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Comment by piperswe | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately it shouldn’t be too surprising that the machine that works by generating the most statistically likely text, generates text that’s statistically identical to human-generated text

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> the machine that works by generating the most statistically likely text

You've just described a “base models” (or pre-trained model), but later training stages (RLHF, GRPO, whatever secret sauce model makers use) induce a strong bias in the output.

Also, being “statistically identical to human generated text” doesn't mean it's unrecognizable, because human generated text exhibit many various clusters (you're not texting your friends with the same language you're writing a book with) and an LLM can, and in practice, do, use language that is not appropriate for the tone a human expects in a certain context (like when bots write LinkedIn-worthy posts in reddit comment section). The “average human-looking text” is as unnatural to us as a “synthetic average human” with one testicle and half a vagina would be.

I'm not so sure I buy that. AI written text is fairly obvious to good writers with exposure to LLM output. Is it a case where it's sort of an average of writing styles, but that average is not human and thus humans can detect it?

AI writing you can recognize as AI writing is obvious. Newer models are better about this and the line will only get more blurry. Here's a benchmark where good writers make the assessment rather than different LLMs ranking each other: https://surgehq.ai/leaderboards/hemingway-bench

The top models are also the latest:

Gemini 3.1 Pro: still a bit of a gremlin, but will probably stay on top until the other model makers go xkcd 810 and target this benchmark

Gemini 3 Flash: current favorite of writers using it as a helper for its speed and decent prompt following

Yeah I think it's more about effort than anything - if the user puts in effort to make the writing indistinguishable from human writing, I'm not so sure it's really a bad thing. Low effort slop is detectable however, and that's a good sign to just not continue reading it.

I've never seen the word "delve" show up with such frequency in the pre-AI era, but now it's an overwhelmingly large signal of LLM-generated text, so I'm not sure where that came from. Ditto for vomiting emojis everywhere.

The rise in prevalence is recent, but older than transformer models by a comfortable margin.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=delve&year_sta...

I have heard that the human trainers for early LLM models were overwhelmingly from West Africa, so some of the word choices reflect that, including a preference for the word delve. This now means that humans from that part of the world are now frequently unfairly suspected of being AI.

The models are designed to be these fake positive corpospeak yes man assholes by fake positive asshole corporations.

Mirroring real human text is only the basis of training. Afterwards they get aligned a.k.a. lobotomized.

It's not statistically identical to human writing.

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