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Comment by ethin | Hacker News Reader

This looks really really AI-generated even if the author did try to hide it by making some grammar elements improper. Idk if that diminishes it's accuracy though.

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I had to stop reading. I have become overly sensitive to LLMisms. This is definitely "ChatGPT, read this article and rewrite it in a casual tone" with little to no actual authorship. On HN we should try to get primary sources for this sort of thing.

If it’s not important enough to deserve thought in writing, it’s definitely not important enough to read.

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." – Dick Guindon

If your text hasn't undergone that process, it's still sloppy thinking.

my first rule of HN is to check the comments first, article second.

after seeing these comments, i just had to see for myself... and i couldn't even make it through the first section of the article.

> On HN we should try to get primary sources for this sort of thing.

+10000

I don't know why you are downvoted. The article is AI blogspam, it doesn't have any more factual information than eg https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/vercel-empl... and is full of empty LLMisms. It's depressing people are willing to read this.

I didn't notice till I saw this comment and now I'm also confident it's significantly AI written.

Because a comment that just says it's AI generated provides no value to the readers. They could at least provide an alternative link like you did.

It does provide value in that I know I shouldn't read it. It's clearly LLM written after a few glances.

That article you linked to didn't mention that Context.ai, from where this mess originated, is a YCombinator company. Most probably its founders are on this very web-forum.

Has the article been edited since these comments? I see "It was a Y Combinator company" in the text.

> and is full of empty LLMisms

I dont have an llm-radar like you but I felt some anxiety reading through it. Cant explain why but the logic was not linear and this strained me as a reader. It didnt have the obvious llm-isms i see on youtube videos "not this but that". My natural instinct is to make sense of what I read, and if presented with a word-salad, it strains me. What are the empty LLMisms so my radar can be calibrated ? These are some giveaways I could spot.

> The timeline is genuinely absurd

> The timeline sequence description (Feb/March/April) is abstract and does not depict specifics reflecting human understanding.

The author’s site is on Vercel.

So I believe the author has exposure to the issue and interest in understanding it, that’s more than AI alone has got.

It's absolutely LLM prose, though not all of it. Maybe the author rewrote parts.

The thing that concerns me is that even at a site like HN, where a lot of people are very familiar with LLMs, it seems to be passing.

I hate to think this will become the norm but it's not the first HN linked post that's gotten a lot of earnest engagement despite being AI generated (or partly AI generated).

I'm very comfortable with AI generated code, if the humans involved are doing due diligence, but I really dislike the idea of LLM generated prose taking over more and more of the front page.

Of course it will be new normal. Even worse in few years you will be writing yourself AI-like prose cause of all of that AI written article and news that you read, will cause silently for you to adopt that style. In few more years barely anybody will be able to write coherent statements themselves without help of LLM :)

The author did change some things to try to pass the LLM test. For example, they removed the apostrophe from I've. The problem, of course, is that this isn't enough to actually pass it, and the author would need to practically rewrite it in their own words to actually come off as natural.

And yes, I agree with you: it's sad seeing LLM-generated slop taking over the front page. I (possibly naively) hope that this trend starts reversing itself sometime soon, as HN is a valuable resource for me to discover new and fascinating things.

I thought the same. Normal people don’t write that way.

Soon they will!

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