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Comment by vodou | Hacker News Reader

I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.

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> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.

> You can change a password. You cannot change your face.

> This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win

These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice.

It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.

Although these are indicators, real people also use these sometimes.

My brain skims the entire blog before reading it and if I see two short sentences with dots and negation or even one single em dash, I ctrl+w out

I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write. I use the "it's not X it's Y" framing a lot of the time because it's a quick way to get my point across. It's probably the sign of a bad writer because I can't come up with a different/better way to say the same thing, but I'm not AI.

I could tell it was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless. FWIW, I don't think AI enablement is inherently bad; this can be a game changer for an individual with an interesting thought yet difficulty expressing themselves in written word. (Obviously, it's also created a real problem with the ability to create near infinite well-written content, especially in the case of propaganda.)

I do agree with you that the quotes cited out are literary constructs used by humans, and there's a risk we get trigger-happy in calling out AI-slop. Still, those are just the most obvious tells — there were absolutely other, less notable mannerisms that confirmed it for me. If you interact enough with an LLM, you can become quite good at detecting their output through subtle subconscious cues that are hard to put to words.

I do wonder where some of the tropes came from. Claude tends to say "____ is doing a lot of work in this sentence", yet I don't recognize that as a common construction for humans overall or even a specific community (e.g. journalists). Perhaps I'm just unfamiliar with some vernaculars found in training data. Yet sometimes, it legitimately feels like they've actually developed a lingo of their own — an emergent property.

I find it all truly fascinating (along with other feelings…), and I never expected computers to be able to "understand" language anywhere near the degree we see today. Will it soon plateau, requiring another breakthrough? Or is there plenty of juice left to squeeze?

> was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless

I suspect the prompt given to the AI was 3 sentences, maybe interesting sentences,

and everything else was AI expanded, a waste of everyone's time? (Those who read everything)

That would imply that all of the knowledge held with these models is an uninteresting waste of everyone's time. I don't believe that's true.

Yes I guess there exists such blog posts. And that it varies from person to person of course (what they already know or dont).

This blog post in particular though, I got so bored so I couldn't finish reading it. I gave it another quick try now because of your comment :-)

> I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write

Certainly. If these were one-offs in an otherwise human written piece then we wouldn't even be discussing it.

In this case, they're just the simplest examples in an objectively LLM produced piece. I'm happy to point to more if you're skeptical; I'd happily wager cash the prose here wasn't written by human fingers.

I think AI was used to help write this but I doubt it was 100% AI generated. Kind of like how AI could be used to write code, but if a human's thoughts go into how the code is structured, and a human does a final pass to edit/polish the code, I'd still consider the code human written.

AI slop in my mind is anything that's completely written by AI with the only human input being "hey it would be nice if this article existed in the world"... If the human doesn't verify or edit anything the AI wrote, then I might as well just prompt the AI myself if it's a topic I'm interested in.

If anyone uses a couple of these red flags to dismiss the entire article and the underlying idea, that says a lot more about them than the author.

I personally don't like reading text written by LLMs, I'd rather just read the prompt itself. I suspect you feel differently. I imagine this says a lot about the reader :)

At least the article makes you be curious about what the prompt was. That's already better than people dismissing the entire thing.

These are normal patterns in US English. The zeal to accuse limits the scope of possible responses. There are all sorts of things humans do when writing that LLMs mimic — em-dashes for instance — that are entirely legitimate ways to communicate but get shouted down for… reasons?

Surely you’re aware that LLMs were trained on the ways humans write specifically to mimic them? Yes? So what’s the gripe? Someone cranked out a “thought piece” with no effort or actual thinking on their own?

But thats the promise of AI.

So are you advocating doing away with AI tools and research? Maybe we start asking “should we” not “can we”? Now that is a position I might get behind.

But really how the hell am I supposed to write at all when nearly ANYTHING I write could be interpreted as AI-generated and then shouted down in some quasi-ad-hominem attack on me while not engaging with any points made?

