Can we get over the detective work about if the text was written by LLM or not in 2026 already ? This is a lost cause, and we could instead focus on substance over syntax.
Not OP but my frustrations come from it being impossible to ignore and outright distracting.
I've found the same thing showing with Claude-coded/designed front ends that overuse the same semi-monospaced fonts, Blue/Yellow/Red palette and rounded corner borders. It isn't that it is bad, but it often isn't fit for purpose.
You're right it wont change anything, but authors shouldn't be surprised when people who care about their time/attention comment on low/no effort pieces.
No but it's a useful shorthand to describe a type of bad writing.
I also think that people should focus on substance and not if AI was used, but AI writes like shit and I find myself retching a bit when I have to read long AI-written documents. Do they say something useful? Maybe, but when my eyes are glazing over because it's just so exhausting trying to parse what's written, I can't tell.
I certainly think less of people when they have such poor taste that they think writing like that is acceptable.
Slop is slop. When the “it works but isn’t great” phrases end up slipping into a strong conceptual core, it compromises the perception of the ideas.
Perhaps our AI will cater to us by rewriting the content we read, and each of us intermediate all communication with systems that make that slop bearable.
Or perhaps, we learn that we kinda still need to give a shit when writing to land on the perception we’re trying to create within our readers
To be fair internet (or rather shovelware websites like Medium) were already flooded by crap articles based on a set of templates. Of course the issue is that LLMs are actually better than the robot-humans who used to write them so now it takes more time until you figure whether it’s worth reading or not..
To me it's a useful signal not to read an article that someone didn't bother to write.
Which is a shame as real insights are buried inside some of these articles, which if the author bothered to write in his own words could have reached an audience that would have appreciated them.
Writing is one of the areas where I want no LLM involvement.
The number of things that make it to the top of HN/Reddit/wherever now that are devoid a human's touch is exhausting. Whether it's a site that's got that Claude frontend smell, or a repo that's got a burst of 10 claude commits before getting shared and abandoned, or a series of blog posts that were written by LLMs... it's all, at this point, a flag for me that the human behind the LLM doesn't really want to engage with others or share; in some ways it dehumanises their entire (supposed) audience.
IDK. Maybe having Claude contribute writing about something novel to the general blogosphere is useful in some dimension, but it usually gives me no confidence in the truth of the post.
More often it's the difference between finishing something and not finishing it - so often LLM's are helping them reach an audience that would appreciate them, even if that audience doesn't include you
I agree with the copy-pasted slop that you see sometimes, that is probably generated from a short prompt and therefore has no real substance to it.
If an article has interesting content (which comes from an human) and the LLM is just used to help the author finish off the article, I don't have any problem with that.
Labeling both scenarios in the same category feels completely wrong to it, as equating vibe coded stuff (as in no human ever read the produced code) and agent-assisted good old software engineering
The problem is that the second you suspect something is written by AI, its a pretty good signal that 50-80% of the text is empty of meaning. Maybe that will change, but LLMs are terrible and inefficient writers.
Only so much time in the day, its a quick signal to not waste anymore of it.
Correct. AI == Credibility hit and it's increasing as more humans get used to feeling they are AI slop consumers, not worth the time for genuine human engagement. Human engagement costs are increasing. Amazing to read/watch.
It's not about figuring out if it's LLM written though. The style is hard to read and annoying. With the kind of sentences GP was talking about it's actually harder to get the substance.
Yes, as soon as models come out that can write properly, we'll all instantly get over it. Until then we'll be having this discussion over and over, as many times as it is necessary.
Evaluating substance takes time - perhaps more than was invested in the article to begin with. So these tells are very distracting because as soon as I see them I wonder if the person who prompted the LLM even bothered to read the output. If they haven't, then I certainly shouldn't invest the time to determine if there is any substance.
No. As a human I like reading human written text over computer written text. I want something a human composed with thought put into it. Not something a human tried to save time with by having the machine write it.
It's not detective work, it is literally blatantly obvious and impossible to ignore.
And no we can't get over it either. But I already have talked about that before and said roughly all I have to say on that front, so I'm just going to link back to my last comment regarding this.
But it's not about whether it was AI or human authored. That misses the point. We're all fatigued on the writing style. The same cadence and patterns; the same phrases and terms like "load-bearing". Used everywhere, they create a super fatiguing monoculture in all the writing. It's like if every illustration on the internet suddenly contained Garfield the cat.
I have a counter proposition: don't fall for this constant suggestion that LLMs are an unavoidable future would you leave the techbros alone now pretty please, relentlessly keep reminding that we still don't think it's acceptable so people don't start to think this is okay since nobody complains anymore.
I appreciate these comments, they save me time for procrastinating elsewhere.
I agree with this sentiment: it’s not inevitable if we relentlessly ostracize obviously LLM posts
And let’s be real: I had a post this year that was #1 on HN for a while, and an LLM “wrote” the whole thing, but it was very much my writing style and NO ONE called out the post as LLM slop. If you use an LLM correctly for writing, it’s not detectable. It seems that most folks don’t go through that effort.
I've found the same thing showing with Claude-coded/designed front ends that overuse the same semi-monospaced fonts, Blue/Yellow/Red palette and rounded corner borders. It isn't that it is bad, but it often isn't fit for purpose.
You're right it wont change anything, but authors shouldn't be surprised when people who care about their time/attention comment on low/no effort pieces.