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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Right. Its examples fall into categories like:

- AI slop is trivially factually wrong, and frequently overconfident.

- AI slop is verbose.

But, as you note, IRL this is not usually the case. It might have been true in the GPT-3.5 or early GPT-4 days, but things have moved on. GPT-5.1 Pro can be laconic and is rarely factually wrong.

The best way to identify AI slop text is by their use of special and nonstandard characters. A human would usually write "Gd2O3" for gadolinium oxide, whereas an AI would default to "Gd₂O₃". Chat-GPT also loves to use the non-breaking hyphen (U+2011), whereas all humans typically use the standard hyphen-minus character (U+002D). There's more along these lines. The issue is that the bots are too scrupulously correct in the characters they use.

As for music, it can be very tough to distinguish. Interestingly, there are some genres of music that are entirely beyond the ability of AI to replicate.

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I'm like 99.99999% sure that the usage of non standard characters, em dash, fancy quotes, "it's not X, it's Y" etc was clearly done on purpose from the very beginning and pushed for by various parties who have a strong vested interest in monitoring who is using AI and how it's being used.

I kneel Hideo Kojima. You saw this all coming: https://youtu.be/PnnP4sA80D8

> whereas all humans typically use the standard hyphen-minus character (U+002D).

I made it a point to learn to type the em dash—only to have it stolen by the bots; it's forced me to become reacquainted with my long lost friend, the semicolon.

Hah, well, there's that.

But I was referring to the special hyphen that the AIs frequently use today, and which is a hallmark of AI generated text, as it's not on regular keyboards and difficult to access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-breaking_hyphen

They're also fond of this apostrophe: ’

Whereas almost every human uses: '

Word automatically corrects apostrophes and converts hyphens to em-dashes

Interestingly, there are some genres of music that are entirely beyond the ability of AI to replicate.

Sounds interesting, what are some of those genres?

You'll find this surprising, but Suno is completely and utterly incapable of generating ambient music like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsA-jxQsx8I

It simply doesn't get it. This sort of thing probably wasn't in its training data.

The really interesting thing is that when I upload something like that track, and tell it to compose something similar, it usually gives me an error and refunds my credits.

Also, and this is far more mainstream, both Suno and ElevenLabs are totally incapable of generating anything like, e.g., Darkthrone's "Transylvanian Hunger." Music that is intentionally unpolished is anathema to them.

I could go on. There are lots. I think that they understand melody and harmony, but they don't understand atmosphere, just in general...

> But, as you note, IRL this is not usually the case.

Except for the huge the amounts of already generated slop that is combined with SEO to pop up in search results

Oh, if you finetune GPT-4 on an author it assumes the style so well that people prefer it to human experts doing the same job

> "Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers"

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