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by gregsadetsky 272 days ago
I actually 100% wrote that comment myself haha!! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45316437

I think it would have sounded more reasonable in French, which is my actual native tongue. (i.e. I subconsciously translate from French when I'm writing in English)

((this comment was also written without AI!!)) :-)

1 comments

Oh, my honest apologies then, Greg! :) I am not a native speaker myself. And as far as i can tell, the phrasing is absolutely grammatically correct, but there's some quality to it that registers as LLM-speak to me.

I wonder how the causal graph looks here: do people (esp those working with LLMs a lot) lean towards LLM-speak over time, or both LLMs and native speakers picked up this very particular sentence structure from a common source? (eg a large corpus of French-English translations in the same style?)

No apologies needed, but thanks for your kind words! I think that we’re all understandably “on edge” considering that so much content is now llm-generated, and it’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t.

I’ve been removing hyphens and bullet points from my own writing just to appear even less llm like! :)

Great stylistic chicken and egg question! French definitely tends to use certain (I’m struggling to not say “fancier”) words even in informal contexts.

I personally value using over-the-top ornate expressions in French: they both sound distinguished and a bit ridiculous, so I get to both ironically enjoy them and feel detached from them… but none of that really translates to casual English. :)

Cheers