[mananaysiempre]

> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.

> [...]

> I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.

> [...]

> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind.

> [...]

> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.

It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading.

And, I mean, none of these is even bad in isolation, but it sure feels like we’re due either a backlash where these patterns become underused even when appropriate, or them becoming so common they lose their power (is syntax subject to semantic bleaching?). Or perhaps both. Socioliguists are going to have a blast.

[fallpeak]

Have courage and trust your own instincts. Unless one is extremely disagreeable it's very tempting to hedge and avoid outright saying "this is AI" just in case you're wrong, but if you're literate and regularly exposed to AI outputs your instincts are likely quite accurate.

In this particular case the linked article is definitely AI generated.

[eterm]

Indeed, consider these two posts linked below also from this blog. They look the same, they maintain the same impersonal writing style. There's no humanity to it at all.

They maintain such a consistent paragraph length that they're either a professional copyeditor or, as is clearly the case, are an LLM.

Humans deviate a lot more than this, they use run on sentences or lose the thread in their writing.

This blog however reads like every-other post on LinkedIn. Semi-professional tone, with a strong "You, Me" hook to most posts.

I encourage everyone to make an LLM-generated blog, don't post the articles anywhere, but generate one, to get a feeling for how these things write.

Because this is unmistakably LLM. I'd even go so far as to identify the model of these particular posts as ChatGPT.

Yet when we point this out, we're told it is "unmistakably human" and that we're rude for pointing it out.

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-joy-of-a-simple-life-wi...

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/finding_flow_in_code.md

[joshka]

Is this comment LLM generated?

[fallpeak]

What does that have to do with anything? These days any piece of text may or may not be AI generated (my money would be heavily on "no" for the post you asked about), but either way it isn't blatant slop so we can't tell.

It feels like you're trying for a lazy gotcha, but the actual point here is something like "AI models often generate writing with specific noticeable characteristics that make it obviously AI output, and TFA is an instance of such writing, and this should be called out when possible"

[K0balt]

OTOH I’ve had blog posts I wrote two decades ago vehemently called out as AI generated. AI generated style unfortunately means writing that tested positively in human A/B testing, now over represented in a style used largely by AI.

So if you write in a way that engages the reader, you’re going to struggle not to use em dashes and the occasional a/b contrast, because those are challenging the reader to engage… but when overused, they not only don’t have the intended effect ( to break the reader out of passivity) , they also constitute a new kind of sin.

So no, don’t “trust your gut”. Trust the math. Is it too much? Or is it just trying to jar you out of not engaging with the prose?

But yeah, I’d say this article is likely written primarily with AI. Which doesn’t mean it’s not guided with intention and potentially important, it just means the article was probably commissioned and edited by a human, not written by one.

[KaiMagnus]

It's kind of funny when I open some books nowadays and the writing style and formatting just immediately scream LLM sometimes. Not because the book was AI-generated, most are too old, but because LLMs were simply trained on these exact books and are now reproducing their style, which I guess was either popular or selected during training.

Anyways, really hard to push through and I need to remind myself to judge the text by its meaning. But if it's some random blog, my "tolerance" is lower and I don't want to spend my time reading nonsense, I just can't stand the writing style anymore either.

[lelanthran]

> OTOH I’ve had blog posts I wrote two decades ago vehemently called out as AI generated. AI generated style unfortunately means writing that tested positively in human A/B testing, now over represented in a style used largely by AI.

Everytime I see this claim, I ask for links to those blog posts. I have yet to get any links to the so-called "human" pattern that AI uses.

[K0balt]

This blog of my idle musings, specifically, has been a source of call-outs. In articles from back in 2013 of all things. I also noticed that( ChatGPT?) seems to have replied to one of my latest (2023) posts, which I find odd and improbable

https://bogon-flux.blogspot.com

I get what you mean though, to me I don’t see the hallmarks of AI writing, but you will find the occasional em-dash and contrasted-constructions. I think some people see an em-dash and decide them and there that it’s AI generated, probably because they are illiterate by any reasonable measure of the term.

[bombcar]

I used an em-dash once in 1998 so you can't call all my AI slop out as AI slop.

Checkmate.

