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Comment by breakingcups | Hacker News Reader

I can't decide whether this person writes in the type of style that was apparently overrepresented in LLM training, or whether they heavily used AI to spruce up their writing. I'm learning towards the latter.

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Spruce up is unreasonably charitable. I'm more irritated that the authorship information is misleading. craig-kerstiens is not available on Huggingface, and yet not a single sentence in this article seems to have been typed on a keyboard.

When Claude writes things like "as someone who has spent a lot of time doing X", I think this is also a kind of failure of alignment. LLMs shouldn't write as if they had personal experience. It's something a person might say in the training data, but I just think LLMs shouldn't claim life experience they don't have, even if that's a statistically likely sequence of tokens.

You don't need to be charitable, Snowflake laid off technical writers citing AI to replace them: https://snowflake.help/snowflake-layoffs-2026-technical-writ...

These low effort constant comments about style or formatting are against Hackernews guidelines for discussions and something needs to be done to clean up the comment section. Getting to a ridiculous point

It's not about style or formatting, people are tired of reading slop.

These comments are worse than the slop.

They aren't actually. They make me feel like I'm not going crazy - that I'm not the only person noticing that the quality of the average article on hacker news has dropped off a cliff in the last 6 months. Links from different people with different cultures, life experiences, and languages have the same tone of voice, the same sentence structure, and the same breathless, boring, staccato yet arrhythmic, emotive yet soulless style.

I hope everyone keeps pointing it out. Even better, change the site guidelines to make AI generated articles a flaggable offense. It's already been done for comments.

Hear hear. I can't believe people are content to consume slop like this.

If comments about how "this blog post could have been a link to this github repo" are in-bounds, so are comments about how "this could have been a link to a LLM session." HN has always tried to work out if a submission is novel and interesting work or is just a slick coat of paint on mundane work (sometimes if good work is obscured by insufficiently clever presentation). Highlighting that content was generated by an LLM and asking if that impacts how to understand it is entirely in keeping with our culture and standards.

Pangram says the text is entirely AI generated but I don't know how trustworthy Pangram is. (I would love to hear what others think about it.)

It has extremely low false positive rate in various tests (e. g. https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1), I've never seen it mark something I knew was human written as AI.

Favorable benchmarks for Pangram exist, and it is one of the better AI detectors. But it's never been trustworthy as proof of authorship/misconduct, and it's getting less useful as models (and people's ability to steer them) improve.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/pangram-ai-de...

At some point you're going to have to accept content is AI generated. There's heaps of stuff you probably read daily you don't even realise is AI generated.

I get it's in vogue to take stabs at whether or not AI was used. But I think the more useful approach is to instead be critical of the end product, if you have criticisms of it.

This IS a criticism of the end product.

This actually gave me an amusing idea: a book review club that strictly reviews the cover art, book binding, hand feel, paper weight, font, etc. of the book.

How weird a book club that actively ignores the style of writing would be!

I don't think most people would consider the writing style of a postgres article to be the 'end product' of that article.

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