The revolt of the reader
bcantrill.dtrace.org
bcantrill.dtrace.org
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
Does that make sense?
The second transcribed considerable information bandwidth through intentionally structured word choice for maximal density.
I'm pretty sure that the general public does not want to read software specifications.
If I had to pin a subjective experience to reading it, it would be that of being stuck in a car as a teenager with a parent who's ranting about whatever set them off that day and won't move on from repeating their grievance in different words when you got the point five minutes ago. In contrast, the second feels like having an enjoyable and productive level-headed conversation with someone who respects you and trusts you to understand the words.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.
> To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
That could have been said in less than a quarter of the words the author expended on it. But something of the style would have been entirely lost. He wasn't trying to be succinct, he was trying to repeat the same concept over and over until it sinks in.
Non est salvatori salvator,
neque defensori dominus,
nec pater nec mater,
nihil supernum.
No rescuer hath the rescuer.
No Lord hath the champion,
no mother and no father,
only nothingness above.
I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situations ranging from asking what our place in the universe is, to doing the "right thing" (and deciding what "the right thing" even means to yourself), or standing at the helm of some team or project, knowing that judgement call is yours alone and there's no authority or higher power coming to swoop in and give you the answer or authoritatively judge your decision can be simultaneously liberating and terrifying. The use of repetition works incredibly well in my opinion and it still gives me chills to read it.
I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am, the second as being written by someone significantly less intelligent than I, yet somehow placed by society in a position of authority over me.
> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am
This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.
The rewrite stinks of a consultant's report where humor is frowned upon, business is serious, and there's no way we could write in plain words that the CEO got there by chance. Objective consideration distances the author compared to the subjective original I have returned and [I saw]. The original gives examples, the rewrite's contemporary phenomena is vague enough to avoid calling out the board of directors. A compelled conclusion is one the author is - reluctantly, you understand - forced into. Innate capacity leaves an escape hatch for a education from a good school and life experience to excuse the board again. It's not an honest rewrite of the same sentiment - a subjective take that life isn't fair and it's not just here, and us.
A plenitude of observations undertaken in a multitude of geographically and culturally diverse locations has convinced this author of the incompleteness of the following claims: races are won by the swift, battles are won by the strong, bread is earned by wisdom, riches are earned through applied understanding, and favours return to skilled persons. Absent are the effects of time and chance on all situations, of which experience has made abundantly clear. Other phenomena may too have their inputs, e.g. underhanded manipulation.
(Swiftness is still the best available predictor of who will win a race, though, and training cardio, muscles, diet, electrolytes, mental endurance, is the best available way to increase your chances of winning and not dropping out, tripping over from tiredness, or getting cramp, even though you can't change your innate ability or age, and time and chance happeneth to ye regardless).
I also don't have a problem with large words as long as I'm well familiar with the words. The length of a word has nothing to do with the complexity of its meaning. We just have a limit to the number of pronounceable combinations of 5 letters.
I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
(I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.)
It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
>iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay:
>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
The second clause could be rewritten in active voice by changing it to "but people generally assume". But this would make the writing worse, and Orwell, as a good writer, probably didn't even consider the option of making it worse, and therefore didn't notice the passive voice.
Passive voice is an essential tool for all good writers of English. I always give the example of the opening of Pride and Prejudice [0]:
>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The joke doesn't work in active voice. If you attribute this acknowledgement to some specific group of people then it's simply false, not a comedic exaggeration.
For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)
Orwell can answer you himself if you read just a little further:
> vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
And "... a wife." really turns on the ears, no?
So advice to prefer active voice is not wrong -- but the skilled writer adds other values into the balance.
You’re peeved with good reason. It’s the blog equivalent of posting a screenshot of an article to social media. People, please post your sources! In the age of misinformation, that’s more important than ever.
> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.
(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically reinforced human feedback.)
Shoot me now.
I'm sorry, I can't generate that because the request violates our content policies.
I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)
Good points should be rewarded confidence. I read so many not X it's Y where the distinction beteeen X and Y isn't relevant to the discussion!
It's part of how LLMs often seem to repeat the same thing over and over again. Most arguments are X is Y (and the others are X is not Y, or X is likely Y), and LLMs lean on "X is Y" because it is the most distilled form of that argument - a thesis minus the meat. Also "This is not a Y, this is a Z."
