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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the “No _____. No _____. Just the ______.” is such a dead ringer for AI writing these days that I just ignore any writing that features it.

If you don’t care about your craft as a writer to the extent that you can’t even realize how straight-out-of-a-LLM your writing sounds, I’m not going to care about it either.

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Every time I see people talking about this, I see new alleged LLM fingerprints. Keeping up with that is a significant burden, especially without a centralized place to easily find an up to date list. This is even harder for me specifically because I have been told that my writing style (even when looking at things that I wrote before LLMs became widely available) closely resembles that of an LLM.

I wouldn't focus on it. People notice naturally after spending time with an LLM rather than focus on lists of phrases

So writers / publications should change their writing style because LLMs have adopted it?

If you are using one of the small handful of phrases that chatgpt hammers into everything it writes, yes you should change them if you don't want people to think you are a LLM.

It's not fair but yes, it may help once AI users stop making obvious mistakes that give it away.

At least until the publisher secretly runs the content through AI by themselves. YouTube already does that with short videos, making them all look like AI generated content and making drawn animations etc look objectively worse.

Yes, I had to give up my cherished em-dashes.

How do you draw the conclusion that the writer doesn't care about their craft though? If someone uses an emdash, but spent three hours and a ton of effort on a three paragraph comment and some of that time was spent running it through ChatGPT to hone their point so it comes across better, does that invalidate the point they're trying to make? Should we start documenting how long it took to write something, regardless of if an LLM was used in some capacity to help write something instead?

Why would you think a writer would spend three hours on a single paragraph when it ends up being indistinguishable from ChatGPT?

Is that an efficient use of time?

How would such a writer that spends that much time per paragraph even survive in today's competitive economy?

Because they're human writers, and don't sit down and calculate the most efficient use of time, and then only do that? Most scientists and engineers I know aren't that obsessive about how to most optimally spend their time.

"Got Milk" cost tens of thousands of dollars per word. Sometimes it's about quality not quantity.

You missed the point entirely. You can't actually tell if an article is AI-assisted or not. A writer that doesn't leverage AI is going to get outcompeted full stop.

I'm not sure where I claimed I can tell AI assisted writing from not.

A writer that doesn't leverage AI might get outcompeted, it's not a foregone conclusion, and it's their perogative to use AI or not.

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