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Comment by arm32 | Hacker News Reader

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That sounds evasive. I share the parent's view that the article appears to be largely LLM-written. Given that you cite "your AI assistant", I'm guessing you did lean on an LLM here, perhaps without realizing that it imparted a very distinctive tone.

And honestly, it just cracks me up that it's usually the authors writing about AI lean on the tech. Including the critics...

Busted. I am a human-in-the-loop.

I think everybody should use LLMs to polish their language. This topic is important to me and I want to communicate as effectively as possible.

I stand by every character of the article regardless of which fancy autocomplete I used to polish it. I use spellcheck, too, and a digital tuner for my guitar.

Just want to reiterate: https://alec.is/posts/ai-employees-dont-pay-taxes/#:~:text=I...

But people don't want to read something they can tell is AI, and thus you lose more authority and respect from your readers. If you are interested in getting your words out, and presumably you are as otherwise this wouldn't be a public article, the use of AI does in fact hurt that goal, ironic.

Finally, I will link this, about how "it's insulting to read your AI generated article:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069

I have a quibble here: the people who post in response don’t want to read content they know is AI-generated.

There exists some proportion of people who don’t mind and don’t care about it enough to comment on the topic.

The problem is deeper than that: The majority of hn readers seem to prefer the AI voice.

De gustibus non est disputandum

(The writers of HBO’s Westworld deserve a retroactive Emmy. We’re speedrunning to their speculative fantasy much sooner than anyone could have imagined.)

Or it's more like website bounces, they do care about it enough to close the tab but not enough to comment or specify exactly why they left on some comment section or feedback form.

I personally don't like using LLMs for doing anything creative, but I find it hilarious how if you're against AI for coding you're considered a Luddite by most in these parts. But blog posts? Now that's too far and you deserve to be lambasted.

I don't see anything wrong with what you've done.

At least many of the comments here still seem to be human written and so are much more interesting to read than the increasing number of AI written articles that get linked.

You're absolutely right.

Although to be fair, the fact that the comment section of HN is often more interesting than TFA is something than long predates LLMs.

LLMs are worse at things where performance is based on subjective preference, it's as simple as that.

It's not just blog posts: the staunchest AI supporters are the quickest to call out slop in the default aesthetics of vibe-coded websites, or images, or music.

Pretty much anywhere that "taste" is supposed to be involved.

And you made your communication vastly less effective, spinning conversation off about LLM-generated text.

Also, when are people going to get tired of assuming that em dashes automatically mean something was written by an LLM? At this stage, this is such a tired observation that it's unproductive to repeat.

They literally conclude by quoting Gemini 3:

> As my AI assistant gemini-3-flash-preview put it so blindly today:

So I can excuse someone for jumping to the conclusion the rest of it was LLM assisted too.

I read it and while I didn't think it was LLM writing (until the literal LLM writing), it's an incredibly grating style of writing that would earn ridicule before LLMs.

Obnoxiously building up straw men in section headers then knocking them down with "Reality:" is just not a way to have a useful conversation about a topic. Yuck.

Author confirmed they used an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427769

I don't pay attention to em dashes, they're overused as a pithy saying for sure

The actually useful tips are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

One problem with any shibboleths people are looking for is as people see more AI writing they're more likely to begin to pick up AI phrasing. I mean, if the power of Web apps can revive the past participle "gotten" in the UK, it shouldn't be surprising it can get people to use the verb "delve" more often.

The shibboleths aren’t the problem with AI writing; the problem is that it’s bad writing.

Good writing uses novel combinations of tools (vocabulary, rhetoric, metaphor) to communicate novel ideas. Bad writing is a cargo cult of those tools.

That’s a bit of a different problem. I’m talking about people specifically wanting to know whether AI was used. There are lots of bad writers out there with or without AI assistance.

I find it crazy on the basis that the LLMs shouldn't/wouldn't be using them if they weren't in use... in the training set, in the first place.

Did you, or did you not, use any AI or LLMs in the process of writing this article?

Who cares?

A lot of people with disabilities are also using LLMs to level the playing field and to compete with non-disabled people.

Are you going to be the person who tells them they need to stay out, stop using this technology, and stay in their "place"?

Don't argue against a strawman, no one was disagreeing that disabled people use AI.

Em dashes aren't rare because of disuse. It's a Unicode character that can't be easily typed from a Western language keyboards -- real humans shouldn't be able to vocalize it. Hence it's considered an AI giveaway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com