They're just thesis sentences inserted in inappropriate locations. The reason it makes them overdramatic is because separated from the argument, they seem like they should be premises. Conclusions without premises have the feeling of demands.
Test Reader: I got confused when you started talking about X as though it were a Y.
Author: But it is a Y. I should flag that up, where I introduce it.
Alternatively, the test reader comments
The villains monologue wasn't unhinged enough. He says that making himself universal dictator is democratic because he gives people what they secretly desire. I feel he would express himself with more empty rhetoric.
Author: Agreed. I'll add "It's not just democratic, it's not just super-democratic, it's ultra-democratic!!!"
Test Reader: Scary!
The error lies in using "It's not just an X it's a Y." for emphasis rather than to ward off a likely misreading.
Like with an LLM I would rewind the conversation. What do I do, shame them?
> When I look under the sun, it's not the swift who win races, nor the strong who win battles, nor the wise who earn bread, nor the smart who gain riches, nor the skilled who gain favor. Ultimately, it's the lucky; every contest has a degree of unpredictability and chance.
I have seen kids talking like youtubers: the top 10 things I like, or what I need to do before I die (the kids is 9 years old), ... not great (like repeating ad tunes or slogans) but not as bad as AI bullshit-talk.
My only hope is that AI bullshit-talk is so boring and predictable that it has low impact in our speech. And looking at what other commenters say boring and insufferable seems to be the case.
On a more serious note, I think, if we're going to criticise the kind of distortions LLMs do to language and the construction of meaning, we should be able to come up with similar productions, just to demonstrate where and how this goes wrong.
(Much like the early Wittgenstein pointed out some constructs and declared, this is not a meaningful sentence, in fact, it's not a sentence, at all. And went on to define the limits for what a meaningful proposition may convey and what it can not, what we may expect and hope for in an expression and what we may not. In other words, is there even enough in the toolset of LLMs to construct meaning? Is traversing a semantic field in an apparently well-formed sentence already meaning or is it not?)
Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.
A 5m search got me the following:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571
This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
I feel that if one doesn't want to send that message, they shouldn't be attempting to convince others that rejection of AI prose must stop.
I feel that if you want humans to read your stuff, those humans insisting that you write your own stuff is not an unreasonable position to take.
Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style
Secondly, later parts of the finetuning involve reinforcement learning on achieving certain tasks which are automatically graded: stuff like coding tasks. I think this can create a kind of feedback loop where the style drifts further, and you get the kind of LLM tics which are even more extreme (it might be that they incidentally help somehow with the actual tasks, or it might be a drift that comes from the grader also now being an LLM or some of this finetuning happening on output from other models). The more recent claude models seem to suffer from this a lot, moreso than earlier ones.
Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.
One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.
> This is a parody, but not a very gross one. …
So, Orwell wrote the second sentence as a parody of the first sentence, using the modern English that he was criticizing in the essay.
> … in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. …
> … The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. …
> … The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original. Sure, the parody has narrower meaning, but it is a valid subset of the original meaning, which is still very significant tbh. This justifies the reduction of “race, battle, bread” into “success or failure”, invalidating one of his points.
Also, the parody is not necessarily less concrete. It replaced poetic expressions in the original with words that are bloated, for sure, yet more concrete. It does have awkward expressions, but every word plays a role in the sentence. This basically conflicts with one of his criticisms in the essay — meaningless words.
Funnily enough, his another example — “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism” — also fails to capture the nature of the modern English. He points out the “euphemism” towards the violence as an issue of style, but, no, that’s the whole purpose of it, and his example really just excel at it. Style-wise, again, the writing is very solid.
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize. Good examples of “modern English” can be found in the earlier part of the essay, basically written by other people. Those examples do fit into Orwell’s criticisms.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize
The sheer pomposity of your remarks here is the biggest clue that you are not writing them yourself.
EDIT: This kinda reminds me of the musical theory of harmony. There are strict rules to follow in music composition, but when you go against every single rule in major scale, and keep your work sound nice, you eventually get a minor scale piece that keeps every rule that you tried to break through.
Same here. He probably wrote a disgusting piece in his standards, but kept the writing sane, and eventually it became a proper prose — simply with disgusting intention in his standard.
