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Comment by Tiberium | Hacker News Reader

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If you're right (and thank you for this comment by the way - I hadn't spotted any AI tells, but I think you may be, as they say, absolutely right about the maintenance backlog achieving immortality - a useful reminder that I need more practice), I'm not sure it's actually ironic. Since the statement does actually say that you can get AI to do all this stuff now, and doesn't appear to be complaining about this aspect of the situation.

This wasn't written with AI... obviously... I feel like there might need to be a new definition for whatever this paranoia is called because it's getting a bit out of hand.

AI is trained on how people on the internet talk. The message just sounds like a pissed off dude whose style was copied by slopbots.

It's annoying that such comments are now part of every post now.

Can you not?

Not what? It's incredibly ironic that the creator is complaining about AI yet they used AI just to write a tiny text announcement. Apparently such a tiny snippet didn't deserve human writing.

"It was written with AI!" is boring (and often wrong). It shows up on almost every post, and doesn't require any skill or insight. That's why GP said "Can you please not?" It's just not interesting.

I only post it when I'm sure and I cross verified. And in this case specifically it's not boring, quite the opposite, it just shows that humans can be quite inconsistent. I really hope HN would extend its no LLM rule to articles/text, although this is too hard to enforce. When I look at HN, I want to read human text, I don't mind the use of LLMs for actual code and use it a lot myself. My issue is with people who generate whole articles with LLMs and present them as if they were written by a real human.

To anyone who's willing to do a short HN test, please see and try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212433

You're in for a nice surprise.

You are so sure they used AI. It looks like you didn't bother asking them, yet know more about what they do than themselves.

BTW, this sarcastic comment didn't use AI. I can put some em dashes if that helps you on your little crusade — — — — —.

You have no idea. Stop it.

If you cannot see that the linked text is LLM written, I've got bad news for you.

It is so obviously AI that it is scary how duped these morons have become. I guess HN is another corner of the internet ruined... which is what I initially thought this headline was going to be about. HN has been absolutely destroyed by the ignorant reddit hivemind type.

You are a fool if you think you can detect AI reliably from such a short sample. It seems not to have occurred to you that some people can write with expression and wit, and AI emulates their style.

You are a fool if you really think that the linked text is human written. I interact with LLMs basically daily, it's incredibly easy to spot their default styles. And, honestly, you should trust Pangram over me.

Ooh, you interact with them basically daily! Amazing! Tell us more, we long term residents of a technology news forum are ignorant of such wonders. We know nothing of 'gradient descent' or the 'vibe coding' that travelers speak of.

"AI Writing Detectors" are absolutely full of false positives, as anyone working in education or related fields can attest.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212433 and try yourself. And Pangram has been confirmed to be working by reputable educational institution, too.

I mean, I've seen HN detecting AI written articles at a 300 to 500% rate, like that time they were saying an article originally written in 2015 was by AI.

So do this, if you think it's AI written send a complaint to the hackernews email address to have it removed. If you don't want to do that, don't spam up the comments calling articles AI.

And those AI detectors are hot worthless garbage. Just like YouTube detecting Kurzgesagt as AI last week. Useless.

Can you show some examples of Pangram being "hot worthless garbage"? This reputation is true for most other detectors, but Pangram spends considerable effort to have an extremely low false positive rate. I think you just used some of them in 2023 and now think that they can't be made better.

Language is a living thing. At one time saying 'cool' to mean something was neat wasn't a thing. Then someone used it that way and it spread throughout humanity (or least English speakers in the US).

This means as people use AI and read AI we'll start speaking like AI just as much as AI speaks like us. ESL people tend to have it even worse as they commonly speak a more proper subset of English and get identified as AI quite often.

The Panagram CEO was saying some rather dumb shit recently that they have high detection rates of AI because they can put in documents from X years ago and they are not detected as AI. This tells you absolutely nothing about if a recently written document is human or AI written at all!

Total snake oil.

Okay, I have a test for you. It's a bit undocumented, but I'm pretty sure HN is using Pangram or a similar tool to auto flag AI written comments. Can you copy the entire text from the linked article and reply with it here, and see what happens to your reply, would it get flagged or not? I think this will show you what reality we live in.

Pangram is just some BS man can you please stop

Can you actually just do the test I explained? You seem to be basing your evaluation of Pangram on some old experiences. It's a very reliable service, used by research conferences and universities.

It's baffling that people would rather call BS on me than try the actual tool being talked about.

It is not a reliable service. The CEO likes to say that it failed 1 time out of 10,000. In Panagrams own research the failure rate was shown at 2%. That's a pretty massive difference.

How about you do this, write your own words on a topic, but use AI-isms in it. A few 'not X but Y' an a few EM dashes and watch it say you're text is AI written.

Writing using AI stylisms has nothing to do if a text is actually written by AI or not. The tests are mostly bullshit because just adding some informalisms in the text corpus tends to get it counted as non-AI. It's not detecting what you think it is.

Who cares about Pangram? Why do you care about Pangram? Why not leverage our own intelligence? How does this post read to you? To me, it does not read like it was written by AI.

I put your initial comment into Pangram and it said "We believe that this entire text is AI." So.

... Come on now. This is obviously because I quoted the LLM written parts from the article. Remove the quoted parts and try again. Do people not understand what LLM detectors do?

And, to be fair, short texts are one of the areas where even Pangram struggles, with a longer text it would be able to identify it as a mix of human and AI written text. They clearly disclose that short text detection is less reliable.

The fact that anyone as any faith in an AI language detector at all blows my mind. It seems that every AI detector that gets productized gets as bad as the AI CEOs themselves and starts making claims their products cannot accomplish. They try to sell it as a black and white detection product while covering up the error bars are huge.

It's ironic since your comment was clearly written with AI.

Apparently even an HN comment didn't deserve human writing.

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