[mapontosevenths]

This was not AI, or at least was only proofread/edited by AI.

More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?

This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.

Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.

Read more books people!

[simonw]

"They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have."

Right. That's one of the suspicious things here. They're phrased in the way that an LLM might write if you told it to imitate Pratchett.

Edit: that's effectively what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070

> I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made.

[mpalmer]

Do not bring literacy into this; because the sufficiently careful reading of the post surfaces multiple ridiculous (worse, witless) passages no person would write. How closely did you read it?

    There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

Pratchett would not have mixed the metaphors of memories being furniture and also people who kick over furniture. An LLM would/did absolutely make this mistake, given that Pratchett quote as a prompt.

    The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further up.

Ah yes, that familiar old way the Watch books always occupy a shelf that is simultaneously the same and also higher up. And never mind that the Watch books are newer...

[Ekaros]

Feels weird. There is not that much books between The Colour of Magic and Guards! Guards!. So as engineer I would fully expect them to be on same shelf. Or the later book being on lower one due to the usual western sorting of left to right top to bottom... Unless you go for alphabetical sort I suppose...

[simonw]

Yeah, the more attention you pay to this piece the more obvious the slop becomes. I'm quite upset it caught me out at first.

[booleandilemma]

I've never read any of Pratchett's books. Why does he know more about furniture than most people?

[celsius1414]

The first paragraph, and the one directly above the one about knowing more about furniture:

> There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

[dfxm12]

Interesting. Which philosophers have this theory?

[booleandilemma]

Yeah I read that. It doesn't mean he knows more about furniture than most. I agree with rogual, it looks nonsensical.

[Scarblac]

I interpreted as saying he knows a lot about different kinds of ideas / memories / things in the head.

[spacedcowboy]

Look up the definition of metaphor in a dictionary. Hint: nothing here is referring to furniture.

[booleandilemma]

Why are you being mean? Honest question. Why? What's the point?

Furthermore, and more importantly, why are you defending slop?

Look up the definition of kindness in a dictionary sometime.

[threethirtytwo]

Because the objective truth is that what the LLM or author outputted was CLEARLY only using furniture as a metaphor. The metaphor wasn't good but HNers are taking it completely out of context. There's nothing mean here. Just objective facts.

[krisoft]

> Why are you being mean?

They are not. They are blunt.

> why are you defending slop?

Because they don’t believe it is slop. They believe you are unable to comprehend a not too advanced literary device and based on that accusing that the text is slop.

On the topic of kindness: You might be right and it is AI generated slop. You might be wrong. If you are wrong what you are doing is deeply and utterly unkind. Not calling out the other commenter, but calling the writing slop.

It has happened with me before. I wrote a comment on reddit with my own hands and own mind and commenters accused me of being a bot. There is nothing more rage inducing. How can one respond to that? Have you thought that maybe that is what you just did? Are you 100% sure that it is slop?