Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgoulter | Hacker News Reader

Examples of LLM-style text: short & punchy sentences, negative parallelism ("not just X, it's Y"), bullet points especially with emojis and bolded text. Overuse of em-dash.

This is a good list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

It's one thing to observe "LLM-generated writing all looks the same". Whether the LLMs were all post-trained the same way is a different question.

I don't agree "everyone says everything is AI". Do you have examples where a consensus of people are accusing something of being AI generated, where it lacks those indicators?

View on HN

I consistently get accused of AI writing, but I’m not really sure why. I use spellcheck, that’s about it. Although I am a fan of an appropriately used em-dash, I don’t really follow the other patterns. I also find that people say that as a form of character assassination though, literally denying your humanity lol.

Many of those rules are kind of hazy though. Curly Quotes, em-dash, etc are also signs of using MS Word for writing for examples.

It's our fault—we've all been overusing emojis and the em—dash for years.

I know exactly what you mean ^_^ honestly — and I’m saying this with a certain satisfaction — it’s been difficult to stop smiling :)

It’s not slop — it’s inspiration!

Just reading through posts on here about various blogs/posts/opinion pieces there always seems to be a handful of people that jumps to "this is AI". And maybe it is! But the driving force behind this seems not to be to identify that something is AI, but because they spite it so (AI writing), to quickly rule out caring about the material if identified as AI slop.

The problem I see this leading to is plenty of legitimate written things getting thrown away because somebodys online exposure bubbles don't end up including a lot of Medium or Tumblr or a certain Discord or whatever bubble where _huge_ groups of people actually are writing in whatever $STYLE is being identified by the reader and commenter as AI. Which then, because of their post, also gets other people to not even look.

It seems like a disaster, frankly.

> But the driving force behind this seems not to be to identify that something is AI, but because they spite it so (AI writing), to quickly rule out caring about the material.

Your expressed concern is "people don't like AI; this dislike motivates people to dismiss the material".

I think it's misguided to assume motivation.

For myself, I dislike the writing style because it's insincere and inauthentic. If the author isn't motivated enough to write out something in their own words, what's there to motivate a reader?

> The problem I see this leading to is plenty of legitimate written things getting thrown away because somebodys online exposure bubbles don't end up

Do you have any actual examples where legitimate writing was dismissed as written by AI? If not, I'd suggest your concern is hypothetical.

I believe the same depth as your comment is a comment from another person who also writes like this.

And yes, I'm not writing a research paper, I'm posting a comment. Full Disclaimer for those not paying attention, this is an Opinion.

One: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44807103

Two: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44807541

Reply on news.ycombinator.com