[freedomben]

Indeed. My son has been accused by bullshit AI detection as having used AI, and it has devastated his work quality. After being "disciplined" for using AI (when he didn't), he now intentionally tries to "dumb down" his writing so that it doesn't sound so much like AI. The result is he writes much worse. What a shitty, shitty outcome. I've even found myself leaving typos and things in (even on sites like HN) because if you write too well, inevitably some comment replier will call you out as being an LLM even when you aren't. I'm as annoyed by the LLM posts as everybody else, but the answer surely is not to dumb us down into Idiocracy.

[Der_Einzige]

Stop using em dashes, the fancy quotes that can’t be easily typed. Stop using overused words like certainly and delve. Stop using LLM template slop like “it’s not X, it’s Y”. Stop always doing lists of 3s. We know you didn’t use to use so many emojis or bolded text. Also, AI really fking hates the exclamation mark so that’s a great proof of humanity!

Most people getting flagged are getting flagged because they actually used AI and couldn’t even be bothered to manually deslop it.

People who are too lazy to put even a tiny bit of human intentionality into their work deserve it.

[freedomben]

That's all good advice, but it's not enough. He never uses em dashes or emojis in papers, and in the past when using exclamation marks he had teachers say, "don't use these in academic papers, they're not appropriate." Also mac OS loves to use the fancy quotes by default so when he's writing on a Mac, it's a pain in the ass to use regular quotes. It seems absurd to me that you'd have to jump through that hoop anyway just so it doesn't look like AI.

We've had teachers show us the screenshot output from their AI tool and it flags on things like "vocabulary word unusual for grade level." In my early 20s when I was dating my now-wife, she had a great vocabulary and I admired her for it, so I spent a lot of effort improving my vocabulary (well worth it by the way). When my son was born I intentionally used "big words" all the time with him (and explained what they meant when he didn't know) in the hopes that he would have a naturally large vocabulary when he got older. It worked very well. He routinely uses words even in conversation that even his teachers don't know. He writes even better than he speaks. But now being a statistical outlier is punishing him.

It flags plenty of other things like direct quotes (which he puts in quotation marks as he should) and includes it in the "score", so a quote heavy paper will sometimes show something like "65% produced by AI". He uses Google Docs so we can literally go through the whole history and see him writing the paper through time.

> Most people getting flagged are getting flagged because they actually used AI and couldn’t even be bothered to manually deslop it.

I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't excuse people using an automated tool that they don't understand and messing with other people's lives because of it. Just like when some cloud provider decides that your workload looks too much like crypto mining or something so AI auto-bans your account and shuts off your stuff.

[Sharlin]

It's almost as if this whole LLM stuff wasn't a net benefit to the society after all.