Can we get over the detective work about if the text was written by LLM or not in 2026 already ? This is a lost cause, and we could instead focus on substance over syntax.
I've found the same thing showing with Claude-coded/designed front ends that overuse the same semi-monospaced fonts, Blue/Yellow/Red palette and rounded corner borders. It isn't that it is bad, but it often isn't fit for purpose.
You're right it wont change anything, but authors shouldn't be surprised when people who care about their time/attention comment on low/no effort pieces.
I also think that people should focus on substance and not if AI was used, but AI writes like shit and I find myself retching a bit when I have to read long AI-written documents. Do they say something useful? Maybe, but when my eyes are glazing over because it's just so exhausting trying to parse what's written, I can't tell.
I certainly think less of people when they have such poor taste that they think writing like that is acceptable.
Slop is slop. When the “it works but isn’t great” phrases end up slipping into a strong conceptual core, it compromises the perception of the ideas.
Perhaps our AI will cater to us by rewriting the content we read, and each of us intermediate all communication with systems that make that slop bearable.
Or perhaps, we learn that we kinda still need to give a shit when writing to land on the perception we’re trying to create within our readers
Which is a shame as real insights are buried inside some of these articles, which if the author bothered to write in his own words could have reached an audience that would have appreciated them.
Writing is one of the areas where I want no LLM involvement.
If an article has interesting content (which comes from an human) and the LLM is just used to help the author finish off the article, I don't have any problem with that.
Labeling both scenarios in the same category feels completely wrong to it, as equating vibe coded stuff (as in no human ever read the produced code) and agent-assisted good old software engineering
The number of things that make it to the top of HN/Reddit/wherever now that are devoid a human's touch is exhausting. Whether it's a site that's got that Claude frontend smell, or a repo that's got a burst of 10 claude commits before getting shared and abandoned, or a series of blog posts that were written by LLMs... it's all, at this point, a flag for me that the human behind the LLM doesn't really want to engage with others or share; in some ways it dehumanises their entire (supposed) audience.
IDK. Maybe having Claude contribute writing about something novel to the general blogosphere is useful in some dimension, but it usually gives me no confidence in the truth of the post.
Only so much time in the day, its a quick signal to not waste anymore of it.
Pointing out they generated it at least encourages them to write a shorter article that says what they meant.
Good communicators learn to use the written word. Bad ones rely on mental crutches.
Good communicators get an audience, and bad ones won't.
You think it's a lost cause, but it's not, because people don't like this junk, because it is low quality and, on average, lacks substance.
The best minds in AI that I've seen all write their own words. They use AI to help them research or ideate, but what they write is their own.
Before assuming this is a "lost cause," consider why the smartest people in the room don't do it.
The AI police is there to say what is worth reading and what is not, because THEY know what people like.
Or not.
And no we can't get over it either. But I already have talked about that before and said roughly all I have to say on that front, so I'm just going to link back to my last comment regarding this.
I appreciate these comments, they save me time for procrastinating elsewhere.
And let’s be real: I had a post this year that was #1 on HN for a while, and an LLM “wrote” the whole thing, but it was very much my writing style and NO ONE called out the post as LLM slop. If you use an LLM correctly for writing, it’s not detectable. It seems that most folks don’t go through that effort.