[embedding-shape]

Any specific sections that stick out? Juxt in the past had really great articles, even before LLMs, and know for a fact they don't lack the expertise or knowledge to write for themselves if they wanted and while I haven't completely read this article yet, I'd surprise me if they just let LLMs write articles for them today.

[croemer]

Here's one tell-tale of many: "No alarm, no program light."

Another one: "Two instructions are missing: [...] Four bytes."

One more: "The defensive coding hid the problem, but it didn’t eliminate it."

[monooso]

That's just writing. I frequently write like that.

This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

[croemer]

These are just some of the good examples I found.

My hunch that this is substantially LLM-generated is based on more than that.

In my head it's like a Bayesian classifier, you look at all the sentences and judge whether each is more or less likely to be LLM vs human generated. Then you add prior information like that the author did the research using Claude - which increases the likelihood that they also use Claude for writing.

Maybe your detector just isn't so sensitive (yet) or maybe I'm wrong but I have pretty high confidence at least 10% of sentences were LLM-generated.

Yes, the stylistic patterns exist in human speech but RLHF has increased their frequency. Also, LLM writing has a certain monotonicity that human writing often lacks. Which is not surprising: the machine generates more or less the most likely text in an algorithmic manner. Humans don't. They wrote a few sentences, then get a coffee, sleep, write a few more. That creates more variety than an LLM can.

Fun exercise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AI_or_not_quiz

[monooso]

Here's an alternative way of thinking about this...

Someone probably expended a lot of time and effort planning, thinking about, and writing an interesting article, and then you stroll by and casually accuse them of being a bone idle cheat, with no supporting evidence other than your "sensitive detector" and a bunch of hand-wavy nonsense that adds up to naught.

[xmcqdpt2]

To start, this is more or less an advertising piece for their product. It's pretty clear that they want to sell you Allium. And that's fine! They are allowed! But even if that was written by a human, they were compensated for it. They didn't expend lots of effort and thinking, it's their job.

More importantly, it's an article about using Claude from a company about using Claude. I think on the balance it's very likely that they would use Claude to write their technical blog posts.

[monooso]

> They didn't expend lots of effort and thinking, it's their job.

Your job doesn't require you to think or expend effort?

[kenjackson]

While I agree with the sentiment, using AI to write the final draft of the article isn’t cheating. People may not like it, but it’s more a stylistic preference.

[TylerE]

Using AI and a human byline is 100% cheating.

[bookofjoe]

Yet another way the mere possibility of AI/LLM being involved diminishes the value of ALL text.

If there is constant vigilance on the part of the reader as to how it was created, meaning and value become secondary, a sure path to the death of reading as a joy.

[NetMageSCW]

Those aren’t good examples - that’s just LLMs living for free in your head.

[oscaracso]

I am reminded of the Simpsons episode in which Principal Skinner tries to pass off the hamburgers from a near-by fast food restaurant for an old family recipe, 'steamed hams,' and his guest's probing into the kitchen mishaps is met with increasingly incredible explanations.

[aionwikipedia]

This is a myth. At least one study (Juzek/Ward) has shown that these stylistic patterns do not appear nearly as often either in well-known datasets of English language -- including datasets restricted to specific dialects of English. They don't even appear as often in text generated by raw language models. When they start showing up is after the model has undergone RLHF. Think of the Fermi paradox: if there are all these people who write like AI, then where are they?

AI writing also tends to show these indicators over and over, consistently, over passages of text. It is very hard for humans, even if they are really familiar with AI writing, to be that consistent, and almost impossible for them to be that consistent for more than a sentence or two. Writing a long blog post by hand that is believably "AI-written" takes the amount of purposeful skill you'd need to forge an entire painting or ancient document.

The problem is that people either look for the wrong things, look for obsolete things ("delve" is dead and modern LLMs have killed it), or extrapolate things from indicators that are extremely narrow and specific.

[gcr]

See also: “I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me” by Marcus Olang', https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

For what it’s worth, Pangram reports that Marcus’ article is 100% LLM-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/640288b9-e16b-4f76-a730-8000...

