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Comment by ronbenton | Hacker News Reader

I just pasted the first paragraph in an "AI detector" app and it indeed came back as 100% AI. But I heard those things are unreliable. How did you determine this was LLM-generated? The same way?

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Apart from the style of the prose, which is my subjective evaluation: This blog post is "a view from nowhere." Tiger Data is a company that sells postgres in some way (don't know, but it doesn't matter for the following): they could speak as themselves, and compare themselves to companies that sell other open source databases. Or they could showcase benchmarks _they ran_.

Them saying: "What you get: pgvectorscale uses the DiskANN algorithm (from Microsoft Research), achieving 28x lower p95 latency and 16x higher throughput than Pinecone at 99% recall" is marketing unless they give how you'd replicate those numbers.

Point being: this could have been written by an LLM, because it doesn't represent any work-done by Tiger Data.

For what it's worth, TigerData is the company that develops TimescaleDB, a very popular and performant time series database provided as a Postgres extension. I'm surprised that the fact that TigerData is behind it is not mentioned anywhere in the blog post. (Though, TimescaleDB is mentioned 14 times on the page).

The cynical take is: the AI doesn't know you-the-blog-post-author made TimescaleDB unless you tell it!

I don't understand your example: pgvectorscale was built and is maintained by Tiger Data

In terms of that example: they should link to how they got those numbers, and it should state the benchmark used, the machines used, what they controlled for etc.

Just using LLMs enough I've developed a sense for the flavor of writing. Surely it could be hidden with enough work, but most of the time it's pretty blatant.

Sometimes I get an "uncanny valley" vibe when reading AI-generated text. It can be pretty unnerving.

It’s got that LLM flow to it. Also liberal use of formatting. It’s like it cannot possibly emphasize enough. Tries to make every word hit as hard as possible. Theres no filler, nothing slightly tangential or off topic to add color. Just many vapid points rapid fire, as if they’re the hardest hitting truth of the decade lol

ChatGPT has a pretty obvious writing style at the moment. It's not a question of some nebulous "AI detector" gotcha, it's more just basic human pattern matching. The abundant bullet points, copious bold text, pithy one line summarizing assertions ("In the AI era, simplicity isn’t just elegant. It’s essential."). There are so many more in just how it structures its writing (eg "Let’s address this head-on."). Hard to enumerate everything, frankly.

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