[JohnHammersley]

This is such a well written story, and congratulations Ben, it sounds like it's been a lot of hard but ultimately successful work!

I know you'll deservedly get a lot of credit for all your work in remastering the game, but you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, and good luck with the Steam release, and whatever project you take on next! :)

[benstopics]

Thank you sir and I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I hope it's successful but we will see.

[sho_hn]

I really enjoyed this article as well!

I'm still curious, however:

> That's not a marketing angle—it's a headline that writes itself.

Any ChatGPT assistance there?

[benstopics]

Claude actually! Yeah the content editing was heavily LLM assisted as I'm a terrible writer and I wanted the read to be enjoyable. So I compiled all the research and worked with Claude to build the article. I then attempted to go through with a fine tooth comb and write it in my own words. That is one particular sentence I missed with a highly recognizable LLM pattern which I will fix. I simply also don't have time to really market the game, I care more about the quality of the software. I know if the software is great then it will be successful. But I wanted to share the story in a compelling way. Apologies if it was distracting!

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

To me, it read like your typical reporter writing a story for nontechnical readers, which is exactly what it is. I thought it was fine.

You could look at it like Claude was the reporter writing the story, with your collaboration.

[sho_hn]

Totally fine, thanks for the answer.

[grey-area]

I wonder why LLMs do this so persistently (the ‘it’s not this it’s that’)? Is there really so much of this style of writing out there?

[elzbardico]

Marketing copy has been using this rethorical artifact for decades, as well as journalism with some success, it is like an analogy, but pruned down in meanin by the opposition. It is impactful, and probably got high marks with the humans doing RHLF, that I suppose, came mostly from journalism and marketing schools.

[doctoboggan]

I think it comes from the RLHF. If you haven't interacted with LLMs enough to get turned off by it, I think that kind of speech is seen as powerful and confident.

[dxdm]

RLHF = Right Left Hand Foot. It's a technique in Bavarian interpretative folk dance where you jump around, artfully hitting the soles of your feet with your hands in order to court women who are busy carrying unbelievable numbers of beer Steins into the mountains.

That's what came to mind when I saw the abbreviation. Then I looked it up:

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.

[rzzzt]

"Rood Luck, Have Fun!" A rood is a unit of area that is equal to about one fifth of a football field.

[elzbardico]

It is a staple of marketing and journalism writing. And the guys doing the HF on it most probably came from this exact background: marketing and journalism.

[msephton]

Professionally typeset books. Designers have been typing it—and the other dashes—manually using modifiers+hyphen on Mac since 1984. You can type them—plus the bullet character—today on iOS by doing a long press on the hyphen key.

[grey-area]

I’m not talking about the em-dash, which is not a great indicator IMO but the horrible overuse of binary oppositions with a kind of false surprise, e.g.:

The problem was not em-dashes — but binary opposition!

That sort of thing.

It is a much clearer marker of llm use than the em-dash. The sad thing is when searching for info on this the most convincing reply in search was generated by an LLM, which went on at length about why LLMs do this as some sort of consequence of their internal structure. I have absolutely no idea if that’s true — it really sounds a bit trite and exactly the kind of thing LLMs would confidently assert with no basis. I would want to hear from someone working in LLMs, but their blogs are probably all generated by an LLM nowadays. So this conundrum is a good example of a question where LLMs actively work against clear resolution.

This is in my view the most insidious damage word generators are inflicting on our culture — we can no longer assume most writing is honest or well-meaning because amoral LLMs fundamentally are not wired to make that distinction of true and untrue or right and wrong (unlike most humans) and many people will use and trust what they generate without question, polluting the online space and training data until everything is just a morass of half-known facts sprinkled with generated falsehoods that are repeated so often they seem true.

How do we check sources when the sources themselves were generated by LLMs?

[Macuyiko]

My personal feel (completely subjective) is that during RLHF humans are incredibly sensitive to this pattern, especially when talking about personal or emotional issues. Any reply in the form of "it's not you, it's them" is such a dopamine hit that the LLMs started applying it for everything else.

[ghaff]

The em-dash meme, if it's actually a thing, I find really annoying. That's the style in a lot of places and for a lot of people with or without spaces on either side. It was house style a a few different places I worked over about 25 years. More broadly, I assume LLMs are training on how a lot of people actually write. I'm not changing my writing style because some people will flag it as LLM-generated <shrug>.

[msephton]

Apologies! You have a point.

[alwa]

I wonder this too. Is there so much of this style, or does it indicate some aspect of the LLMs’ sensemaking?

[te7447]

Whatever it is that caused "It's not X, It's Y", it's more recent than LLMs as a whole.

As far as I remember, neither GPT3.5, GPT4, nor Claude Instant did it. I think Gemini was the first to really do it, and then out of nowhere, everybody was doing it.

[Aloha]

I'm only annoyed that I cant buy it right now!

[teiferer]

> This is such a well written story, [...] you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read.

Don't forget to give credit to the LLM too which wrote the story for him.

[benstopics]

Sure, it's 2026 I used Claude to write a lot of it. But tell me this. Do you know which paragraphs I wrote?

[rgovostes]

Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.

Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.

[benstopics]

I did that on purpose, I thought it needed to be reiterated. See, you're blaming the AI but that was me. I did not specify a word count. Maybe I should have let the AI write the whole thing? Like I said I am not a great writer, especially content editing. Even with AI I couldn't make everyone happy. Oh well.

[IshKebab]

Dude why do you meet every valid criticism with such passive aggressive defence? It doesn't come off well at all.

