this css proves me human
will-keleher.com
will-keleher.com
Neurodiverse people have been running this gauntlet forever. Your pacing is too flat or too intense. Your vocabulary is too formal or too casual. You don't make eye contact correctly. You're either masking so hard you're invisible, or you're visibly yourself, and people assume something is broken.
The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human is to pass your writing through an LLM. That maps onto something a lot of us already live. The only way to seem normal is to perform a version of yourself that isn't quite you.
One should ask oneself: How many insults to the intelligence and creativity of an unexpectedly excelling student (that hasn't used AI) is it worth catching the shortcut-taking, LLM-using student? Is it 1/10? 1/1000? How much "demotivation of an unexpectedly excelling student" is the "rightful punishment of the cheating LLM using student" worth? And what is the exact cost of a false negative (letting the LLM using student off the hook)?
In other words, where on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve do you want to sit, as a teacher? I imagine it's quite the dilemma.
They indicated that while they worked closely together while learning the material, they weren’t stealing from each other. I believed them then, and still believe them now, but I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with today’s AI world.
I'm not sure if it had any lasting effects. Maybe a burning hatred of Grammarly ads.
LLM killed traditional poetry, what you are now seeing is post-LLM poetry.
Maybe you missed it, but this is clearly not an LLM, what prompt would even produce that.
The anti LLM crowd killed poetry by accusing every text on the net to be LLM generated and establishing generated text to be a mortal sin.
Neither of those two things would be very bad if people weren't so damn zealous about it. Nobody expected the Human Inquisition
(FWIW, some people consider this style of colon use an LLM-ism.)
I appreciate where you're coming from, though. As bland as LLM output can be, it seems to read more human to people because it's more average. (Although I can't really fathom seeing the neurodivergent as not human; neurodiversity is about the most human trait I can imagine. cf. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/11/05/think-alike/ .)
Long before the rise of ChatGPT, it seems a lot of people were immersed in a culture where "improving" your writing with tools like Grammarly was considered more or less mandatory. And it seems like people read less nowadays, certainly when it comes to attempts at good writing for writing's sake. Overall I fear the art of natural language communication is in decline.
And, in this case, is indeed LLM output. Maybe you are already aware of that, I couldn't tell - the account you're responding to is 19 hours old and their only previous post is a ShowHN submission to a tool they're making for neurodiverent people to use LLMs to communicate (https://www.bottomuptool.com)
EDIT: Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.
lowercase, maybe, but not em dashes.
Soon there's only going to be one way to prove you're human online: Write with an eloquent combination of hate speech, racial slurs, and offensive language.
I do not think the author genuinely used an LLM to write the post.
If I found out that he just used AI to make the picture, then I'd probably ask him what his workflow was.
I'm not against using AI to generate images and stuff! I actually have been playing with image generation (Nano banana and also comfy ui). I like making silly pictures for friends and family as e-cards (or whatever they're called now). If it's not a close friend, then I'll exchange prompts with nano banana and generate a few dozen images and then pipe it into veo to make an animated e-card. Maybe takes 10-20 mins including image generation time.
For closer friends I'd spin up comfy ui, spend some time looking for workflows or loras, probably generate a few dozen images as well, and pipe the one I like into Wan video.
This process can take me about an hour, which includes generation time. But I tell my friends they're ai generated, not that I need to because they all I know I can't draw. They don't mind, even if they don't necessarily know how much effort I put into their picture. To their eyes, maybe I just used nano banana. But no ones ever accused me of being lazy with them. It's all in good fun anyways.
> Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.
Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning was up to the reader to decided.
Art and its meaning are in the eyes of the reader, yes, but when you live in a version of the Library of Babel where every book is properly spelled and punctuated, seeking meaning in what you read is a great way to waste your life.
On the flip side, let's say LLMs are able to generate something novel. Well, then it could potentially generate thought-provoking art.
Not everything is deserving of finding meaning in. But the fun part of life is looking for things to find meaning in. Whether it's the words of God or an LLM or the President, people will always find meaning. And if it makes them happy and fulfilled, who are we to say it was a waste?
> Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning was up to the reader to decided.
"Not long ago"? Not everyone in the past ascribed to death of the author, and not everyone in the present rejects it. But even so, evaluation of meaning is different from evaluation of merit. If an author only wants praise for their work, they would be advised not to post it publicly.
