[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.