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Comment by alex43578 | Hacker News Reader

Someone with native fluency in American English can (should) be able to tell the difference between human writing and unpolished AI copy-paste.

Essentially 0 people use emoji to create a bulleted list. Nobody unintentionally cites fake legal precedents or non-existent events, articles, or papers. Even the “it’s not X, it’s Y” structure, in the presence of other suspicious style/tone cues signals LLM text.

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Also one big tell that is hard to hide is making verbose lists with fluff but little actual informative content.

Ask an LLM to read your project specs and add a section headed: Performance Optimizations, to see an example of this

Another is a certain punchy and sensationalist style that does not change throughout a longer piece of writing.

Exactly, it's the monotony of the style that gives it away.

One of my subtle favorites is the “H2 Heading with: Colorful Description”

Eg - The Strait of Hormuz: Chokepoint or Opportunity?

I’ve used titles like that for thirty years.

I'm going to ask the qustion I ask everyone who makes the claim that they wrote like that for years: Can you show us a link from prior 2022 that you wrote like that?

No, of course not. It’s all corporate internal documentation.

I suppose my high school essays were not. Apologies, but those are lost.

Nobody owes you evidence for your witch hunts.

Sure, but, look, we have seen these claims so many times, that if it were true by now someone would have linked at least one archived blog post to show that it is, indeed, how humans used to write.

The lack of a single example is very telling.

Sure, and an LLM-written article will use that pattern eight times in two pages.

>Even the “it’s not X, it’s Y” structure

I wonder where some of this comes from. Another one is 'real unlock', it's not a common phrasing that I really recall.

https://trends.google.com/explore?q=real%2520unlock&date=all...

Emojis for lists: completely agree with you, but presumably this was learned in training?

I think that’s a RLHF issue - if you ask people “which looks better”, they too-frequently picked the emoji list. Same with the overuse of bolding. I think it’s also why the more consumer-facing models are so fawning: people like to be praised.

So are you saying that anyone with native fluency in English but who is not from the US can't tell the difference between human writing and unpolished AI copy-paste? I don't agree. Given that US-based LLM models tend to default their output to American English, its arguably much easier for "the rest of us" to spot the "US" language patterns...

> 0 people use emoji to create a bulleted list.

I haven't seen this yet, but I guess the only reason I haven't done it is because it never crossed my mind.

What I have found an easy detection is non-breaking spaces. They tend to get littered through the passages of text without reason.

I think the trope in this comment[0] from another thread is the most obvious tell, perhaps even more than "not x, but y".

> It’s the fake drama. Punchy sentences. Contrast. And then? A banal payoff.

It's great because it's a double-decker of annoying marketing copy style and nonsensical content.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615075

I do use bullets and emojis

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