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Comment by woadwarrior01 | Hacker News Reader

> The measured result is a reference point, not a performance ceiling.

Claude was here.

I am not native, my English is far away from perfect. I am using LLMs for checking my texts or grammar. I always trying to edit it properly, but sometimes I missing parts like that because I don't really have this "language feeling" as natives. Apologies for this

Friendly feedback: write in your native language and use https://deepl.com to translate. I am fluent in both German and English. I find Deepl does a much better job at capturing the direct translation of what I’m saying than using Claude/ChatGPT, etc. Results may very for your language…

Very nice work! Sorry that the AI comments partially overshadowed it.

Thanks! Will try!

I grind my teeth when I see it. It's so pervasive that I worry I'll pick up the same ticks by reading so much Claudeslop.

you're absolutely right

But here’s the thing nobody tells you, it’s a repository not a spaceship. Not a pizza, not a cow, but an undeniable disco boot. Let’s delve into this.

Now I've got the whole picture.

The analysis has come back and the result is clear — the smoking gun is the belt-and-suspenders.

Do you want my honest, load-bearing opinion?

Say the word and I'll build it.

The word

Let me verify this claim properly rather than resting on the grep I ran.

Let me know you've got the full picture

I got hit with my first belt-and-suspenders by Kimi K3 this morning. I normally use GPT. Is that a Claude-ism?

Your observation is sharp. The honest answer: Yes.

I got my first load-bearing in GLM 5.2 weeks back.

"I ran more than 100 experiments. Most didn’t work. A few got me here."

And here.

I'm sure it was a chatgptism first, but I wouldn't accuse a western company of distillation.

In all fairness, maybe it's just that they let some post-2022 recipe blogs get into the training runs around ~4.6-4.8 time

Let my karma burn for saying this: Maybe it is time to let this go man. These comments are really the new incarnation of "grammar policing". (1)

They don't add anything of value, did the author use an LLM to fix his prose but no useless slop was added in the process: who cares ? Is the article useless slop: fine, downvote it to oblivion.

(1) For those not old enough to remember that wonderful practice please use your nearest LLM to find out or, you know, visit a library and do your own research.

Thank you! Text is not the main part of this repo. The main part is the technology and the list of experiments (and some useful knowledge I got from this project, haha). I have always been bad at writing or editing text (in both my native language and English), but without text it is impossible to share this project online.

Text was the last and most difficult part for me. It is not perfect (and this project is not perfect as well), but I believe it does the job of communicating my ideas

I'm not making any moral judgements based on it, merely observing it.

The criticism is not that it's moralizing, but that it's boring.

100% agree. We're on Hacker News. We should be open to people who aren't native English speakers using LLMs to help them communicate their ideas and more importantly, cool projects without getting dragged for AI speak in the text.

I am with you in principle.

There is 0 wrong with using AI to write a draft.

However catching the glaring LLMisms shows that the person did a pass and tried to edit the obvious LLMisms.

For me, unprocessed AI output is perfectly fine as the means to the end, but not as a final output.

The writing is made worse by a specific choice which the commentator identified. That’s actionable feedback.

I don't know what the author's native language is, but I assume it's something I'd need machine translation for anyway. Having it in good (if not Nobel prize level great) English is much easier - and will probably be easier to find again via search.

If they feel the need to polish their texts with LLMs because they’re not comfortable with English, how would they tell the output is bad?

I can tell you first hand it’s sometimes hard to figure out what is LLM writing and what isn’t, English isn’t my first language either.

how is it made worse in this case?

Because it's a strong signal of AI slop. Why put in more work than the "author" did?

If the author generated text that required no effort, and has no understanding of the contents of the material generated, and no self-awareness of their behavior and how the audience will receive it, it definitely doesn't warrant wasting a single second reading it.

Now, granted, maybe they did review it, maybe they did understand it, maybe they did know how it would be received and merely made a mistake, but how are we to know? It quacks like a duck.

The term "AI slop" is thought-terminating. A more nuanced approach: read it and decide for yourself on merits, rather than vibes.

