[fleshmonad]

LLM slop. Why do people (presumably) take the time to debug something like this, do tests and go to great lengths, but are too lazy to do a little manual writeup? Maybe the hour saved makes up for being associated with publishing AI slop under your own name? Like there is no way the author would have written a text that reads more convoluted than what we have here.

[fn-mote]

> Why do people […] take the time to debug […] but are too lazy to do a little manual writeup[?]

They like to code. They don’t like to write.

I’m not excusing it, but after you asked the question the conclusion seems logical.

[PKop]

> They like to code. They don’t like to write.

People like reading LLM slop less than either of those. So it should become a common understanding not to waste your (or our) time to "write" this. It's frustrating to give it a chance then get rug-pulled with nonsense and there's really no reason to excuse it.

[sb8244]

I read it just fine and everything made sense in it.

I would spend similar time debugging this if I were the author. It's a pretty serious bug, a non obvious issue, and would be impossible to connect to the ffi fix unless you already knew the problem.

[iberator]

For example beigg non native english speaker:)

[xerxes901]

I have no idea whether the text was generated from an LLM, but “slop” it absolutely is not - it’s clearly a very logically ordered walkthrough about a very thorough debugging process.

If you call anything that comes out of a model “slop” the term uses all meaning.

[michaelcampbell]

> LLM slop

Is this the new "looks shopped. I can tell by the pixels."?

[dmix]

Every single article or social media post has someone claiming it's AI these days

From what I've seen doesn't it take a particularly strong reason for the entire article to get dismissed

[dpark]

Sorry, why is this LLM slop? I only got about halfway through because I don’t care about this enough to finish the read, but I don’t see the “obvious LLM” signal you do.

[scmccarthy]

It's clearest in the conclusion.

[dpark]

I still don’t see it.

I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too.

Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.

[dkdcio]

I came to this thread hoping to read an interesting discussion of a topic I don’t understand well; instead it’s this

I have opened a wager r.e. detecting LLM/AI use in blogs: https://dkdc.dev/posts/llm-ai-blog-challenge/

[dpark]

I feel like it’s on every other article now. The “this is ai” comments detract way more from the conversation than whatever supposed ai content is actually in the article.

These ai hunters are like the transvestigators who are certain they can always tell who’s trans.

[PKop]

No. These articles are annoying to read, the same dumb patterns and structures over and over again in every one. It's a waste of time; the content gives off a generic tone and it's not interesting.

[internetter]

> I will make a bet for $1,000,000!

> I won't actually make this bet!

> But if I did make this bet, I would win!

???

[dkdcio]

if two parties put up $1,000,000 each and I get a large cut I’ll do the work! one commenter already wagered $1,000, which I’d easily win, but I suspect this would take me idk at least a few days of work (not worth the time). and, again, for a million dollars I’d make sure I win

see other comment though, the point is that assessing quality of content on whether AI was used is stupid (and getting really annoying)

[_dain_]

I don't have a million dollars but I'll take you up on it for like a grand. I'm serious, email me.

[dkdcio]

the problem is it’s a lot of work (not actually worth it for me for a thousand dollars) — but you cannot win

just one scenario, I write 100 rather short, very similar blog posts. run 50 through Claude Code with instructions “copy this file”. have fun distinguishing! of course that’s an extreme way to go about it, but I could use the AI more and end up at the same result trivially

[PKop]

That's your issue not ours. It's obvious; if you don't have a problem with it, enjoy reading slop; many people can't stand it and we don't have to apologize for recognizing or not liking it.

[dpark]

I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI.

If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.

[Jweb_Guru]

I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to make a much narrower claim, however: each particular set of models, when not heavily prompted to do otherwise, has a "house style" that's pretty easily identifiable by humans in long-form writing samples, and content written with that house style has a very high chance of being generated by AI. When text is written in this house style, it is often a sign that not only were LLMs used in its generation, but the person doing the generation did not bother to do much editing or use a more sophisticated prompt that wouldn't result in such obvious tells, which is why the style is commonly associated with "slop."

I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational, or that you think the difficulty of reliably detecting AI generated text at scale is evidence that humans can't do pretty well at this much more limited task. Do you also find claims that AIs are frequently sycophantic in ways that humans are not, or that they will use phrases like "you're absolutely right!" far more than a human would unless prompted otherwise (which are the exact same type of narrow claim) similarly conspirational? i.e., is your assertion that people would have difficulty differentiating between a real human's response to a prompt and Claude's response to a prompt when there was no specific pre-prompt trying to control the writing style of the response?

[Jweb_Guru]

Parts of it were 100% LLM written. Like it or not, people can recognize LLM-generated text pretty easily, and if they see it they are going to make the assumption that the rest of the article is slop too.

[dpark]

And yet you don’t call out any parts that are 100% AI and how you recognize them as such.

I’m not saying there’s no AI here. I am asking for some evidence to back up the claim though.

[Jweb_Guru]

I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text. And there are a number of other tells as well.

The reason I don't usually bother to bring these specific things up is that I already know the response, which is just going to be you arguing that a human could have written this way, too. Which is true. The point is that if you read the collective whole of the article, it is very clear that it was composed with the aid of AI, regardless of whether any single part of it could be defensibly written by a human. I'd add that sometimes, the writing of people who interact heavily with LLMs all day starts to resemble LLM writing (a phenomenon I don't think people talk enough about), but usually not to this extent.

This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible to use "this was written with the help of an LLM, and the person posting it did not even bother to edit the article to make that less obvious" as a heuristic to not bother wasting more time on an article.

[dpark]

> this parallel construction

“not A, not B, not C” and “not A, not B, but C” are extremely common constructions in general. So common in fact that you did it in this exact reply.

“This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible”

> The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text

This is just blogspam-style writing. Short snippets that are easy to digest with lists to break it up and bold keywords to grab attention. This style was around for years before ChatGPT showed up. LLMs probably do this so much specifically because they were trained on so much blog content. Hell I’ve given feedback to multiple humans to cut out the distracting bold stuff in their communications because it becomes a distraction.

[inopinatus]

Blog spam doesn’t intersperse the drivel with literary narrative beats and subsection titles that sound like sci-fi novels. The greasy mixture of superficially polished but substantively vacuous is much more pronounced in LLM output than even the most egregious human-generated content marketing, in part because the cognitive entity in the latter case is either too smart, or too stupid, to leave such a starkly evident gap.

[Jweb_Guru]

Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us. People like you immediately claim that human writing is like this all the time, which it's not. Suffice it to say that if a large number of people are immediately flagging something as AI, it is probably for a reason.

My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.