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The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/
LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes.
It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI.
If this isn't AI writing, why say "The “New Account” Trap" with then further sub-headers "The Legal Catch", "The Technical Trap", "The Developer Risk"... I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
Aren’t LLMs evidence that humans did write this way? They’re literally trained to copy humans on vast swaths of human written content. What evidence do you have to back up your claim?
The problem is they were trained on everything, yet the common style for a blog post previously differed from the common style of a technical book, which differed from the common style of a throwaway Reddit post, etc.
There's a weird baseline assumption of AI outputting "good" or "professional" style, but this simply isn't the case. Good writing doesn't repeat the same basic phrasing for every section header, and insert tons of unnecessary headers in the first place.
Repeating your thesis three times in slightly different words was taught in school. Using outline style and headings to make your points clear was taught in school. People have been writing like this for a long time.
If your argument depends on your subjective idea of “good writing”, that may explain why you think AI & blog styles are changing; they are changing. That still doesn’t suggest that LLMs veer from what they see.
All that aside, as other people have mentioned already, whether someone is using AI is irrelevant, and believing you can detect it and accusing people of using AI quickly becoming a lazy trope, and often incorrect to boot.
Regardless of whether AI wrote that line he published it and we can safely assume it is what he thinks.
I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI.
> I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
What would you have written instead?
In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in the case of what AI commonly spews out).
This is fairly basic writing advice!
To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. For me, it reduces the trustworthiness of the claims in the article, especially combined with the key missing detail of why/how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased.
It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking here. It's a blog post, not a book.
Look at the last line of the article: "No permission granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)." The author has also written several previous articles that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/
So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the article was written by AI.
The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..." headers.
Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style.
We're clearly not going to agree here, but I just ask that as you read various articles over the next few weeks, please pay attention to headers especially of the form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem", "The ___ Solution".
No, I'm going to try very hard to forget that I ever engaged in this discussion. I think your evidence is minimal at best, your argument self-contradictory at worst. The issue is not even whether you and I agree but whether it's justifiable to make a public accusation of AI authorship. Unless there's an open-and-shut case—which is definitely not the case here—it's best to err on the side of not making such accusations, and I think this approach is recommended by the HN guidelines.
I would also note that your empirical claim is inaccurate. A number of the headers are just "The [noun]". In fact, there's a correspondence between the headers and subheaders, where the subheaders follow the pattern of the main header:
> The Situation • The Trigger • The Consequence • The Damage
> The "New Account" Trap • The Legal Catch • The Technical Trap • The Developer Risk
This correspondence could be considered evidence of intention, a human mind behind the words, perhaps even a clever mind.
By the way, the liberal use of headers and subheaders may feel superfluous to you, but it's reminiscent of textbook writing, which is the author's specialty.
The difference is that using em dashes is good, whereas the cringe headings should die in a fire whether they’re written by an LLM or a human.
If this is a published author known to write books before LLMs, why automatically decide "humans don't write like this". He's human and he does write like this!
Your accusation on the other hand is based on far-fetched speculation.
It's kind of weird realizing you write like generic ChatGPT. I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now.
Don't give in to the nitwits!
If you receive them as a gift, use them only in a situation unconnected with your cloud ID, such as to pay for new hardware at an Apple store.
The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers).
I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc
I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases for them is for people that choose to not use cards online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be able to buy digital goods with cash.
Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift card, we're blaming the victim
People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally omitting details which can help explain the other side's actions.
Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of thing instead, or use various services which generate virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with the options in other countries.
2. I didn't see the prepaid cards in stores outside the US, so they are probably not that popular outside.
Sometimes you also want to shift your spending, like if you spend 500 USD this month at this store, you'll get some good % cashback. So you end up buying a gift card that you know you'll definitely use next month.
I think this is irrelevant, TBH.
Even if it feels sus, remember that AI is trained on what it sees: even the posts here will make it more and more effective at “writing like a human”.
As for the OP, the claims to exist and have published books, etc. are relatively easily publicly verifiable.
No, $500 isn’t a large amount, doubly so anymore. I consistently have to try to re-anchor, but $100 is the new $20 (sadly).
I never claimed the author doesn't exist.
$500 is objectively a large amount for a gift card. Off-the-shelf gift cards with predetermined amounts are almost always substantially less than this.
"The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)" There's not much of a reason to assume someone else unaffiliated with the author bought this card, he mentions talking to the vendor and getting a replacement which means he has the receipt
It certainly implies the author bought the card for himself, yes; but that seems rather unusual to me, especially in such a high amount.
Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest question, I literally don't understand that motivation at all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually runs out.
Second question: why did you create an HN account just to write this comment?
Asides from the promotional bonuses that other users have mentioned, if you have an Apple Family Sharing group you can only use a single credit card tied to the main account for any payments to Apple, but individual accounts will draw down from their Apple Account balance before using that credit card - so gift cards let individuals pay for their own Apple things (subscriptions or otherwise).
there is a number of services that I pay for with either their gift cards or generic gift cards