[croemer]

In theory, wouldn't be too hard be to settle the question if whether he used ChatGPT to write it: get Olang to write a few paragraphs by hand, then have people judge (blindly) if it's the same style as the article. Which one sounds more like ChatGPT.

[embedding-shape]

The times I've written articles, and those have gone through multiple rounds of reviews (by humans) with countless edits each time, before it ends up being published, I wonder if I'd pass that test in those cases. Initial drafts with my scattered thoughts usually are very different from the published end results, even without involving multiple reviewers and editors.

[jmalicki]

When people judge blindly, the are more likely to think the human is the AI and the AI is the human.

73% judged GPT 4.5 (edit: had incorrectly said 4o before)to be the human.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

Not only are people bad at judging this, but are directionally wrong.

[nothinkjustai]

There is research showing the contrary that is far more convincing:

> Our experiments show that annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks excel at detecting AI-generated text, even without any specialized training or feedback. In fact, the majority vote among five such “expert” annotators misclassifies only 1 of 300 articles, significantly outperforming most commercial and open-source detectors we evaluated even in the presence of evasion tactics like paraphrasing and humanization.

https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v2

[brookst]

I’m so glad the witch hunt has moved on to phrasing so I get less grief for my em dashes.

[nothinkjustai]

No, it’s pretty obviously AI written. Not sure why you’re running so much interference for them…are you affiliated with this company?

[360MustangScope]

I hate that I can’t write em dashes freely anymore without people accusing the writing of being AI generated.

Even though they are perfect for usage in writing down thoughts and notes.

[d1sxeyes]

One thing you can try⸺admittedly it's not quite correct⸺is replacing them with a two-em dash. I've never seen an AI use one, and it looks pretty funky.

[Majromax]

Since the advantage of standards is that there are so many to choose from, one lesser-used but still regionally acceptable approach (e.g. https://www.alberta.ca/web-writing-style-guide-punctuation#j...) is to use en-dashes offset with spaces.

[croemer]

I have nothing against em dashes. As long as your writing is human, experienced readers will be able to tell it's human. Only less experienced ones will use all or nothing rules. Em dashes just increase the likelihood that the text was LLM generated. They aren't proof.

[brookst]

That nuance is lost on the majority of anti-AI folks who’ve learned they get positive social reactions by declaring essentially everything to be AI written and condemnable.

“An em dash… they’re a witch!”… “it’s not just X, it’s Y… they’re a witch!”

[andersonpico]

> anti-AI folks who’ve learned they get positive social reactions by declaring essentially everything to be AI written and condemnable.

that's a strawman alright; all the comments complaining how they can't use their writing style without being ganged up on are positive karma from my angle, so I'm not sure the "positive social reactions" are really aligned with your imagination. Or does it only count when it aligns with your persecution complex?

[NetMageSCW]

Evidently there are no experienced readers who post AI accusations.

[gopher_space]

Same weight as "there are no experienced men who'll ask a woman if she's pregnant."

[NetMageSCW]

Why do you care what others accuse you of?

[tapoxi]

This is my exact writing style - I'm screwed.

[croemer]

I doubt you write like that. Where can I find your writing other than your comments which IMO don't read like the blog post?

[NetMageSCW]

Justify your doubt.

[TruffleLabs]

This is just writing; terse maybe and maybe not grammatically correct, but people write like that.

[croemer]

It's not just terseness, it's the rhythm and "it's not x, it's y".

In fact, the latter is the opposite of terseness. LLMs love to tell you what things are not way more than people do.

See https://www.blakestockton.com/dont-write-like-ai-1-101-negat...

(The irony that I started with "it's not just" isn't lost on me)

[wk_end]

> (The irony that I started with "it's not just" isn't lost on me)

But an LLM wouldn't write "It's not just X, it's the Y and Z". No disrespect to your writing intended, but adding that extra clause adds just the slightest bit of natural slack to the flow of the sentence, whereas everything LLMs generate comes out like marketing copy that's trying to be as punchy and cloying as possible at all times.

[djmips]

"Here’s how the bug might have manifested."