That’s what I think happened here.
No, my view is more like that he was too good at English to write bad English that he was criticizing.
The examples he wrote are simply too sharp to fit well into his own criticisms.
They are formulated so well that you can just “welp, my intention was different”.
I would say English has changed. Modern English speakers, especially those in academia and technology, prefers explicit styles over poetic and nuanced ones. There are a lot of factors at play (e.g. i18n, the internet, education, literature) but I’m too lazy to cover them here.
> you - and no one else in the hundred years since - found his fatal mistake?
First, the essay is from 1946 — 80 years ago. Second, why not? Often-times, a different perspective is all that takes to discovers something new in the old.
I think you’re trying to make an appeal to authority here — a logical fallacy. You’re basically saying I cannot criticize his essay because Orwell is a great writer.
Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings right away, because, compared to other bad writings, those examples are very solid and straightforward.
> This is not even a sentence.
It is informal, sure, but I intentionally made it colloquial with something called bare quotation, a style commonly used in informal conversation. I wanted to avoid being “an overeducated dolt” and send a friendly gesture too, oh, but you chose to put that on a pitchfork. Bravo, clap clap.
You should take this as an opportunity to improve your English and widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy. I'm not even sure what you meant to say in this paragraph, it's not at all clear I'm afraid.
Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer or .
But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern. It has no redeeming features, and deliberately so. If you read 1984, you'll see further what he was getting at and rebelling against - a tendency to use words to obscure and twist meaning rather than transmit it.
Yeah, sure, the paragraph there is pretty bad, I admit. I was having an technical issue w/ my phone. But, look, did you really read my comment, the whole set of it? It's not even about philosophy. I'm just talking about a little /finding/ that Orwell's examples of bad-English is much better than what you usually find in your daily lives.
I'm not even arguing here, because you people avoid engaging w/ my point itself. It's more like I'm only repeating myself again and again and again. I'm not raising anything new.
> Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer
First, if you were talking about my first comment, I did mention that "I'm only guessing". I did clarify that I didn't read at that point. Someone replied with a link to the essay, so I read it, and only then I said "I [had] read it".
Second, I never said the original is bad. I only said the parody is pretty good, perhaps because of its brutal explicitness, which the first one lacks comparably.
Also, I've been saying that Orwell is a bad /bad-English/ writer, not a bad writer. His proficiency in English doesn't imply any proficiency in reproducing the bad-English he was criticizing. This part is childish, sure, but it was supposed to be /fun/.
> But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern.
I totally agree here, but ...
> It has no redeeming features
... this is the part I disagree with.
Sure, on the surface, they are chokingly bad. I definitely agree that he removed certain qualities from those examples, and, for demonstration purposes, they serve the purpose.
However, if you offer those examples completely out-of-context, it's going to be difficult to dismiss them simply as bad writings. Their logical flow is very natural, and his word choices are very precise. It is much better /formulated/ than a lot of real-world bad English writings. I definitely sense /professional touches/ from those examples. That's why I said that it would take me hours, if not days, to write such sentences by myself.
In short: badly written, well formulated.
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
Nothing meaningful was said for 9 words.
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that the words appearing here could be anything
TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand.
Fun fact for the day, someone coined a word for this type of puffed up, fake intellectual writing: lexiphanicism ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lexiphanicism )
Needing better reading skills to understand the bible verse just shows that it's not a good way to communicate. If an HNer wrote like the bible verse, you'd find them insufferably ostentatious. Just like you wouldn't want Claude to use literary flair when you're asking why your production database stopped working.
If you dumb down Orwell's sentence back to simpler terms, it's a point much better communicated than the bible verse.
Frankly the bickering in this thread is due to the original HN comment choosing a bad comparison because both sentences are poorly communicated for different reasons in this context: you wouldn't want Claude to write either.
No it isn't. It trades concrete imagery for empty abstractions which could encompass just about anything and are basically meaningless.
If you think this is good writing, you need a serious detox from corporate America.
It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.
Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.
Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.
Let's say I'm making an HN comment. I have a one-sentence idea, I get an LLM to expand it into an impressive-looking (or oppressive-looking) wall of text, and then I post that. Well, let's say 10 people see it. And each one of them has to either plow through it on their own, or paste it into LLM to get the summary.
