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Comment by Quarrelsome | Hacker News Reader

is this just slander or are you basing this on something?

I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...

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I found this comment pretty convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413

maybe but its not like people don't also do these things (erroneous sentences, weird fluff). I mean editors exist specifically to slap that shit out of writers.

That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps we end up demanding no doubt. Human only community meet ups to discuss and share ideas, music and art. No recording allowed.

The Internet becomes primarily a passive stream of information vetted by government and Mega Corps, just like the TVs of old. Except for the nifty buy with one click button of course

Digital artists are expected now to have at least some recorded timelines of their creations.

It's easy to do with digital tools today, like Procreate, so it is increasingly suspicious not to have any.

We will rue the day that image generation evolves beyond diffusion and AI is able to use digital brushes and blending directly on a canvas.

you could probably already fake that to some extent with the latest video models.

There have been mail spam, link farming, non-AI slop content sites, and other forms of scamming looking to take advantage of people on the Internet for something like a quarter century by now. Even HN's /new submissions queue is filled with such rubbish. There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero.

> There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero.

I feel like that's just an argument for cruelty. The issue is that generative content makes it hard to tell and people confidently call borderline issues now, more than they used to.

    The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.

Pratchett's Pocket editions were slightly battered? Pre-sale, even?

Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.

It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.

Presumably the ones from the library, which the author mentions was his source? Every Pratchett book I read as a kid matched this description, including being battered.

Tell me more about this already-guilty-looking paper, and how this kid was "sliding" an entire paperback book into a math textbook with "a centimetre to spare".

I think I could slide this into a maths text book?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174439579599449/posts/23646...

You wouldn't be able to open it and keep it open flat against the textbook though, not without the teacher noticing. It simply doesn't work, now that the author has acknowledged they used AI to spruce up their blog post, we can agree this part (hiding pocketbooks in open textbooks) was 100% slop.

I dont know what kind of pockets you have, but most Pratchetts book did not fit into mine. And yes there were whole series of books that fit. But, pratchetts ones did not.

I found this odd too. And the notion you could hide a Pratchett pocket book inside an open textbook. Anyone who has read Pratchett, or knows pocketbooks, knows this wouldn't work. They are voluminous (regardless of their name) and won't stay open on their own.

In fact, it seems a uniquely AI mistake to make to believe pocketbooks go in pockets. Anyone knows they don't fit, unless you have really big pockets and don't mind the weight and bulge.

they battered if you put it in your pocket. The idea of paper looking guilty chimes with the idea that you're reading it in the back of the classroom when you're not supposed to be.

I mean seriously? We're so cooked if this is the "red flag".

There's like nine red flags. You are holding the English language to an incredibly low standard.

we can talk about the others if you like, but we were discussing this one and I am a little disappointed about us just moving elsewhere. Are you yielding, or do you still think guilty paper is somehow sus?

> You are holding the English language to an incredibly low standard.

I'm holding humans to a low standard. That's why editors exist.

I have never seen a printed Discworld book that would fit in a pocket. Have you?

EDIT: I stand corrected, turns out they DID have pocket sized editions in France: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248586

Yes. The original small ones would fit in my jacket pockets or the back pocket of my jeans.

In france, there was an edition of the discworld series literally called "pocket", and yes it sometimes fit in pockets (which had to be on the bigger end of pockets though), especially if you bended the book a little. Looked like this: https://www.babelio.com/livres/Pratchett-Les-annales-du-Disq...

The first books of the discworld were thin too.

Thanks, I didn't know that! Definitely smaller than the paperbacks we had in the UK, and pocket-sized.

Not to say that the article doesn't have plenty of other flaws, but - yes, my original paperbacks certainly did.

What does it matter? The AI slop universe is only going to grow worse no matter what we do. Accusing stuff you don’t like as being AI is just a thing you do, not an actual serious observation.

> What does it matter?

cause false positives are brutal to the victim.

This was not AI, or at least was only proofread/edited by AI.

More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?

This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.

Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.

Read more books people!

I've never read any of Pratchett's books. Why does he know more about furniture than most people?

The first paragraph, and the one directly above the one about knowing more about furniture:

> There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

Yeah I read that. It doesn't mean he knows more about furniture than most. I agree with rogual, it looks nonsensical.

I interpreted as saying he knows a lot about different kinds of ideas / memories / things in the head.

Look up the definition of metaphor in a dictionary. Hint: nothing here is referring to furniture.

Why are you being mean? Honest question. Why? What's the point?

Furthermore, and more importantly, why are you defending slop?

Look up the definition of kindness in a dictionary sometime.

Because the objective truth is that what the LLM or author outputted was CLEARLY only using furniture as a metaphor. The metaphor wasn't good but HNers are taking it completely out of context. There's nothing mean here. Just objective facts.

This is exactly what I was trying to say, but kindly. The metaphor wasn't great, and I dodnt want to he unkind to the author. Enough people were doing that.

I found the fact that people couldn't identify it as a metaphor was much more alarming.

> Why are you being mean?

They are not. They are blunt.

> why are you defending slop?

Because they don’t believe it is slop. They believe you are unable to comprehend a not too advanced literary device and based on that accusing that the text is slop.

On the topic of kindness: You might be right and it is AI generated slop. You might be wrong. If you are wrong what you are doing is deeply and utterly unkind. Not calling out the other commenter, but calling the writing slop.

It has happened with me before. I wrote a comment on reddit with my own hands and own mind and commenters accused me of being a bot. There is nothing more rage inducing. How can one respond to that? Have you thought that maybe that is what you just did? Are you 100% sure that it is slop?

It's confirmed as AI-assisted writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070

The thing is that whether it's AI-assisted or not doesn't really matter. It's still clearly a metaphor.

Maybe I was being mean - I don't know if the person I replied to has English as their first language, and if not, then perhaps I'm railing against the wrong comment. If so, I guess I should apologise.

If English is their first language, though, well I would expect my 13-year-old son to be able to tell me that was a metaphor instantly, and I tend to expect better-than-teenager-level reading comprehension from people in general. It's kind of disconcerting just how many people on HN seemed to be flummoxed by the prose.

Interesting. Which philosophers have this theory?

Do not bring literacy into this; because the sufficiently careful reading of the post surfaces multiple ridiculous (worse, witless) passages no person would write. How closely did you read it?

    There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

Pratchett would not have mixed the metaphors of memories being furniture and also people who kick over furniture. An LLM would/did absolutely make this mistake, given that Pratchett quote as a prompt.

    The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further up.

Ah yes, that familiar old way the Watch books always occupy a shelf that is simultaneously the same and also higher up. And never mind that the Watch books are newer...

Yeah, the more attention you pay to this piece the more obvious the slop becomes. I'm quite upset it caught me out at first.

Feels weird. There is not that much books between The Colour of Magic and Guards! Guards!. So as engineer I would fully expect them to be on same shelf. Or the later book being on lower one due to the usual western sorting of left to right top to bottom... Unless you go for alphabetical sort I suppose...

"They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have."

Right. That's one of the suspicious things here. They're phrased in the way that an LLM might write if you told it to imitate Pratchett.

Edit: that's effectively what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070

> I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made.

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