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Comment by anonymous_user9 | Hacker News Reader

This seems interesting, but the sheer density of LLM-isms make it hard to get through.

I actually disagree, thought it read reasonably well and didn't feel LLMy at all.

It stinks of LLM - sections with headers beginning with “The”, a lot of “it’s not just X, it’s Y” etc etc.

The content is good and interesting though. Just hard to wade through with all the thorny LLM bushes getting in the way.

Looks like the author had a draft with the core content and ideas and asked an LLM to embellish it. Maybe because author wasn’t confident in their writing skills? Whatever the reason, I’d honestly prefer something human-written.

I must be immune to that since I thought the post was very nice and didn't realize any of those things. Do they really make the post less good though?

I think at this point comments like this are equivalent to saying "I didn't like this article, because it's written in too good English".

It shows a lack of care for the reader. Use your own words.

I would edit sentences like this:

"Erlang is the strongest form of the isolation argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously, which is why what happens next matters."

It doesn't add much, and it has this condescending and pretentious LLM tone. For me as a reader, it distracts from an otherwise interesting article.

That what the only place that made me stumble, because “what happens next” doesn’t really make sense in that context.

But mistakes like that are what makes it human! I really don't know anymore that we can have certainty about things being AI or human.

Mistakes yes, but “this obviously makes no sense” less so.

I don't think you can get an LLM to write that personally. I tend to write with a bit too long run on sentences like that and have to edit myself carefully to make it readable. I don't think LLMs do that.

It's like when my kids say "that's AI!" about everything now. We're overreacting and thinking everything bad about writing is because of LLMs, but in fact, I think LLMs write better than 99% of humans now. A year ago that wasn't the case, but we need to update our priors.

Sorry, good English is good grammatically and structurally while being unique and feeling creative. and AI-written English is not good. It’s correct but totally repetitive, formulaic and circular. It’s like expecting a pizza and finding it’s made of cardboard.

Or maybe more like expecting Italian food and getting pizza?

I liked the content of the article enough to read it to the end, but I did have a hard time due to inflation with LLM-isms. Then again I am not a native so how would I know if this is good English? I can only tell that to me, it is hard to read despite interesting content.

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