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Comment by ekidd | Hacker News Reader

Claude's writing style is at least as distinctive as any human's personal style. It has a long list of favorite words, verbal tics and common structures. On top of that, LLM writing is often bad in a very particular way: it's weak on actual things to say, but with an overheated style.

Some days, I spend over 4 hours a day reading walls of text written by Claude. If I couldn't recognize Claude's default "voice" by now, something would be wrong. It would be like a Hemingway fan not being able to recognize Hemingway. Except more so, because Claude's writing style is getting worse from version to version, descending into self parody.

On the statistical side, Pangram's model identifies AI-authored text with a 1-in-5,000 false positive rate, measured against hold-out texts from before 2022. My "ear" also agrees closely with Pangram. If I think something sounds AI written, Pangram virtually always comes back with "AI, confidence: high."

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Claude's default voice, yes. But I'd assume a lot of people have learned to prompt it to something other than its default style. IMO it is good practice to have a style guide to feed in with the prompt.

> On top of that, LLM writing is often bad in a very particular way: it's weak on actual things to say, but with an overheated style.

This point is interesting because it raises the question of what "LLM writing" actually is. If it is expanding a smaller prompt into a larger article then yes, by construction the information density is low. But it can also be used to take a semi-coherent stream of consciousness and turn it into something readable and the people using it that way might already have started to slip under the radar.

This is a lot like how the criminals seem especially stupid because the ones who get caught are disproportionately the stupid ones. The easily detectable LLM writers are going to be the lazy ones.

I suspect people who think they are getting away with this are far more obvious than they realize.

> The easily detectable LLM writers are going to be the lazy ones.

To an extent, true. There are a lot of lazy ones though. And even for those who take steps, it sometimes leaves enough of a trace to at least raise the question.

One thing I think that helps is that for anything more worthwhile than message board posts like this I use Claude to review my text, make suggestions, and iterate on structure with me. But I'm the one writing the bulk of the text. I'll take some of its suggestions verbatim, but only if I genuinely like it better than anything I came up with myself.

The end product is something much more polished than anything I'd writ eon my own, but still comes off as being genuinely from me. At least that's what people have told me when I've asked.

> It has a long list of favorite words, verbal tics and common structures.

Go on, then, let's see the list.

That reply was AI written.

Lol, no. I've always sounded like that, and there are decades of my writing online.

Also, FWIW, Pangram scores my writing as entirely human.

Claude's writing isn't easy to identify because it uses em-dashes and bulleted lists. Claude's distinctive style goes much deeper than that.

I think it was a joke

This reply was AI written

I often run my writing through scans for AI tells. The number of things it flags that are just my own personal vocal tics, that I've had for 40+ years, is amazing.

In other words, correlation != causation

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