Hacker News Reader

Comment by tfrancisl | Hacker News Reader

This article is not AI generated. Everyone is asserting it is but the author is well known as a critic of these tools in his communities. Why would he lie and use it to write an article with his genuine views, edit it to assuage the feelings of HN commenters, and then double down? Speedrunning losing his credibility, or, his writing style got on some people's nerves?

View on HN

I agree with your assessment. Read the article and did not come back thinking an LLM authored. I read more LLM content now than from humans and while there were fingerprints of LLM writing, it still read as institutionalized English. It seems like we are in a weird transition period where LLMs trained on proper English prose are now training humans to identify prose that is apparently not common enough to be labelled as human authored. So what are people looking for in writing? The mistakes, disjointed sentences, less em dashes?

There's even a typo there, a space on one side of an em-dash and not on the other. I'm serious, noticing this makes me believe it's 100% human written

Considering all the minor grammatical issues I'm seeing, I think it's very much written by a human.

"And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it."

I'm 100% confident that a human did not write this sentence unless they were deliberately trying to sound like an LLM. Just look at it! You don't need Pangram. There's a classifier model between your ears that knows how humans write.

I'd retrain that model if I were you.

I'm generally quite open to the possibility that I'm wrong. I said 100% for this one because it is tooth-grindingly obvious. Could you give me some examples of long-form writing like this from before 2024? Generally to retrain my model I need data.

To be honest with you, I think this is pointless. However hostile this might sound, the active userbase of HN seems to be extremely dismissive to the thought of LLM detectors and they think that all those LLM written articles are actually human written. I don't know if this will change, perhaps it'll only get worse from now. (You can see my recent experience in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212027 )

If you don’t know how to write well, the AI slop is less obvious. That’s my theory at least, I don’t understand how people can read these nonsense sentences and believe a human actually wrote it.

That sentence doesn't read as llm to me.

Can you give an example of long-form writing that sounds like this from before 2024?

Running Llama 3 between your ears?

Don't you and all the people in this thread claiming AI slop know that AI was trained on human writing?

>Don't you and all the people in this thread claiming AI slop know that AI was trained on human writing?

Do you think this implies that it is impossible to distinguish LLM-generated text from human text? I don't think that follows at all.

>Running Llama 3 between your ears?

I'm always happy for a chance to improve my classifier! Can you provide some long-form writing from before 2024 that uses this style?

No, I dont think there is any reliable data to be able reliably classify AI text. So far what I've seen is humans actually fail this task reliably

Interesting hypothesis! I find that my internal sense of whether the article is AI almost always agrees with Pangram when I check it, and almost never triggers on pre-2024 text, even if I didn't know beforehand when it was written. I think this cuts against your hypothesis -- if I was just recognizing a generic style of writing, I would expect it to fire on pre-2024 text, and if I was just recognizing text written in 2026, I would expect it to fire much more often when reading blog posts of already-established writers who I trust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com