[mananaysiempre]

I started off hedging but by the end of the comment came to think that AI use—or lack thereof—was actually beside the point. I have feelings with regards to the situation where “the situation” includes some largely irrelevant-to-writing things like the mainframization and the “feelings” are not nearly coherent enough to graduate to thoughts. Thus (unlike some others) I don’t think that calling out writers or warning readers about AI is all that useful (or for that matter courageous). With respect to writers who use AI due to a lack of confidence, it’s probably even harmful. (Saying that as a person who manages to absolutely suck in embarrassing ways in multiple foreign languages. And also in English but less obviously. And likely in my native language too due to lack of use.) Meanwhile, TFA makes a decent point, and I am in no position to criticize people for being wordy.

The thing is, by now it doesn’t actually matter if AI or not AI or partly AI or whatever, because the record scratch is still there and still breaks my immersion. I could be oversensitive (I definitely am to some other English-language things, and also feel that others are to yet other things like em dashes), but it feels like there’s a new language/social-signalling thing now, and you may have to avoid it even if you’re not an LLM.

[mmooss]

> if you're literate and regularly exposed to AI outputs your instincts are likely quite accurate.

There's no basis for that. The reason experts - for example, scientists in their own field - use objective fact is because reasoning like the parent is highly unreliable. What evidence shows is that people way overestimate their own intuition. It's not 'courage', it's foolishness.

[fao_]

With the amount of AI-generated slop content on the front of HN these days, I'm honestly reconsidering visiting this site in the first place. What's the point? It seems better to curate RSS from existing known-good sources.

The art of essay-writing seems to not be something people here care about any more. If a human didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?! Just post up the bullet points you would feed the LLM, and let the people who want to do so, post it into their own LLMs so they can make the Content and shovel it into their eyeballs by themselves, instead.

[franga2000]

LLMs don't "own" this writing style. By definition they can't - they were trained on human writing after all! People wrote like this before and that's fine. You might not like the style, but saying it's because LLM writing has infested their brain is wrong, dismissive and dehumanising.

[dxdm]

Any style can cross the border into bad and get in the way of itself when it's turned up to 11, no matter who wrote it.

There've been stylistic fads before LLMs where a thing, with results just as chalkboard-screech-inducing as the current one. That this one is just a button-push away does make it worse, though, because it proliferates so greedily.

Bad writing is bad writing, and writing like an LLM is writing like an LLM. We should be able to call this out. In fact, calling out the human responsibility in it is the very opposite of dehumanizing to me.

[franga2000]

Yes, definitely, but the parent post was quite explicitly saying it was either LLM generated or the person's style was influenced by consuming LLM content.

Sure, call the style bad or even similar to LLMs, but there's no reason to believe the style came from LLMs. It existed before and people who used it before still exist and still use it now.

Hell, this person seems to be a web(site) developer, that's a very marketing-speak-heavy field. It's far morely likely that's where they "caught" thos style. It happened to me too back when I was still in it.

[dxdm]

I think the original comment is much more open-minded towards the author of the TFA than you are to the commenter.

> explicitly saying it was either LLM generated or the person's style was influenced by consuming LLM content

We might disagree here, but if we're strict they did not say "either/or", especially not explicitly. They raised two possibilities, but didn't exclude others.

> there's no reason to believe the style came from LLMs

They say "might" and "plausibly". I think there's no belief there until you assume it.

And even if: It's not unlikely that a contemporary author's mind is influenced by the prevalent LLM style. We are influenced by what we read. This has been happening to everyone for ages, without anyone questioning the agency of writers. There's nothing wrong with suggesting like that could be the case here. It's entirely human.

I know it's easy for one's mind to jump to conclusions, but I am not a fan of taking that as far as accusing someone of "dehumanizing" others. Such an escalation should ideally cause a pause and a think, before pressing submit.

[mananaysiempre]

Nah, the two possibilities were in fact exclusive in my mind (subject of course to the usual likelihood of any one thing I say being completely wrong, but that’s always in the background and not that useful to constantly point out). And it might be fair to say that it is unwise to attempt this kind of amateur psychoanalysis in public. It’s just that I don’t see being influenced by things you read as a big deal, let alone an accusation, let alone a dehumanizing one. See my neighbouring comment[1] for more on the last point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073567

[servo_sausage]

Only to a limited extent, the fine tuning of these models uses a much smaller more curated set to generate tone and defaults.

