One of the recent AI tells other than em dash is the excessive usage of hyphenated words:
> multi-tenant-safe cache keys
> on a server-rendered app
> byte-for-byte identical (classic)
> gets a cache-speed response
> cached-file-extensions list
Honestly, this is terrible. I had to add a "use simple words only, don't hyphenate unnecessarily" warning to my Claude config. After a full day of work, having to read these Claudisms all the time make a noticeable difference on how tired you get. It gets even worse when Claude starts to make up its own vocabulary.
Fuck, I spent all these years developing a thoughtful writing style that leaned toward clarity for the reader, even if it meant extra work to achieve precision, or adding affordances like “excessive” hyphenation, and now I guess have to learn to write worse.
There is a world of difference between well-written human text and sloppy walls of AI-generated text. There's nothing wrong in using hyphenations or emdashes -- I use them myself! That's not the point of my comment.
Whether we like it or not, em dashes are effectively verboten in online discussions and blog posts if you want people to take you seriously. If the idea that excessive hyphenation is an AI tell gains traction, it too will become impossible to use without ruining your credibility.
This is not true. I regularly get HN front page hits, and still use em dashes. Nobody accuses me of AI writing. Writing with em dashes is not a problem if you have something to say.
What does it mean when prompting SoTA LLMs prone to slop to be concise and precise, with respect to context at hand, not work at all? Anyone benchmarking that?
I think it’s exceedingly unlikely for a good-faith reader to mistake good-faith human writing for AI writing.
Even if you use em dashes and a few phrases that have become associated with AI writing, there’s still an unmistakeable sense of how much effort was put into the writing.
But I suppose there might be naive readers who don’t know how to spot this effort and would false positive on em dashes or supposed AI phrases.
Don't change. The homogenous way LLMs write is just tiresome and boring, like if every movie stared Ryan Reynolds - an actor famous for having no range. Ryan Reynolds is enjoyable to watch on occasion, but I don't want everything I watch to be Ryan Reynolds.
Yeah, I mean, slop is easily recognisable by structure and content. But the obvious "markers" everyone claims (emdashes, hyphenation, etc), are just the writing style taught in the predominantly ex-British-colonial schools where the labellers were educated
I have used em dashes extensively — for at least a decade — and I also generously apply hyphens when it makes sense to do so as well. You people are about as annoying as the grammar nazis on IRC in the '90s, except you're saying that prose is less readable because a large language model has been trained on nearly the sum total of human knowledge and found that em dashes are used extensively in the highest rated prose and therefore must be the correct choice to make.
Also, most engineers will likely just be skimming this article before feeding it into their harness to implement the changes anyway, so it makes sense for it to be more heavy on context than it would be if meant for only humans to consume.
They could just feed an llm a small corpus of past human authored posts from their site, and have the LLM rewrite it in a style matching style, and it would likely turn out pretty great.
"slop" doesn't mean "AI generated content", it means bad content, a waste of the reader's time. Grantparent's implication is that your comment was bad content, not that it was AI generated bad content.
Not the original commenter; but, at least for me, the idea is that when it’s written by humans we know that effort and care were put into communicating the news. Otherwise they could post a link to the docs and we could ask my flavor of LLM to summerize. No need for extra filler content. That why it’s slop and it’s different.
I don’t have access to my flavor of LLM on the train nor the time or budget to have it do the research and summary for me
Why are we all of a sudden pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art or even that effort and care was put into them? In most cases they were significantly less coherent and incomplete. Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
Because we add humans enjoy variety. I read for entertainment, even technical posts like this one that I have no use for. I often trying to think about what the author may have been thinking when writing, why they introduced concepts in a specific order, what ideas might they have omitted, etc. It's personal and enjoyable. But now, when I detect the familiar writing style of what seems to be a gpt 5 model, that "parasocial" connection dies.
The LLM explained the core concept and features very well. But it was dull and boring to me, as I already have to read this writing style at work pretty much all day every day.
I hear you, and agree with your points, but do have to ask - what’s the point in complaining? See LLM slop as you called it, ignore it and move on. There’s plenty of more intimately authored content out there.
>I don’t have access to my flavor of LLM on the train nor the time or budget to have it do the research and summary for me
Aren't you gonna let the LLM develop for you anyway? Why bother writing and reading a post at all?
> pretending like pre-LLM era blogs were these pristinely well written pieces of art
The point is the effort and care that the writer puts which differentiates it from automatically generated text. That matters because a human can sympathize and that leads to better understanding and greater connection. That's why a post is written.
> Don’t get me started on the mess that was the communication of this particular company or one of their competitors like AWS.
And we criticize those as well. Nothing's changed. Yesterday's bad content is today's slop (plus a mind boggling amount of investment, corruption and environmental side effects).
Honestly sounds to me like you have a bone to pick with AI in general. Negative sentiment on a particular LLM authored blog post muddies the waters and misrepresents your valid points. Not the way to do this IMO. Happy to be corrected.
> multi-tenant-safe cache keys
> on a server-rendered app
> byte-for-byte identical (classic)
> gets a cache-speed response
> cached-file-extensions list
Honestly, this is terrible. I had to add a "use simple words only, don't hyphenate unnecessarily" warning to my Claude config. After a full day of work, having to read these Claudisms all the time make a noticeable difference on how tired you get. It gets even worse when Claude starts to make up its own vocabulary.