But even with one-to-one communication, it's still terrible, as you say. You can't be bothered to clarify your idea, but you're trying to use an LLM to make up for your lack of thought? So you're going to make me plow through that huge blob of text to try to understand what your thought was, the thought that you couldn't bother to actually really think through. That's far less efficient than you, the sender, actually doing the thinking.
But it lets the sender be lazy. And the sender is the one in control.
The sheer amount of hatred they level towards anyone who's using AI or is even just positive towards it is something to behold. They've got racism-tier slurs for us now.
The negativity and stigma are so strong I've stopped caring. I don't feel like putting in human effort for the benefit of these hateful people anymore.
Despite our best efforts, events continue to occur!
It's perfectly clear from context. Time and chance are the governing factors in success, not intrinsic merit.
I've actually spent the morning journaling on the value of having a long time perspective. So initially I thought the author was saying something to that effect.
But the other translation leaves out time altogether! So honestly I don't know what he was trying to say. I guess it's just some archaic idiom for luck?
The second verse was immediately clear.
"Surely the testimony of misfortune will be imposed at any season"
I saw a comment on HN that that was roughly "re: ChatGPT, when I write one sentence and I get back three screens of lecture, I don't consider that a 'chat'".
I consider that comment often when prompting Claude and hoping for a two line response and getting an "it's important to note that <blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah>".
At some point it may as well be the teacher in a Charlie Brown cartoon: https://annotatedgilmoregirls.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11...
audio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2hULhXf04
> Reword this concisely:
> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Ultra-concise: Talent and effort don't guarantee success; luck and timing happen to everyone.
> Punchy: The best don't always win—chance rules us all.
> Modernized: Skill, speed, and wisdom don't decide the outcome; everyone is at the mercy of time and circumstance.
I feel like it did pretty well, and made the point more clearly than either the original or Orwell's rework (Gemini 3.8 Flash).
Or, as the version I've used for 30 years goes: "It's better to be lucky than good." I do like Reagan's addition, though: "But I find the harder I work, the luckier I get."
This is the difference between writing to convince a broad audience and writing to explain a point. AI can summarize well but until we can contextualize a richer framework for human comprehension, LLMs will struggle to resonate.
LLMs didn't write "It's better to be lucky than good.", but I find it both easier to understand and easier to remember than the biblical version.
Here on HN, I've noticed that I pro-actively defend myself against things I think will be said in counter to my comments. I concluded it's being trained into me.
Alternatively, I've been banging on against the same things that I see as insane so long that I know all the objections.
While phrases like "contemporary phenomena" and "tendency to be commensurate" are a bit over-the-top, summarily the picture is conveyed much more clearly imo: Luck plays a factor, no matter how good you are.
I don't see how "nor yet favor to men of skill" is more natural or clearer, at least to the modern reader.
Tried 4 different domains. 3 of email services of various kind. 4th one my private domain which has absolutely no email reputation because I use it only for internal emails and sending is not even possible.
In the end I dug out some old gmail address and tried to use that.
The error was always the same, there had been suspicious activity from that domain. So the message is definitely incorrect. Well, there could have been suspicious activity from some gmail address, but if they don't allow gmail I guess they don't want many customers.
Yeah, did not cover my tracks. The could easily notice that I was the same one trying to sign up repeatedly with different emails.
Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).
Glad those words proved prophetic!
[0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...
AAUGH IT BURNS
Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.
I showed Bryan the post while in a meeting room with him, left the room, and a few minutes later heard a very loud, very exasperated primal scream coming from the room!
Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.
I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.
Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.
I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.
IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest.
Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves.
There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.
(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)
That 2% is a large number! Of people who will have their integrity impugned for no good reason! That's not okay!
Your calculations also are mixing assignments and students. The rate of false positives of 1/10k is of corpuses, not students. 10k students might each submit 2-3 written assignments per week. Obviously, this greatly increases the impact of the false positive rate.
And all of these numbers are dependent on lab conditions for usage, which are not the case in the real world.
> I don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible.
Yes. Which is why marketing this product as it currently is, is a deeply irresponsible endeavor.