Life is short. Do you want to spend it reading text that was evidently generated by a machine? There is an opportunity cost to reading "slop."

90% of what I read on the internet is trash. I've long ago optimized for critical thinking. AI doesn't change that calculus at all.

That's like inhaling a virus to see if it's contagious. Reading text generated by a model tuned with RLHF is a dangerous pastime. It's all too easy to reach past a human's critical thinking and push the pleasure buttons. Uncanny valley is uncanny for a reason. As social monkeys we instinctively screech danger warnings at each other; AI slop gets the same treatment as an alligator pretending to be a log.

Saying that something is thought terminating is thought terminating, it's the laziest "I win" bullshit approach ever. A more nuanced approach: don't produce slop and people won't dismiss it as lazy bullshit either.

No, that's not true at all. Thought-terminating cliches cause you to stop thinking; they give a quick shortcut that let's you be dismissive. That's what "AI slop" is, when someone bestows the moniker on a piece of prose that has "It's not this, it's that" in it.

Look, there's is a wide variety of work being produced with AI, all the way from exceptional professional work to total trash done by amateurs. Painting all over those efforts with the same brush of "AI slop" attempts to avoid the thought necessary to process the nuance in each individual situation. In fact, folks that use "AI slop" enjoy being able to dismiss AI output as quickly as possible; they seem to be quite happy to forgo whatever insights might be present in such work. But let's not for a moment pretend it's not a crappy heuristic.

Through this lens, dunking on a piece of prose because it has some trace of LLM processing seems both useless and uninsightful, which is why I'm rallying against it as thought-terminating. Do the thinking to determine whether what you're reading is valid. Saying that it has tells that an LLM might have contributed is not sufficient evidence to do that, and it's also something anyone can do, it requires no skill or insight, and makes for boring discussion. Zero curiousity, 100% dismissive.

Yes, it’s dismissive, intentionally and abrasively so. Because the author is being disrespectful to the reader, expecting them to put more effort into it than they did. I will happily be uncurious about a text the author couldn't even bother to proofread and clean up. Life is finite, LLMs could generate more text than I could ever possibly read, there has to be a quality filter we all apply and I’ve drawn my line in the sand.

You’re arguing in favor of what I view as pollution. I’m not lacking thought, it didn’t terminate, you just value slop for reasons I don’t.

Why would you want to signal low effort for your writing and the related project?

It's not low effort. The author had to write in English, not their native, and then used LLM to polish it. The sentence itself conveyed a real point. They cared how their article came across. That's much more effort than the boring "Claude was here" comment that took a second to write but costs real energy to appear, and once again spurred a worthless debate.

Let it go FFS.

I hear you, the author put in real effort. That’s why it’s a tragedy if it presents like low effort.

The world is not the Unites States

> Is the article useless slop: fine, downvote it to oblivion.

You can’t downvote submissions on HN, only flag them. Identifying when text was written by LLMs is a useful signal. Maybe you don’t like these repeated comments, but I’d bet the people making them hate even more that they feel they wasted their time reading it.

This attitude will just cause people to write the same thing with AI and then ask it to strip out all the tells. I found it works just fine, but then you push usage underground, making it harder to detect, which isn't in your best interest, assuming you want to be able to detect and avoid low-effort writing.

Okay, I’m the first to get annoyed at LLM-ese. But language requires the ability to say that something is A and not B. There are certain phrasings of that that are painfully Claude-esque, but ffs the one you quoted is the type of thing an actual human being is just as likely to say.

I don’t get why that construction is associated with Claude. I’ve never picked it up from reading Claude output.

As a English-as-a-second-language speaker I’ve been using that formation long before llm and it has legitimate usage

Claude has a specific version that typically starts with “it’s” or even more often “that’s”. It takes the construction “That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.” and applies it to absolutely everything.

In a way, the AI-text-policing is a golden age. Allasudden, folks actually give a shit about style??? Before AI was there _ever_ comments on HN "bro, the semicolons ... I just can't"?

Everyone's on high alert. Maybe writing will get better!

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