- teiferer 7d ago
  Have you actually read the article? They point out multiple times that they like the Waymo ride and would use one again and loved it. It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research. And here you have it — I used an LLM-ism. Oh, and now another one! Time to downvote me for supposed LLM use! (Which I obviously didn't, I'm typing this on an ancient smartphone waiting for a train, but that doesn't deter the witch hunters.)
  - meowface 7d ago
    You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different. I use LLMs all day every day. I think they're great. I just don't like humans who put their name to what an LLM did.
    - teiferer 7d ago
      > You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different. Well I know that I did, so you are wrong with that claim, which sheds a strong (negative) light on other statements of fact that you posted in this discussion. You may disagree with me, or I may even have gotten something wrong, but just claiming I didn't read the article ... sorry man, I thought HN had higher standards than that.
bee_rider 8d ago
Em-dashes would be a loss, they can be a better flowing version of a parenthetical. “It’s not X it’s Y” is not a loss. This phrase is a symptom of a situation where the author wants to subvert expectations but doesn’t have the space, ability, or faith in their audience to organically set up X as the thing to be contrasted against. I suspect it became an LLM tell because it is over-represented in text that’s easily available to the models but that most people don’t actually want to consume: marketing text, LinkedIn posts, that sort of thing.
PunchTornado 8d ago
Why trust pangram? What are their accuracy scores in the wild? Ai detection is notoriously difficult.
- no_multitudes 7d ago
  AI detection in long-form content is a problem well-suited to training a classifier model. We have tons of verifiably-not-AI text from before 2022, and you can create tons of verifiably-AI text. As language drifts over the next few decades, it may get more difficult. But right now it is quite a manageable problem for languages with large pre-2022 text corpora available online. The reason why AI detection tools other than Pangram are awful is because they are not really trying to solve the problem -- they just want to appear good enough to convince people to use them.
teiferer 8d ago
Have you also scanned earlier work of the author with pangram to establish a baseline? Pangram is not without problems.
- meowface 7d ago
  It is actually pretty much without problems. It doesn't catch everything, but if it detects something it's very rarely a false positive.
- no_multitudes 7d ago
  Can you give some examples of verifiable pangram false positives?

mlinhares 8d ago

That’s not common and effective, it’s buzz feed style articles.

zamadatix 8d ago

Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name to believe things as obvious as "a long form news article cramming every AI trope it can fit from start to finish" being AI written. At this point I'm surprised when a news article isn't largely AI written, let alone one using the default tone! I don't even mind it as much as others seem to, it's just turning into more and more of a rarity for a news article to not be these last few years and so is now what sticks out.

wrsh07 8d ago
You have to name pangram because the other ai detectors are quite bad
dwedge 8d ago
> Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name I kind of assumed it is, given how it suddenly seemed to start getting namedropped in multiple comment threads. And it's often in response to someone saying content is obviously LLM (with examples) and the shill wedges pangram into the conversation "omg you're right, I didn't believe you but I checked this new product and wow it agreed with you" as though that adds anything to the discussion at all.
- arjie 7d ago
  I mention pangram because it’s good at what it does. Otherwise, people like to claim “That’s just how I’ve always written. I always say That’s the seam and the seam undercuts the other pillar. It’s not just correct, it’s also verified lol; it’s just how I speak” and it’s obvious bullshit. Depending on the politics of the poster, people will also support this kind of garbage, but it’s all drivel. The authors are so often dishonest that it’s hard to believe that the things they’re saying are anything but a random hallucination.
- wgd 7d ago
  Pangram gets brought up a lot because if I read an article and think it's blatant AI slop and want to communicate that fact, a natural impulse is to provide some sort of objective corroboration rather than just asserting that I have superior taste and thus am able to tell. Also Pangram is basically the only AI detector that's actually put in the work to build an accurate classifier, so if you try to discuss AI writing detection without being specific that you mean Pangram you'll get half a dozen commenters screaming about how awful some of the snake-oil salesmen like GPTZero are.

