Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rafterydj 20 days ago
is the author of this post in thread? i do not like the AI voice it reads like.
2 comments

I didn't notice any obvious markers, weird prose, or meandering in this one.
It's clearly written by AI. I find it interesting that some people recognize it immediately and others do not. I don't know what to make of it.
Yep. Very slop-like. I found it grating and had to stop reading, even though I thought the subject was interesting.
I made it through because the content was interesting, but I am definitely not going to read more from this author because the AI-wordsmithing is so grating (I read loads of it at work, don't need to read any more of it).
No it's not, your detector is broken.
Seems like yours is?

FWIW, on your own blog, the most recent post also reads as at least AI helped "Navigator Theory". This sentence in particular sticks out: "They affect what the person notices, what they dismiss, what they measure, what they trust, and what they do when reality pushes back."

The one earlier post I read does not ("toxicity of ideas").

And fwiw, online detectors seems to agree with my own judgement here.

I am absolutely shocked and freaked out by the number of long lived accounts on this thread that can't detect the fact that this is Ai composed.
Cunningham's law. :)
It absolutely was written with Claude. There are so many Claude-isms in the second half that it was hard for me to digest, despite enjoying the ideas.
Like what?
> Hesiod felt it. Plato theorized it. Polybius mechanized it. Sallust prosecuted it (while guilty). Ibn Khaldun put it on a timer. Five civilizations, twenty-one centuries, one diagnosis. The only thing missing was proof.

> For most of history, “too many assholes ruin everything” remained a vibe. A well-documented, five-civilization vibe, but a vibe. Then, in the twentieth century, it became math.

> Sallust, it turns out, was doing game theory in a toga. He just didn’t have the notation.

> That’s not my characterization — it’s the title of the paper. And the researchers defined the term with clinical precision

> That single belief turns out to be a genetic marker. Everything else travels with it.

^^ that one in particular is a VERY strong Claude-ism

> Now, the finding inside the finding

> The study is not a catalog of monsters [...] It’s a measurement [...] with polling-grade precision

> Political violence wasn’t rhetorical; it was a body count

There are a lot in here, I could keep going...

It's rather full of "it's not X, it's Y" and expository paragraph followed by short sentence counter-point, and "read that again".

But no, I don't think it's AI, I think it's just written in a style that happens to be an attractor for LLMs.

I also got strong AI vibes, but I enjoyed the content. I thought it was a interesting summary of topics I've read many times before and even if the content was AI-assisted, does it matter? It seems there was a strong guiding hand in presenting a popular topic in a new way.
It matters because I don't like the style. I wouldn't like it if a human wrote it. I don't like the style so much that I won't read things written with it.

So maybe she had something interesting to say, but it was not communicated to me because I bounced.

And then you came to tell the rest of us that "you did not read it?" Why do that?
I would believe she wrote it in this style if you can point to any of her writing pre 2022 that is similar in style.

Does that exist? Genuinely curious.

“Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books.”
All of her books seem to be children's books and many of the 13 are illustrator credits.

I found this blog from late 2021: https://medium.com/grimhistorian/coffee-the-sexiest-drink-in...

I can only see the beginning of it, but to me the style is obviously different from the thread's linked article.

That would be disappointing, as the author is a fairly known writer.