I think it's interesting that there's a few camps of commenter in this discussion who think this post is Ai generated and refuse to engage with the content. And there's others who are enjoying it for what it is. A silly blog post.
There is a little something self important about the type of person that performs the role of defending forums and sub reddits from unknowingly reading something written by an AI, and so concerned that some other person will mistakenly do the same to their own Unicode-shaped gems, and therefore obsess so much more over the surface style than any other detail.
I just wrote that or did
I Let that sync in
I also like Will's "em-dash disclosure" on his about page:
> I like em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and hyphens (-), and I know how to type them. I also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I didn’t know how to type one… until now. I believe that footnotes and sidenotes are superior to endnotes, appreciate the occasional fleuron, and at one point in my life, I knew what a colophon was.
> All of this is to say: the words, punctuation marks, misspellings, and opinions on this site are my own.
No. Engagement isn't free, and people need heuristics to figure out what's worth engaging with or not.
If people followed your advice, they'd waste their life conversing with dead-internet bots. And to what end? We're not machines mindlessly consuming and producing text. The our is often produced with a goal that's subverted if the consumer is a bot.
Squishy brain heuristics can't last long enough to matter in this environment. Personally, I created a Claude skill to run this query (with some refinements) and check it against an article I suspect of being lazy AI writing. If it's good AI-supported writing, I probably won't suspect it, and I won't care if it is.
The people trying to fool you with lazy writing run the same list on their outputs to have the LLM fix it.
I'd argue this entire HN discussion is proof that whether or not content is LLM generated, people can engage and have a meaningful discussion. I see lots of viewpoints in this discussion.
> And to what end?
The same could be asked of engaging with human commenters on HN :)
I comment on HN because writing is cathartic for me. If the person I'm responding to is a bot, or used a bot to generate it, it doesn't matter. I still stand by what I write. And other commenters can engage with what I wrote, regardless of the provenance of the text of the comment I responded to.
People can talk to themselves too. The question is: is that what you want? Talking with a bot has a lot in common with talking with yourself.
> The same could be asked of engaging with human commenters on HN :)
One problem with software engineers is they oversimplify things based on technical factors, missing important characteristics. For instance: oversimplifying a text-based interaction into mere production and consumption of text, then claiming it doesn't matter what produces or consumes that text.
Well it does matter. For instance if you're looking for connection or community with other human beings, a bot is only giving of a false simulacrum of what you want. If you're engaging in politics, trying to convince others with persuasive case for your views, you've just wasted all your time if you were talking to a bot.
> I comment on HN because writing is cathartic for me. If the person I'm responding to is a bot, or used a bot to generate it, it doesn't matter. I still stand by what I write. And other commenters can engage with what I wrote, regardless of the provenance of the text of the comment I responded to.
Have you tried talking to yourself? That seems like it'd give you everything you need.
> you've just wasted all your time if you were talking to a bot.
Not really. If the person I was responding to was a bot, it doesn't mean that humans can't read the thread and engage similarly. Most of the time when i respond to someone on HN, someone else responds to me with something compelling. I mean this thread is a prime example of that! Your comment I was responding to was a reply to someone else's comment. Let's say that person was a bot and neither you nor I are bots. We're still two humans connecting that wouldn't have otherwise connected if the bot hadn't posted that comment.
> Not really. If the person I was responding to was a bot, it doesn't mean that humans can't read the thread and engage similarly.
Ok, so you've wasted some of your time, in proportion to how many bots you're interacting with. And the more prolific and capable they come, the more and more time you waste.
You seem to be walking a back your "engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen," statement. If you really stood by it, those humans wouldn't have to have to have read the thread.
In the comment "engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen," I understood the material to be whatever content I'm consuming, and not the mechanism by which the content was produced (the pen).
Edit to add: I don't think prolificness of bots has a true bearing on time wasted. I respond to lots of HN comments, written by humans or bots, that don't get responses or votes (ups or downs). But that has always happened since the dawn of social media. That's just how public forums works.
As long as humans are able to consume the content and similarly engage, I don't really think it matters. Again, we're several comments deep on a piece whose origin is very likely a bot. And we're having fun engaging. Or at least I am. You seem smart and I like chatting with smart people.
It's just too easy to make garbage content that gets upvoted because it looks good if you skim it and serves as a good jumping-off ground for discussion. Engaging with the content of all the LLM-written garbage is a major waste of time and would make the site not worth it anymore to me.
