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Comment by lowdude | Hacker News Reader

It started out as an interesting read, until I got to this paragraph:

> The value didn't come from what was said at that moment. It came from what had been built across many such moments: a pattern of mutual recognition, a shared context, a baseline of trust that made the later exchange possible. The relationship was the infrastructure. The conversation was where it had been built, one cup of coffee at a time.

And that made me immediately question the worth of the entire piece. I get it, LLMS can rewrite an entire blog post in a minute, which can be quite tempting for people that don't enjoy writing itself, but it just takes so much variety away. I think people should stick to grammatical corrections only, and not rephrase entire paragraphs (never mind letting an LLM write everything in the first place).

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Similar: as soon as I see that LLM style I bail out, you can't trust the content.

If they can't be arsed to write it, why TF should I be arsed to read it.

fwiw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI

Pangram is a cool idea. It can be wildly wrong though.

seems the author removed that paragraph from the article after reading this comment

If I smell AI writing, I ask my AI to condense it to a few bullet points

how can you tell it's llm that wrote this paragraph

It's the cadence and the density of cliches. I've seen Opus produce very similar output. That's not to say it's 100% that this was written by an LLM. They had to learn this style from human writing in the training data. It's just a very condensed form of bad writing.

I think whenever a blog post begins to sound like a marketing campaign from versace - it's always a great sign that it may be LLM generated.

This isn't just a comment. It's a an experience. A shared cognition between parties -- To collaborate & exchange ideas. It's not procrastination, it's culture. Culture is what builds civilization.

"Density of cliches" is a great way of putting it. It's exhausting to write that way and unpleasant to read back in the edit process which is why that kind of thing doesn't happen (often) in human-led pieces. LLMs don't get exhausted.

Usually the smell is when it sounds profound or insightful but then you realize it's word salad and not really saying anything. LLMs also try to make the most mundane thing sound revolutionary or write about it in an alarmist way like 'increasing x by 1% is a ground breaking innovation' or something.

There's no concept of what truly is important with the writing itself since there's no actual thinking going on. The opinion of the supposed writer, which colors how they structure the writing and the language they use, is often all over the place since an LLM has no real opinions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

fwiw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI

This shit gets me irrationally mad. Well, the existence of such content doesn't, but the fact that other people aren't disdained by it (this dogshit has almost 300 upvotes on _HN_ right now) is what gets me.

As someone who doesn't follow the specifics of how LLMs write, how can you be sure it's an LLM?

I'm asking this genuinely because I've been using stuff like these separators before LLMS - now someone can just say "ahh dismiss the content they used style X it's LLM, it's dogshit".

That's the worst part, I'm never 100% sure, and that uncertainty is so ... disempowering?

Look for triads and "it's not this, but that". These are dead giveaways. You can also pass it through Pangram which is quite reliable these days.

I am not sure if I would manage to correctly identify every typical phrase, but the one I quoted I am absolutely certain of.

You could try asking an LLM to write some prose about whatever you fancy. Maybe two or three different pieces, and ask it to be extra profound. You will probably see that exact sentence structure above a number of times:

> It’s not [X], it’s [Y]. A bit of [A], the [random adjective] of [B], all weaving together to form [C]. A short sentence. Maybe two. A final, culminating closer, gradually transcending into space.

The words are quite interchangeable, but the you will know it when you see it.

The topic brings an interesting melange of people together. That makes up for it and made me upvote.

I too noticed a shallowing of the piece somewhere in the middle. It started with an interesting observation but ended with triviality (like you'd expect from a synthetic mind without a body).

fwiw Pangram says 100% of the original article was written by AI

lol Pangram says 100% of this was written by AI

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