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Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

It’s not X. It’s Y.

Multiple times, over and over.

We need to stop with the AI stuff.

Tip for those who want to skip shit like this, excessive headings glued together by bullet points is quicker to spot, especially since the headings almost always start with "The".

I now scroll any AI-adjacent article I see and just read headings and if I see this I know what I'm getting into:

The Dexterity Deadlock

The Problem

The Geometric Curse

The Sim-to-Real Gap

The Structural Gap f(⋅)

Seeing It in Motion

The N^2 Impedance Mismatch

The Chaos Term ϵchaos

The Information Wall

The Weakest Link

Why Manipulation Needs Better

What We Built

From 288 to 15

Does It Work?

Hardware Validation

Robot Hand Landscape

The Take-Home

Oh my god, it's absolutely chock full of AI-isms. Almost every sentence is a list of 3 items, often nested lists of 3 items.

I think they did a search-and-replace to turn em dashes into semicolons in an attempt to hide the AI. Weird usage of semicolons.

Deciding whether A is an X or a Y is a really basic part of why we're all communicating. Suspicion of em dashes is one thing, but once you start getting nervous on seeing "It’s not X. It’s Y." then you're just going to get paranoid.

The fundamentals of an LLM is to statistically match their output with the corpus. The tics they have are really common in natural human usage too.

This line of argument would fall down if it turns out that a human with statistically normal output is a bizarre-sounding human.

Did you read the article? It's all AI tells. The tone may as well be a fax machine

I didn't reply to the comments talking about the AI tells. I replied to the comment that is making a bad argument. It doesn't matter to me whether the article is or isn't LLM assisted.

Is the not X it's Y in large frequency not an AI tell? I think they're pointing out it has a tell. Humans use those but not that often.

> Is the not X it's Y in large frequency not an AI tell?

I doubt it. The AIs are statistical models, if they've picked up a habit of saying "not X it's Y" then that is probably the most likely thing for humans to say when they are explaining something. The whole training process is about making what the AI says statistically indistinguishable from what humans do; the only way to pick up that it is an AI is either because the model is badly fitted (which, in fairness, many are, they're still working out the ideal weights) or because it isn't grounded in reality. It isn't reasonable to say "oh this looks like AI" based on small phrases like that, AIs use the same phrases humans tend to. It is where they should be doing the best job of fitting in with us.

"This uses really common phrasing ergo it is AI" is a bad case to be trying to make.

Even the title follows a common LLM pattern (The X Problem/Issue/etc).

The authors presumably don't have English as their first language.

Plus a bunch of other elements that are dead giveaways.

In this day and age, I wish people would ask any model OTHER than ChatGPT to rewrite their shit. At least we'd get a different flavor of slop.

Once I became aware of this AI slop pattern, I can't stop seeing it everywhere.

While it’s got some clear LLM patterns, the content seems novel enough to be worth the squeeze. That or I’m far enough outside of my Gell-Mann amnesia bubble that I can’t see the slop

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