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Comment by no_multitudes | Hacker News Reader

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Thought the same. And also, this whole piece might just be a nicely obfuscated ad for the service in question. Plus the "guardian sales angels" in the comment threads protecting their product: "why, I thought it read really smoothly?" "how sad of you to see only the bad things in life" "need to get outside more?" What has this all become. What have I become.

Why do you think this is LLM-generated? Reads perfectly fine to me.

The sentence construction, choice of vocabulary, and continually breathless tone are all clear indicators this was written by an llm and barely edited.

I threw part of it into pangram to get a second opinion:

https://www.pangram.com/history/8d6a7de3-86ac-4ce0-86c5-4f93...

Have you tried putting known human writing into pangram? I have. I've gotten 100% AI with multiple samples of my own human writing. It has also given me 50% on things I know were 100% AI written (from my prompts).

Pangram and everything like it is useless. The results are random on known samples.

Pangram specifically (as opposed to most other detectors) publish internal audits, and seem to welcome external audits [0]. I'm not saying that you are necessarily wrong, just that in my opinion they have earned a higher bar of criticism than random one off anecdote.

[0] https://xcancel.com/JohnHolbein1/status/2059648132250570975#...

That's a fair criticism, I certainly didn't run a full benchmark. Just a few of my own pieces of writing. I also did it a few months ago, maybe it's gotten better since.

I wanted to test the service by having it check a few paragraphs from a known writer that lived before "AI".

I pasted the text into their form, pressed check... and only then they told me they want me to sign up first.

Good riddance.

GP is right. This paragraph is a major tell. If you have read enough ChatGPT output that hasn’t been humanized, you start to instantly notice it:

“ The attacker hadn’t broken into anything. They’d just noticed something I hadn’t: I had a verified email-sending domain attached to open, unverified signup, and that’s a useful primitive if you don’t care what you send.”

Yes, instead he should have written: "The attacka didn broke into nuffin bruv. They jus noticing sometin I aint, yeh?"

Instant betterness.

I would rather read an email the sender actually wrote even if it looked like your example, as opposed to AI-written. In that sense it is "better" to me.

Well I wouldn't. The whole point of communication is that something is adequately communicated, otherwise it makes for an extremely frustrating experience.

And the whole point about "slop" is exactly that the communication is not adequate (despite superficial eloquence), because it's "sloppy" thinking full of unnecessary verbiage that goes nowhere and disrespects the reader, making for an extremely frustrating communication experience.

But if AI (re-)phrasing helps communicate a message clearly then it's not slop. It's just AI assisted. Being able to spot common AI patterns isn't proof of slop, no-matter how sensitive to slop one might be.

And I'm saying this as a person who's VERY much against slop.

That's interesting! I have tried to get false positives from pangram and failed, so I trusted it a bit more than any of the others, although I generally just rely on my own intuition. I am curious what your false positive samples looked like, if you're willing to share.

(I'm less interested in false negatives; I have successfully produced those myself.)

I'll try to pull them up for you, I'd have to go back and find them on my computer.

It's obvious that existence of AI will hugely dissatisfy people and make them demand authenticity. Market dictates that there will be a satisfaction of that demand even if it is a smoke show.

Anyone with half a brain knows that people can write like that too. Sometimes people reinforce their point. Sometimes they even do it three times.

The problem is not in posts that fail to pass some half imaginary authenticity check. The problem is in technology that makes us want those checks.

> There was no exploit. No vulnerability disclosure. No CVE for me to write.

was a dead giveaway in my mind when I read it.

That was the sentence that made me close the tab.

To each their own, I suppose. I personally enjoyed the style, and it definitely pre-dates LLMs. For example:

> You want to know the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper! Clothes are cheaper. Steel is cheaper. Cars are cheaper. Phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That's because I'm a speech writer - I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with 'lowers' and 'raises' there? It's called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and now you end with the one that's not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. Heh, and that's it.

It sounds like this: https://youtu.be/8dGkiJcEK78?si=MGfv2FM_GksGoMho

The style demonstrated in the blog post is really not the same.

> What stuck with me wasn’t the scale, although 14,000 people getting a phishing email from a domain I own is bad. It was how mundane it was.

> There was no exploit. No vulnerability disclosure. No CVE for me to write. The attacker filled out my signup form 942 times, made 942 workspaces, sent 942 batches of about a hundred invitations each, and stopped. They used my tool exactly as designed. The design was just bad enough that the tool was good for phishing.

The comments continue until the patterns are internalized https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316049

If it's not LLM-generated, it's really hard to read. The writing style is "obnoxious Linkedin post".

"There was no exploit. No vulnerability disclosure. No CVE for me to write. The attacker filled out my signup form 942 times, made 942 workspaces, sent 942 batches of about a hundred invitations each, and stopped. They used my tool exactly as designed. The design was just bad enough that the tool was good for phishing."

Dots and periods. Everywhere. So many. There is no paragraph — its sentences all the way down.

That made me think if the project is entirely vibecoded as well.

Even for a project manager without network access, hosting flawed software on your LAN can only get you so far.

shrug it's getting really easy to spot the AI writing style. I find myself scanning for the obvious `tics' and almost always stop reading when I see them. It's too hard to focus on the content at that point for me.

Huh. I didn't assume it was LLM-generated. I liked the article. I appreciated that author cared about the 14K phish recipients as if they were proper users.

I will say, I've grown bored of folks complaining about AI generated content. But, to each their own. Good luck storming the castle.

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