[markstos]

It has a particular style I’ve seen lately using more short confident sentences as professional writers do. But it lacks the professional writer’s sense of when to add an anecdote and when to leave out a detail. And it is this juxtaposition that gives it a distinctive LLM feel of being written in the style of a professional writer, yet something is off.

[Eisenstein]

Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived.

Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.

At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because

1. the heuristic is flawed

2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult

[magic_hamster]

I don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.

[benstopics]

I agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.

[grey-area]

It’d be an interesting exercise to just write it again yourself without referring to the LLM article then compare the two to see which bits of each are better. Yours would be shorter, but perhaps better and more honest?

[magic_hamster]

Just wanted to say don't worry about it too much. I do advocate for writing because I like it and I feel it rewards me. But you made a decision to do it a certain way and that's fine. Don't let people tear you down for this.

[Eisenstein]

I don't use AI for my writing and I agree with you. I meant that it is bad heuristic because people often do put a lot of effort into posts with AI writing styles in them, so it is not accurate due to a large amount of false positives. If one performs a test that is wrong a significant percentage of the time then it will be eventually abandoned.

[chrisjj]

> Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this.

No, do. Really.

[mapt]

The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph.

There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.

That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.

People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.

[benstopics]

I honestly get it. I wouldn't have made that comment but I get why it was made. It tells me I need to go back and put some more effort into it and clean it up. You know, in-between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and working on the actual game... Without Claude there would be no story to read. I pay Anthropic $200/mo and Claude is a robot. I don't think anyone shed a tear that I didn't put "coauthored by Claude" at the bottom.

[sokka_h2otribe]

It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude"

The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.

One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.

I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.

[benstopics]

Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.

[skystarmen]

There's no reason to be so nasty. The fact that it's currently on the top 5 posts on HN means you're dead wrong, he's not wasting anyone's time.

TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.

[baq]

The content isn’t low quality, though. The form got LLM signatures all over, but the story itself is quite interesting.

[infecto]

You’re wasting your time replying here. You should save it and stop.

[kolinko]

I, for one, enjoyed the read. Would love even more details though!

[duskdozer]

I don't, because I stopped reading after I recognized LLM output. You could basically take all the comments you wrote in this thread verbatim and it would still be better, even if there are some grammar errors here or there. Please give yourself more credit.

[SeanDav]

I.Don't.Care.

I enjoyed the narrative. It was true. Who cares if it was written by a ghost writer, an AI or anything else.

[oscaracso]

I did not read it because the prose was insipid. Maybe the project is interesting, but I won't know because I'm not going to read an infomercial. You must understand that this stuff is not to everyone's taste.

[kolinko]

So if something is written by an LLM it makes it an infomercial?

Also, what are you comparing this post to? Because you should compare it to the author’s own writing and according to the author, his writing is not that good.

[oscaracso]

If the author cannot write then he should not write.

[infecto]

Move along then? Anecdotal datapoint but all the anti LLM comments in here are a lot of less than a year old accounts.

If you don’t like something simply move along. Constructive criticism is great but the volume of overly negative and honestly nasty replies like yours are not in the spirit of HN.

[oscaracso]

>Constructive criticism is great

Good, I will continue to voice it. Unfortunately it takes me several thousand times longer to complain about AI slop polluting the bulletin than it does to populate the bulletin with AI slop, which is the actual nastiness going on here.

[infecto]

Nope the only nastiness is how critical mean you are in your replies. All it takes is a quick hey I appreciate the article but not the use of a LLM to write it. None of the other words you have used are in the spirit here. Move along.

[dmos62]

Thankfully you came up with this pulitzer prize of a comment all on your own, didn't you?

[stavros]

Can we stop with this? The world has changed, LLMs exist, people use them, and "omg LLMs" is a very tired trope now. If you didn't like the article, you can critique it, but "you used a tool I don't like" is just boring.

[duskdozer]

Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it? The fact is that generating large amounts of text without care or effort has become very easy, so it makes perfect sense to discard writing with LLM signatures.

[thaumasiotes]

> Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it?

The labor theory of value doesn't work in economics and it also doesn't work in literary criticism. You should spend time reading something if reading it is valuable. You shouldn't if it isn't.

[IshKebab]

The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess. Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.

Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.

[thaumasiotes]

> The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess.

This was true in the past, and is still true now.

> Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.

This isn't true now and wasn't true in the past.

[stavros]

Until recently, the only way to know whether the author put effort into writing the piece was to read it. Simply continue doing what you've always been doing.

[Marazan]

I personally find LLM text exceptionally boring and tiresome to read. It is often incredibly voluminous and filed with trite phrasing that turns a one sentence idea into 3 paragraphs of pablum.

Yes, this has been inspired by a senior management figure in my company posting a clearly LLM assited 500 word slack message that could have been 2 lines.

[stavros]

"I find this article exceptionally boring and tiresome to read" is fine. "This article was generated by an LLM, and therefore it will be boring and tiresome" is just bias.

[duskdozer]

How about people who want to spam LLM output just provide their input alongside the output? I'd be happy to read their input.

[Cruncharoo]

My thought is that if you don’t care enough to even write it then why should I care to read it? The answer for me is that I don’t.

[grey-area]

I and many others find it a useful warning. So I doubt people will stop noting it as part of a critique of things.

'You used a tool I don't like' is really missing the point.

'You generated text that is long and a bit boring and will probably include falsehoods.' is a more accurate description of why people pick up on this - the style is an indicator of using a tool that generates convincing garbage.

[rel_ic]

What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."

Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.

[elektronika]

It's tiresome. I would rather read the bullet points he fed in and be done.