It is the utter end of written discussion.

it's like AI-generated images, though those tend to be more obvious than AI-generated text due to the "average" effect being visually obvious. Yes, these are normal patterns in English, but it is not normal to use them with the frequency that triggers people's llm-lese senses.

I don't see a way out of it until either generated content is either completely unable to be distinguished from authored content (unlikely?), or there's a silver bullet for identifying generated content (also unlikely?)

Are you saying that people are being tricked to being anti-intellectuals? If even the smart people are anti-intellectual, society loses.

No, I don’t think anyone is being tricked. I think people aren’t used to accepting information from all parties, and are looking for a quick way to determine if an article (or whatever) is valid and worthy of their time. I think this applies equally to all levels of intelligence, from the dumbest to the smartest. We all want a quick filter.

I do find it more troubling when people who are very intelligent dismiss things out of a sense that “AI did it” so it isn’t worth engaging at all.

I'm advocating that if people present a written text for others to consume, they should specify whether an LLM or a human produced it.

I think that's super reasonable, you don't?

Having thought about this for a bit now, I am honestly not sure. I think that obviously the end goal would be to not need to include such a disclaimer. But in the interim while AI is being constructed? Maybe that’s a good thing?

Somewhere in this conversation we need to make room for the following idea:

Mostly we seem to take in information, check who it’s from, and either digest or discard it. With AI acting as a “force multiplier”, so to speak, we can no longer do that simple check — we have to actually engage with the text, which is often longer than anticipated, and really attempt to understand it, whereas in the past we could lean on authority and reputation. And it could be pure bullshit! Reputation gets around that neatly. But it also makes it possible to disregard the thoughts and opinions of everyone without authority or reputation really easily.

All of society is based around that authority and reputation mattering. With AI, we all have to disregard authority & reputation and actually engage with the ideas presented. This is uncomfortable for many who have authority and reputation presently because they simply aren’t used to having to acknowledge the thoughts of people they consider themselves “better than” — or perhaps simply “lower status socially, economically, etc.”

Now if you want all points of view represented in society and for the socially and economically advantaged people to have less of a voice overall, perhaps AI furthers that goal? Perhaps the desire to label stuff as “AI or LLM generated” really is us just clinging to an old familiar way.

Honestly, I’m still not sure.

Tons of people write that way.

Did people used to do it 5 times every 10 sentences?

Bad writers do worse

I didn't ask about other worse things, I asked about this specific bad thing.

Since you dodged the question, I guess your real answer is "no, people never did this" and therefore "yes, this is AI slop"

in human conversation "seen worse than that", "do worse than that" usually means the thing in question is not a concern in given context. "worse" obviously includes the thing. Are you AI?

Right, it's either bad writing, or an LLM that's been trained on bad writing.

I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt and assuming the latter.

Straight quotes were my first clue, followed by “it’s not this it’s that” and subheads.

Straight quotes? I thought an LLMs thing was always using the curly ones?

Claude uses straight, at least for me. I assume they’d use straight so that the curly ones can’t ever be wrong.

Specific article aside, you may be interested in:

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

https://github.com/blader/humanizer/blob/main/SKILL.md#conte...

I know, right? It used to be easy: just look for writing in a very long-winded style, almost as if the author is being paid per word, in a place where that sort of writing didn't belong. I think it was because that type of writing represented a disproportionate fraction of the tokens in the training data due to the long-winded-ness. Somewhere around a year ago, they figured out some way to deal with that problem.

I think it will become pretty simple. Does the author say somewhere on their site that they don't use AI for writing? If yes, then great. Otherwise, it's very likely LLM-generated — particularly if the author spends a lot of time writing positively about AI. (And what if they lie? They will be discovered eventually, at which point they can be blacklisted.)

>>Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content...

Its quite simple, at least by HN rules. If you dont like an article, post "This is LLM" and move on. Within 5 minute your post will be voted t o the top.

Easy karma farming!

The em-dashes

The multiple uses of "it's worth X" made me question the authorship, for one

> Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak.

Just read a few fiction books written in 2026 in Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Your brain will be trained to recognize AI-Slop Speak in No Time.

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