The whole corpus is in there, but the standard style is tuned for.

[watwut]

So I will say that things I read were not written in this style.

And people I read had better ability to not put in unneceasary random completely made up facts or illogical implications.

[piva00]

I wonder how much marketing copy has poisoned the "default" writing style of LLMs, it surely has those undertones of pitching a sale in an uncanny valley way.

[mananaysiempre]

LLMs don’t own these expressions in the same sense that McDonald’s doesn’t own salt: they are undoubtedly making use of a strong reaction that humans have had—have been having—long before; but they did develop a way to mash that button on an industrial scale like few before them. (With of course a great deal of help from humans, be it via customer surveys or RLHF; or you could call it help from Moloch[1] in that the humans unwittingly or negligently assembled themselves into a runaway optimizer.) So I think it’s fair to say that LLMs do own this style, as in the balance of ingredients, even if they do not own the ingredients themselves. And anyway nothing in the social perception of language cares about fairness: low-class English speakers did not invent negative agreement (“double negatives”), yet it will still sound low-class to you and even me (and my native language requires negative agreement).

As for being dehumanizing, perhaps I did commit the sin of psychoanalysis at a distance here, but I’ve felt enough loose wires sticking out of my brain’s own language production apparatus that I don’t think pointing out the mechanistic aspects reduces anyone’s humanity.

For instance, nobody can edit their own writing until they forget what’s in it—that’s why any publishing pipeline needs editors, and preferably two layers of them, because the first one, who edits for style and grammar, consequently becomes incapable of spotting their own mechanical mistakes like typos, transposed or merged words, etc. Ever spotted a bug in a code-review tool that you’ve read and overlooked a dozen times in your editor? Why does a change in font or UI cause a presumably rational human being to become capable of drawing logical inferences they were not before? In either case, there seems to be a conclusion cache of sorts that we can’t flush and can’t disable, requiring these sorts of actually quite expensive hacks. I don’t think this makes us any less human, and it pays to be aware of your own imperfections. (Don’t merge your copy- and line editors into a single position, please?..)

As for syntactic patterns, I’ve quite often thought of a slick way to phrase things and then realized that I’d used it three times in as many sentences. On some occasions I’ve needed to literally grep every linking word in my writing to make sure I haven’t used a single specific one five times in a row. If you pay attention during meetings or presentations, you’ll notice that speakers (including me!) will very often reuse the question’s phrasing word for word regardless of how well it fits, without being aware of it in the slightest. (I’m now wondering if lawyers and witnesses train to avoid this.) Language production is stupidly taxing on the brain (or so I’ve heard), so the brain will absolutely take every possible shortcut whether we want it to or not.

Thus I expect that the priming effect I’m alleging can be very real even before getting into equally real intangibles like “taste”. I don’t think it dehumanizes anyone; you could say it dehumanizes everyone equally instead, but my point of view is that being aware of these mechanical realities of the mind is essential to competent writing (or thinking, or problem solving) in the same way that being aware of mechanical realities of the body is essential to competent dancing (or fighting, or doing sports). A bit of innocence lost is a fair trade for the wisdom gained.

(Not that I claim to be a particularly good writer.)

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[xtiansimon]

> “…there’s this record-scratch feeling…”

The op is a blog post. You’re talking about blog post writing. Maybe you just don’t like their style?

It’s also true llm second drafts are a thing.

And it’s true both can ‘record scratch’ you right out of attention.

As well as the now present trend as readers to be impatient and quickly bored.

And this criticism of writing style (for my take this article is perfectly readable)—what is the aim? Call for writers to perform some kind of disclosure? Because without a goal, it sounds like complaining you don’t like the soup.

[sebzim4500]

None of that feels like AI smell to me despite the "it's not X it's Y" framing. I can't really explain why though.

[delusional]

None of those 4 look like AI slop to me. They lack the strange non-sequitur nature these contrasting statements generally have when made by AI. The version of the third example I would expect from a clanker would be more like

> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about novelty of talking to a machine

Which of course doesn't connect to the rest of the article contents, because the AI doesn't have any intention in its writing.

[xigoi]

I hate AI slop, but I also hate the HN trend of “this article uses a rhetorical device, therefore it’s AI-generated.”

[Legend2440]

The hilarious irony of AI-generating an article about overusing AI.