[simonjgreen]

Certainly AI editorialised. I wonder if this is because English isn’t their first language, and they are confidence compensating. I’ve worked with a lot of folks also from Philippines and the Tagalog/English mix leads to some confidence challenges sometimes.

[thierrydamiba]

Recommend everyone take this test: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/09/business/ai-w...

You might be surprised…or you might not. I’ve found it’s a good barometer for whether you actually don’t like AI writing or you just don’t like bad AI writing.

[deaux]

1. This test has really zero to do with what we're talking about. Stylized fiction is a completely separate domain from non-fiction writing of personal anecdotes. There's effectively zero relation between them.

2. Picked the human 5 out of 5. Since it's pointless to take as a judge of preference due to 1), I took it as a test of "spot the AI", and clearly it was obvious to me in every instance.

3. Of course we just "don't like bad AI writing". "Good AI writing" would be unnoticeable. This is incredibly rare in the domain we're talking about.

[Groxx]

Small, pithy quotes vs dozens of paragraphs are rather different things.

It does not surprise me in the least that a machine can produce excellent small quotes. Markov chains have been production some fantastic stuff for decades, for example, and they're about as complicated as an abacus. https://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/

[gpderetta]

It seems I chose AI 5 times out of 5. I'm not a native speaker, so I might have preferred a slightly more straightforward text.

On one side, I think this suffers a lot from selection bias: short AI snippets specifically chosen by humans for their quality and they do not necessarily reflect the average experience of AI text. On the other hand, AI generated text does not preclude human editing.

[piperswe]

Spoilers:

Question 1 had such different styles. I preferred the style the AI was using, but that was purely a stylistic preference.

Question 3 was a toss-up. They both felt fine, and funny enough they both had a "not just X, it's Y" pattern.

Those were the only two where I clicked the AI version - for the other three, it was obvious which was AI.

[Suppafly]

This is like the coke vs pepsi tests, where people prefer pepsi when given a small amount but prefer coke in larger amounts. short snippets aren't a good test of anything useful.

[deafpolygon]

I got 4/5 human. #3 - I chose AI, it was very close.

I noticed something-humans will use words precisely and loosely at the same time. AI will seem like it’s precise but a lot of the wording it uses can be cut or replaced by something else without losing much meaning.

[somenameforme]

A few paragraphs isn't writing, it's a snippet. The shorter something is, the better AI will be at mimicking it, because underlying flaws are less likely to be made apparent.

Music is another great example of this. I enjoy techno/trance type stuff, but YouTube is becoming borderline unusable for this genre due to AI slop. You'd think AI would do a good job of producing tracks here since this genre is certainly somewhat formulaic. And about 2 minutes into a lengthy track I'd probably do relatively mediocrely at determining whether it was human or AI, but by about 10 minutes into a track it's often painfully obvious. I run this experiment regularly as I find myself having to skip the AI slop which YouTube seems obsessed with recommending anyhow.

Ironically AI is probably providing a boon to human DJs here, because actively seeking them out it is one of the only ways to escape YouTube's sloparithm.

[PinkMilkshake]

I preferred the AI 4 out of 5 times. That's a little confronting. And judging by the amount of cope in the comments section, others found it the same. I guess it is a small test, but I think it successfully makes it's point.

[avadodin]

All of the fragments read like bad slop.

I successfully chose the least democratically awful slop if that's an indication of anything.

[sdrothrock]

Two human editors. I'm one of them and I absolutely do not use AI tools when I edit.

If you're going off the use of emdashes and endashes, I've been using them for over 25 years.