I had read 80% of the post and loved it. Then I came to see few comments - Saw yours and now having difficulty reading further. That means:
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content
2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
I feel like the author wrote like the full plan/ substance himself, and gave to an AI the formatting. It's quite fine for me so actually, as long as the substance make sense/is logical.
Some of the headings are very AI-cliche: "Hospitality Is a Dialogue, Service Is a Monologue"; "AI Raises the Floor. Humans Raise the Ceiling"; "Your Employees Are the Moat. The Compounding Is Invisible."
The author didn't use headings like that in their 2024 blog posts.
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
If that was written by a human, it's embarrassing.
I can only speak for myself here, but if I feel like I've read a whole paragraph that should have been half a sentence, that's my signal there's possibly AI generated content in there
I have definitely noticed other people using LLM-choice words, myself included, more frequently. It's a strange phenomenon to witness. Obviously the models got them from us first so there must've been some popularity there prior, but the boost is clear. Blast radius, load-bearing, shape, and so on. Or maybe they were always there and my confirmation bias is in high gear.
One I've started noticing is the "quotation marks around a phrase awkwardly trying to bundle a concept" thing. Like all LLM cliches it's something that has been used in writing for a long time, but I've seen it so much more recently. I think lots of people have picked this up from seeing LLMs use it. But like you said, who knows.
I do have a sneaking suspicion it's a mix of things, I'm at the point now that I do get a bit of an odd feeling whenever I'm reading AI produced content
I suspect over time it will get good enough that I'll need a larger sample size to identify it, however that won't solve what I think of as the "why does this need to exist" problem, I've noticed that a fair bit of AI content hits that mark, it can be fun, but I've not experienced that feeling of engaging with something that's been well thought out / executed, maybe we'll hit that point[0], but I suspect it will take a while
How does Pangram detect this? How do we know this is any more reliable than just asking any HN user to judge a text for AI signs, i.e. how is this more authoritative than the comments you're responding to?
Since I couldn't be bothered, I had AI read it and tell me the outcome: they did in fact go to online-only bookings, freeing the staff from the phones so they could help customers more.
I always wonder how people can tell. For this particular article, was it the thirty-four occurrences of em dashes with spaces on either side? Something else obvious?
It is the em dashes and the excessive wordiness as well as a lot of "not this, but that".
Eg:
"Not dramatically. Just quietly. " -- This is filler words. Whether it's dramatic or quiet has no relevance to the point they're making.
It also loves threes: "Well-modelled, properly sourced, beautifully visualised to requirements" - again, all irrelevant. The point they're making is that it's measuring the wrong thing, not that "beautifully visual things can be incorrect".
"There’s a piece of this conversation that most leaders miss, and it’s the part I care about most" - this hook of "most people miss" it is very common in AI writing.
It was the content. So many very specific claims with no source, just stuff being made up. I don't know who Brené Brown is, perhaps she specifically researches trust, but how curious that her daughter can raise a problem with trust, specifically cite two named behaviours that build trust, and then Brown just happens to have a database of trust-building behaviours to hand, that she hasn't even analysed, ready to output a teachable moment.
In the article, she wasn't introduced as a researcher at all, but suddenly "She went back to her research data...". This totally smells like an LLM refactor where it re-emits surface level details, but completely misses the key beats that tie ideas together across a story.
Articles of this type suggest a fun game: "LLM or Marketroid?" Because either one could have written it, and both are capable of about equivalent levels of original thought. (whoops did i just say that out loud)
I personally thought to myself "written by AI" after this part:
... the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door. In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
I'm sure some people write this way, but most don't. And AI writes this way.
Well, sometimes there's flat-out nonsense that seems to have been written purely to back into the author's thesis:
You cannot design an algorithm that eavesdrops on dinner conversation and dispatches someone to buy a street hot dog, because the person on the receiving end would immediately sense the machinery of it.
But usually there's also:
- Word count hovering between four and five thousand words
- Dramatic/narrative section titles
- "No X, no Y. Just Z"
Last but certainly not least, there's the Lists of Exactly Three Things. I counted literally thirty in this piece. Examples:
- "...the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
- "Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?"
- "You can’t purchase it, automate it, or accelerate it with a clever marketing campaign."
- "...forgive outages, laugh off a late delivery, stay through a price increase."
- "...the food arrives hot, the bill is accurate, the room is clean."
- "You notice, you adjust, you respond."
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content 2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
Anyway I did love the content.