[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.

[dpark]

Is… is this from an LLM? Because this is the first time I’ve felt confident identifying text as no-human-writes-this-way.

[inopinatus]

I don’t usually speak like this on Hacker News, but for fucks sake, just give it a fucking rest already, you utter pillock.

[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.

[dpark]

> Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us.

The thing is, your premise is that you can identify certain patterns as being indicative of AI. However, those exact same patterns are commonly used by humans. So what you’re actually claiming is some additional insight that you can’t share. Because your premise does not hold up on its own. What you were actually claiming is “I know it when I see it”.

Let me give you a related example. If you go to any of the “am I the asshole” subreddits, you will encounter the exact same story format over and over: “Other person engages in obviously unacceptable behavior. I do something reasonable to stop the unacceptable behavior. People who should support me support other person instead. Am I the asshole?” The comments will be filled with people either enraged on behalf of the author or who call it AI.

The problem with claiming that it’s AI is that the sub was full of the exact same garbage before AI showed up. The stores have always been the same bullshit rage bait. So it’s not technically wrong to say it looks like AI, because it certainly could be. But it could also be human generated rage bait because it’s indistinguishable. My guess is that some of the sub is totally AI. And a chunk of it is from human humans engaged in shitty creative writing.

When you look at generic click-bait/blogspam patterns that humans have been using for decades now and call it AI, all you’re doing is calling annoying blog writing AI. Which it could be, but it could also not be. Humans absolutely write blogs like this and have for longer than LLMs have been widely available.

> 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.

It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.

Your “you couldn’t understand” and “obvious to us” stuff is leaning into conspiracy theory type territory. When you believe you have some special knowledge, but you don’t know how to share it with others, you should question whether that knowledge is actually real.

[Jweb_Guru]

> It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.

LLMs simply don't generate the syntactic pattern I used consistently, but they do generate the pattern in the article. I'm not really sure what else to tell you.

The rest of your post isn't really that interesting to me. You asked why nobody was giving specific examples of why it was generated. I told you some of the specific reasons we believe this article was generated with the assistance of an LLM (not all--there are many other sentences that are more borderline which only slightly increase the probability of LLM generation in isolation, which aren't worth cataloguing except in a context where people genuinely want to know why humans think a post reads as AI-generated and are not just using this as an excuse to deliver a pre-prepared rant), mentioned that the reason people don't typically bother to bring it up is that we know people who demand this sort of thing tend to claim without evidence that humans write in the exact same way all the time, and you proceeded to do exactly that. Next time you don't get a response when you ask for evidence, consider that it might be because we don't particularly want to waste time responding to someone who isn't interested in the answer.