Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by willquack 12 days ago
> If a tool marks 40% of new papers as machine-written but also marks 20% of papers written before ChatGPT existed, the real story is the 20% nobody mentioned.

When 65% of the papers you read have the characteristics of being AI written, whether or not you use AI to write, your writing will be influenced by the AI style. I imagine this must be particularly the case for newbie researchers who are still developing their writing style
2 comments
aionwikipedia 11 days ago
even if your writing is influenced by "the AI style," it would likely only show up in patches, a word or rhetorical flourish maybe, but AI-generated text doesn't "sound like AI" in patches, it does so consistently across the entirety of the output. it's very hard for a person to maintain the syntactical patterns of AI writing over an extended period of time unless they know exactly what those are -- probably more knowledge than any person currently has, really -- and are applying a level of detail to each clause comparable to forging a painting.

there's also the fact that "the AI style" has changed over time. for instance, the word "delve" is notorious as an "AI sign," which it was up until mid-2024, at which point it dropped off sharply and has now basically disappeared from LLM output. so if someone happened to pick that up due to reading it everywhere, their writing is now less characteristic of AI, not more.

link
serial_dev 12 days ago
I might be missing something but what’s the real story of the 20%.

To me it sounds like 1. Either your tool is just not that good and reliable as you thought, 2. AI is trained on human written articles, so some of that human written content informed the now established “AI slop”.

There are people who shipped “slop” before AI.

link
cisophrene 11 days ago
> There are people who shipped “slop” before AI.

The funny thing is that "slop" was defined by the writing habits of AI model, which we have learned to pick upon and recognize.

The "It's not X, it's Y", the rhetorical questions and other patterns would have been the tools of a skilled writer, and those people writing "like AI" before AI most likely would have been recognized as such.

link