Like it's already a major drain just to notice the aesthetic tells and then disengage. It's significantly more work to engage, and, AFAICT, around a 0% conversion rate to "oh shit I'm actually glad I read that."
Discerning readers do not stop at the em dash. At least, I don't.
Made me look it up in my own environment. I had already set up a custom incantation for em and en dashes, although I really have no idea when to use the latter instead. Actually I never used to use em dashes, but now I do. I'd much rather deal with people who can intuit the quality of writing rather than relying on such blunt heuristics.
Admittedly sometimes I'll pass my text through an LLM to check for obvious mistakes I may have missed. But the text itself was mine.
If that makes someone think I'm a bot, then maybe it's OK that we didn't engage anyway.
The text-transform trick is more accessible but the same logic applies, the CSS has to protect code blocks from the lowercasing, which is a real edge case. It's a genuinely well-crafted technical solution underneath the poem.
(and thanks for calling attention to the interesting part of the code, I haven't even checked the snippets, I assumed it's not really interesting compared to the prose [poetry?])
And the everyday troll, seeing a less than perfect word choice or awkward turn of phrase will drop a comment like:
L0l d0 J00 3V3N 41Within humans I don't think, for every interaction with the any form of output, "Well, did the human do it themselves or merely pay some other human to make all the decisions?"
Walking into someone's home I'm not thinking "Wow, beautiful decorating and design aesthetic. I'll have to be sure to find out if it was done by an interior design contractor with a free hand in making all decisions so I know how to calibrate my level of enjoyment of it"
> In informal contexts, a hyphen-minus (-) is often used as a substitute for an en dash, as is a pair of hyphen-minuses (--) for an em dash, because the hyphen-minus symbol is readily available on most keyboards. The autocorrection facility of word-processing software often corrects these to the typographically correct form of dash. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
So, the plot twist was somewhat refreshing. Who/what wrote the post seems besides the point.
What does it tell you about you whether it does or does not matter?
It’s art to me. But is it Art capital A?
What have we created?
And you’re going to get fooled, and what then?
For better or worse, my first version of any post tends to contain quite a few typos. It usually takes a few train rides of re-reading the post and making notes of the typos, then fixing them and pushing the changes once I get home, before most of them get weeded out. So there is at least one rather low grade indicator that the writing is coming from an imperfect human brain. I also double-space between sentences which can be another low grade indicator for people who care to 'view source'.
But even so, I find myself increasingly wary that something I wrote might be mistaken for LLM output. It is a nagging worry that has slightly dampened the joy of writing. I very well understand why people have become more suspicious about LLM-generated writing. But I do hope that once things settle down perhaps in a few years, the current hair trigger suspicion will ease and that people who still handcraft their blogs will not feel a persistent sense of suspicion lingering over their work.
I am actually trying to build ways to prove you are human properly. I wrote about it on my blog: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
well, of course until we can distinguish androids from the boring humans
confession time. i read the post once. then twice. the em dashes whispered secrets to people clearly smarter than me. somewhere between complement and compliment i accepted defeat. a quiet tab switch. a small prompt. a large language model clearing its throat.
it explained things patiently. suspiciously patiently. step by step, like a machine that has explained the same thing to ten thousand confused readers before breakfast.
so yes. irony noted. to understand a text about hiding machine fingerprints, i borrowed a machine.
the explanation made sense though. unsettlingly structured. bullet-point neat, internally consistent, statistically likely to be correct. you know the type.
anyway—great post. very human. extremely human.
is there anything else i can help you with?
it's a nearly useless shadow alphabet
and we can dispense with much other punctuation
if we simply structure text semantically
Say something interesting, say something with feeling, express yourself like the goddamn human you are.
The obvious quirks which are easy to pick up and identify, like em dashes or overuse of a specific rhetorical device, are also easy to adapt and change. The things which consistently helps me clock LLMs are the deeper lack of cohesion, thoughtfullness, ideosyncratic quirks and just plain interesting writing and these lacks are, in my opinion, fundamental to the technology and no amount of post-training or RLHF will be able to replicate that.
It's the long tail of genuine human communication, the 0,0001% of training data which is so niche or idiosyncratic, which gets discarded in order to compress and encode the rest, which is what people subconsciously pick up on. Most of the hallmarks which people are so quick to point out, the em-dashes et al, are adressable with tweaks to the system but that lack cannot be because it is a fundamental weakness of the technology.
"Here's my response written in a stylized way that will appeal to highly technical readers. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Interesting piece though.