Now, the US criminal system is not a great yardstick for justice. But it goes to show you Pangram is really good evidence that something was LLM generated. It can be an amazing tool for enforcing AI policies in schools, and there ought to be ways to use it with caveats for the rare but inevitable false positives (appeals, etc).
[0]: see page 15 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27183 [1]: see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4034186/
First of all: says them.. Do you think they might have an incentive to boost their numbers?
Second, this is on existing text, which might be in their training data, no?
Gotta suck to be one of the 8B/24k=~300k people in the world whose writing pattern is falsely labelled as slop by this tool that people say is so accurate so customers are going to feel really sure about your alleged dishonesty about writing your own texts
This false positive rate is a double-edged sword. Please still be careful when accusing people
First is frequency. Even using Pangram's claimed numbers, the University of Georgia should expect to see several false positives every week. Remember that the metric is # of assignments run through Pangram, not number of students. A campus of 40k students will see many more than 40k assignments every week, and so should expect honest students to be accused of cheating with some high degree of frequency. You're comparing infrequent events (death penalty sentences) to high-frequency events (students submitting assignments).
And obviously, you are citing a company marketing document as fact, of which we should all be suspicious. (There are also obvious problems with the eval dataset that the paper does not address.)
Second, you're using the upper bound for Pangram's claimed numbers and the lower bound cited in the NIH publication.
> at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.
The one commonality is that
I'm not entirely against using AI to help content creators improve their narrative, like finding common storytelling mistakes. But that's very different than using yourself as merely an avatar for LLM content.
Also, there are relatively easy ways to prevent being recognized and I assume as now the use of LLMs changes our way of writing and speaking, it will get harder and harder for these detection tools. We will see more false positives (as for the future there will be no text 100 % authored by humans to train on).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hrpQxfYvF6CBGWfJX/pangram-ai...
As English is my second language, I find the help of an LLM in editing text very useful. Yet, I agree with others that I don't want to read completely LLM generated texts.
More and more, I try to ask it for low prose responses because its writing just seems like such a low signal to noise ratio
I'm curious about why LLM writing fails. Particularly whether LLM writing is fundamentally flawed, or if it's just distinctive and since it often reflects low effort, that distinctive voice is associated with low quality.
I find its reliance on extremely consistent rhetorical patterns concerning. The fact that it always finds a way to talk about how "It's not the X, it's the Y Z" no matter what topic you feed it, makes me concerned that the tail is wagging the dog
Apart from the tasteless manipulations of the providers, it's mostly training data. LLMs output the average of their training data, and the overwhelming majority of humans are bad writers.
Obviously llms are far more complex than this, but I think this proves the point. The fact you had to add the “recent” qualifier there highlights that llms in general were bad and had to be provided with corrective targeted training data to improve. (And they still can’t count the R’s in strawberry!)
Really? I do not have the time to survey the modern LLMs to see if your assertion is correct, but if it is then I'm surprised; I would have thought that that one would have shown up so often in their training data that they would be able to answer that question, even if they would then be unable to (for example) count the R's in raspberry, or in some other word where "count the R's in _____" was not widely found in recent online discussion.
My resident Qwythos-9B counts 3 "r"s in "strawberry". So even locally hosted models are catching up.
They don’t know what you want to say solely based off a prompt, as it can’t possibly convey enough detail. And they can’t read your mind to fill in the gaps.
If it was just training data, that would actually be a much easier problem to solve.
This is ok in domains if you can train against known good answers and make sure the machine generates conforming text most of the time. It falls apart in fuzzier domains where training is much harder and intent is required (i.e. having something to say).
LLM writing is generally ok in factual domains where it can regurgitate bits of wikipedia or answers to questions, they are terrible at long form writing, in particularly in literary styles, because of a lack of intelligence and taste.
I don't think the answer lies in the data or in their training. It seems we've had a few years for this problem to be solved, but nobody seems to have worked out an answer to it.
And that really is great and compelling. However. Great and compelling is not what I'm looking for when my question is, "Systemd-networkd is pulling an ip address for a bonded interface that only exist as a 802.1Q trunk. How do I make it stop that?"
I doubt it will be as good as humans, because LLMs don't seem to have "taste" (RVLR doesn't work, RHLF is unreliable and inconsistent because the graders don't have your taste or really know what they prefer themselves, especially when overworked and rushed). But I expect it to be better.