nicce 8d ago

All these "is this AI" checkers should be banned, as they never can reach 100% accuracy.

wrsh07 8d ago
This is a truely bizarre claim. Imagine if one said: "Weather forecasts should be banned because they can never reach 100% accuracy"
- nicce 8d ago
  They are completely different things with different consequences. Someone can point to the sky and prove that the sun is there.
  - joshmoody24 7d ago
    You're responding to a comment about weather forecasts, not current weather. Pointing to the sun is not a forecast.
- PunchTornado 8d ago
  Imagine writing an article in 5 days. Working hard. Posting it online and then everyone says it is ai and laughs and dismisses it because a tool says it is AI.
  - wrsh07 7d ago
    Imagine wasting several thousand people's time
  - Matumio 7d ago
    Like in this comic about art: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/064.html https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/064.html
teiferer 7d ago
They are overrepresented in HN discussions for sure as there is an over-reliance on them that just aims to shut down discussions. Which is ironic since they are a tool folks are trusting blindly supposedly used to argue against tool use with blind trust.

wrsh07 8d ago

Fwiw, I only did the first 300 words (signed into pangram) and it seemingly correctly noted that there were 2 (mostly) human-authored sentences in there What's wild to me is that: 1. People are responding to this article like it's hitting a nerve 2. In most Ubers you already don't talk to the driver (yellow cabs are higher variance in NYC). Doesn't seem like anything's being lost in that case. 3. There are enormous safety benefits to waymo, mobility benefits for youth (and elderly) that are afforded by this technology. It's not clear why people argue "Uber" is better than waymo. A few years ago there were arguments against Uber! (A technology which, again, provides a huge benefit, especially if you live in an area where people were previously expected to go out for drinks and then drive home) I think it's fair to point out real issues at these companies. But we should be clear-eyed about which technologies we want to accelerate vs slow down

teiferer 7d ago
Have you actually read the article? They point out multiple times that they like the Waymo ride and would use one again and loved it. It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research. And here you have it — I used an LLM-ism. Oh, and now another one! Time to downvote me for supposed LLM use! (Which I obviously didn't, I'm typing this on an ancient smartphone waiting for a train, but that doesn't deter the witch hunters.)
- meowface 7d ago
  You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different. I use LLMs all day every day. I think they're great. I just don't like humans who put their name to what an LLM did.
  - teiferer 7d ago
    > You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different. Well I know that I did, so you are wrong with that claim, which sheds a strong (negative) light on other statements of fact that you posted in this discussion. You may disagree with me, or I may even have gotten something wrong, but just claiming I didn't read the article ... sorry man, I thought HN had higher standards than that.

bee_rider 8d ago

Em-dashes would be a loss, they can be a better flowing version of a parenthetical. “It’s not X it’s Y” is not a loss. This phrase is a symptom of a situation where the author wants to subvert expectations but doesn’t have the space, ability, or faith in their audience to organically set up X as the thing to be contrasted against. I suspect it became an LLM tell because it is over-represented in text that’s easily available to the models but that most people don’t actually want to consume: marketing text, LinkedIn posts, that sort of thing.

PunchTornado 8d ago

Why trust pangram? What are their accuracy scores in the wild? Ai detection is notoriously difficult.

no_multitudes 7d ago
AI detection in long-form content is a problem well-suited to training a classifier model. We have tons of verifiably-not-AI text from before 2022, and you can create tons of verifiably-AI text. As language drifts over the next few decades, it may get more difficult. But right now it is quite a manageable problem for languages with large pre-2022 text corpora available online. The reason why AI detection tools other than Pangram are awful is because they are not really trying to solve the problem -- they just want to appear good enough to convince people to use them.

teiferer 8d ago

Have you also scanned earlier work of the author with pangram to establish a baseline? Pangram is not without problems.

meowface 7d ago
It is actually pretty much without problems. It doesn't catch everything, but if it detects something it's very rarely a false positive.
no_multitudes 7d ago
Can you give some examples of verifiable pangram false positives?