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Comment by KPGv2 | Hacker News Reader

"Um ackshually your writing looks like AI and that is so problematic" wags finger

This is how you people sound.

You can't recognize AI. Nobody can without training specifically to recognize AI, and eve then, it's only been shown to be successful with a language with an online corpus significantly smaller than English.

The thing LLMs are best at in the entire world is imitating human writing. So all you're really doing is discouraging a human from writing.

I hate AI in the artistic disciplines. No one hates it more than I do. But Jesus Christ, I've been seeing legitimate authors get called AI for over a year now, and it's so bad that I know people are quitting writing over it. ("What's the point, everyone stopped reading because they think I'm AI") End result being the percentage of writing that is AI goes up, and humans enjoying the most human of all disciplines goes down.

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I didn't claim that I could determine whether AI wrote the prose, or even parts of it. Nor am I trying to discourage folks from writing (actually the opposite, I even thanked Ben for the demo!).

What I observed are overused, and recognizable, stylistic patterns that have become quite common in LLM generated prose. In this article alone there are three "here's the X" rhetorical signposts, well over a dozen neatly constructed reversals/antitheses ("not X but Y," "solved X and created Y"), repeated setup->complication->punchline paragraph structures, rhetorical questions used as transitions, and a high density of anthropomorphized technical metaphors.

None of these alone prove AI authorship. In fact their existence (and the authors own words!) are exactly the point I am making: his validateHypotheticalHooks linter flags "formulaic AI-tell openers," and he describes catching himself writing one because he'd "absorbed the cadence from reading too much generated text."

I'm sorry, but if you're halfway adept in both writing and using modern LLMs, every single telltale sign exists in this material. OP is right to call it into question, and you are embodying the very caricature which you're attempting to assign to him in your fallacious assault on character and authority.

Let's return to a more positive discourse, and not immediately become vitriolic when someone rightfully points out that material marketing a book might not be genuinely produced by a human. We should expect more transparency from the author around the use of AI in their writing and marketing process if we are expected to give this book any attention.

I normally don't comment on AI articles, but the TLDR was so obviously AI and a huge turnoff that I closed the tab.

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