I think this is the third HN link I've clicked on in a row that leads to an LLM-generated article. I'm not opposed to AI, but I'm tired of seeing it quietly substituted for human thought and expression.
Why? What's LLM generated? How can you tell?
To me what's obvious is that our trust system is already breaking down. Commenters accusing each other of being AIs is also another example of this.
There's also a few cookie-cutter patterns that should immediately jump out at you if you're at all familiar with AI writing, such as:
> No hardware identifier is transmitted. No attestation is required. No certification layer determines who may participate. User privacy is structurally preserved, not promised.
> Google Cloud Fraud Defense is not a reCAPTCHA update. The QR code is the visible mechanism, but device attestation is the real product.
* "With Fraud Defense, there was no process to respond to. The product launched. The requirements page went live."
* "That is not a technical limitation waiting to be engineered around. It is the mechanism."
* "The defeat is mechanical. Bot operators point a camera at a screen, a trivial automation with off-the-shelf hardware."
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe humans are starting to write like LLM's, or maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part.
Not the guy you're responding to, but:
1. The high number of (em) dashes is suspect, though it's unclear whether they manually replaced the em dashes or is actually human generated.
2. "One additional failure worth noting: one incident response professional in the HN thread, raised a concern that operates independently of the bot problem" feels out of place for a content marketing piece. HN isn't popular enough to be invoked as a source, and referencing it as "the HN thread" seems even weirder, as if the author prompted "write a piece about how google cloud defense sucks, here are some sources: ..."
3. This passage is also suspect because it follows the chained negation pattern, though it's n=1
>No hardware identifier is transmitted. No attestation is required. No certification layer determines who may participate.
edit:
I also noticed there are 2 other comments that are flagged/dead expressing their reasons.
How does that work when most of the articles posted are now AI generated?
I've ranted about this before, but the gist of the problem is that you're expecting humans to put effort into discussing something that the "author" did not consider worth the effort of creating. There's a fundamental imbalance there that causes the whole "the author put effort into creating this so you should put effort into discussing it" system that encourages high-effort posting to fall apart.
We haven't said anything specific about genai articles but if you've seen https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 it shouldn't be hard to extrapolate.
They're visible now, but still. What caused them to appear as [dead] in the first place?
There was another sibling comment posted around the same time that was also dead.
For the record: we never delete anything, aside from very rare cases in which a user asks us to delete something for privacy reasons. Plenty of posts get killed by flags or software filters (spam, abuse, etc), but these can all be seen by turning 'showdead' on in your profile.
Human written, not generated.
> HN isn't popular enough to be invoked as a source
Excuse me, what do you mean there? The author happens to read HN too.
Read the rest of the comment. It's not suspect because it's referencing HN, it's suspect because of the way it's referencing HN. Specifically, its use of the phrase "the HN thread", even though it wasn't mentioned before. Maybe it's a editing gaff, but it's also consistent with how an LLM would write if presented with a list of sources.
"One additional failure worth noting: one incident response professional in the HN thread, raised a concern that operates independently of the bot problem: …"
The ersatz Ted Talk meets LinkedInfluencer rhythm of sentences, the throat clearing fillers as connective tissue…
Or Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
(Also, you can pry my em dashes[1] from my cold, dead hands.)
[1] https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... says mean 1.64, maximum 13 em dashes per pre-ChatGPT comment.
I mean sometimes they're right, but honestly in this day and age does that even matter?