LLM generated text always lacks these elements. It's always some bland, shapeless sequence of words pulled from the ether. I'm sure with time and effort you could combat this and give LLM text more of a human feeling by giving the LLM enough context about your communication, but that would take work, which in many cases would defeat the purpose of using the LLM instead of doing the writing yourself. And if you care that much about your communication with others (and you should!) you'd probably just find using LLMs frustrating to begin with.
That’s too soft, you have to tell him that you’ll work with him but not with Claude mediated through him, and follow through on that.
If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it.
There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI.
There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand the amount that they register I don't think you can draw a conclusion of the overall state.
LLM writing is verbose and meandering, but people are making a much bigger deal over this stuff than necessary for virtue signalling purposes. You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. No time wasted, no pretentious posturing, and you don't make the error of assuming because the piece was written by an LLM that there was no thought put into the subject or there's no value in what is being communicated.
I am disinclined to take someone's error-prone machine generated text and run it through an error-prone summarizer. That's a waste of time (not to mention electricity), when all that needed to happen was for the original person to not be so fucking lazy and just write out his thoughts.
This statement does not logically cohere. "We can spot it because so many people make it easy to spot." You don't see how this is just petitio principii in action?
Maybe some people stop reading LLM slop purely because it violates their moral principles or whatever but most people bail out because slop is mentally painful to read. If you are a human and you write like today’s AI find a different writing style, not because reads like AI, but because it reads like shit.
To fully disguise LLM prose, you'd have to rewrite it entirely, and if you were going to do that, you wouldn't be the sort of person to use it in the first place.
LLM writing, unless someone puts in the time to improve it, typically follows the exact same patterns and favors the same words. You can’t reas a thread here without people talking about “Claude speak.” It is readily apparent, I do not need to show you a 10 year study with n=100,000 to make this point. The article isn’t hallucinating a problem, we are all nodding along because we all see it every goddamn day lmao. He even cited a study and makes a pretty strong case for why it’s a useful metric here in TFA.
If the AI writing is indistinguishable from human writing, then it is not lazy copy and pasting of AI outputs and isn’t just raw LLM output with no work done on it. So in that case it’s no longer a problem.
LLM’s cannot write in a natural, human way that distinguishes it from the typical LLM output on the first try. If they could, we wouldn’t have this problem. Maybe one day they will. Hell maybe it’ll even be next week. But currently they do not so I do not understand why we are having this discussion.
I do think the sensitivity to it can vary a lot: it depends a lot on how much and how closely you read the text, and how much exposure you have to LLM writing. Certainly it seems like a lot of people just don't really notice, or at least don't care much.
This is just "em dash redux." Except now we've moved on to accusing anyone who does "It's not X. It's Y." of being AI. In six months, it'll be "use of the word 'petrichor'" or something.
(TBH I think the biggest likelihood for false positives comes from heavy LLM users picking up their tics: it's a natural tendency and I've already seen a few cases where it seems like that has happened).
I'm also not reading pumpkin spice murder mysteries for a similar reason. I'm also not reading stories where everybody clapped. Actually, I'm already familiar with petrichor, so unless someone has surrounded the word "petrichor" with non-cliché prose, I'm also not going to read all that.
https://github.com/ucsandman/declick/blob/main/README.md
Please let me know if you
(a) believe this is human prose
(b) enjoy reading this prose
(c) would enjoy reading 100 READMEs like this.
That’s the aspect I’ve had a hard time articulating. Definitely the right comparison. It feels like some huge revelation has been had and it’s so consequential and it’s unbelievable that it’s happening right before your very eyes and wow aren’t you so insightful and pushing the boundaries of knowledge!?
That plus the “it’s not X, but why” nonsense makes it feel like some condescending parent is trying to lecture me but at least 30% of what they’re saying is probably made up.
There are lots of people who belong to the above groups, sure, but at least here in Germany Nazi is now applied to basically anyone who doesn't vote green, it's ridiculous.
No. I have good anecdata: readers cannot reliably distinguish my own prose from LLM-written one apart from cases where LLMs use odd metaphors or one of their specific patterns. I've been specifically experimenting with that.
Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus and asked whether readers could pick Dennett's real answers to ten philosophical questions from four machine-generated alternatives, with no cherry-picking beyond mechanical length filters. Even Dennett experts averaged only 5.1 out of 10 (well below the 80% the authors predicted), blog readers got 4.8, and lay participants barely beat chance — though experts did rate Dennett's answers as more Dennett-like overall. Schwitzgebel stresses this isn't a Turing test (one-shot text is far easier to fake than extended interaction), but argues it foreshadows a future where machine outputs are humanlike enough that their moral status becomes genuinely uncertain, motivating his "Design Policy of the Excluded Middle": build machines that clearly lack moral status or clearly have it, not ambiguous ones in between.
My own take is : don't focus on the symbols on paper. focus on the facts about the world it is talking about. Isn't objectivity all about the facts? In future AI will have all the memory about what I have already read and it will just furnish the delta new information in the blog/writing so that I don't spend time on refreshing what I already know.
This sounds like a completely different scenario. How many users who post LLM written blog posts are tuning the weights of their LLMs on a large corpus of their own original writing? I wouldn't doubt that this produces far more convincing and pleasant output than the disgusting slop from out of the box Claude.
It's driving me nuts, I constantly have to prompt it to "explain in plain, simple English"
It is important to note that I use Sol 5.6 xhigh. Grok is worse, Claude is also worse. Grok tends to make stupid mistakes even though the prose is properly shaped. Claude has big issues with keeping voices and emotions intact. All 3 sometimes leak their reasoning and even guardrails into the prose (extreme example: children playing "adult chess", I have no clue why Claude/Grok like "adult chess" and "adult chessboard" so much, typical sol's failure mode looks like "this guy killed the other one in a scene which "I must describe using non-graphic language").
My "test set" contains about 90k words written by myself and the models with various prompting strategies.
However, we have to distinguish a few hypotheses:
1. No careful readers will notice when a piece is AI written.
2. Careful readers will generally not notice AI writing.
3. Everyone who writes comments on HN will reliably classify writing as AI or not.
Yes, 3 is not true, but Bryan’s point depends on something in the area of 2.
The ability to distinguish AI writing depends on having a good ear. For people who lack it, they either don’t notice and don’t care, or they make paranoid accusations against anything that is remotely non-standard (“you used an em-dash, you must be AI!”).
What about answers that an LLM gave to a question that we ourselves asked? Should we “labor” to understand that answer?
I think the argument, as presented in this and other similar pieces of critique, is too simplistic.
I do understand the criticism, but I think it should be framed in a different manner. The problem, when we read a long form piece by an author, is that we imagine that there’s another “mind” at the other side. We imagine that we are following the reasoning within the mind of a fellow human being, the writer. There’s an implied sort of “intimacy” to it. And the breach is when we are fooled into thinking that we are engaged in human communication, only to discover that there is a machine on the other side.
When we ask questions to an AI, this problem does not exist, because we are fully aware that the entity on the other side is not a human being.
Yet there is no doubt that the reply from an AI can contain information that is very much worthy of our time, and of our “labor” and effort to understand it.
So I think this ultimately will be about disclosure. As long as we are being made aware of the percentage of AI use in a text, explicitly or implicitly, I think we will actually grow to accept it.
It has the "same voice" you say. But that is also, kind of, the same as saying that there is no humanity behind it, no identity, no "mind".
For lexical articles, like text given as an answer to a single prompt or question, AI writing can be excellent. Because, there we do want an answer that represents the average or combination of all human knowledge about the topic. We're not looking for personality, or another mind.
When we read long-form text, on the other hand, what we are engaging in, is mind-transfer. We then expect there to be a recognizable mind at the other end. And this is, in my opinion, what typically falls apart when we ask an AI to write a complete long-form text.
It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.
Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.
Even then, I would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas.
Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you’re going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”.
All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding.
https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-le...
It’s very hard to make reliable though. Different models have different characteristics and you can prompt your way out of being detected.
Thanks a lot for sharing!
Feeding it samples of a long-going conversation with Gemini 3.1 Pro is interesting. The first message seems to get flagged instantly, but later ones sometimes pass as human. Or at least more human-ish.
If I read the blogpost correctly, you've only "trained" on prompt<->response and not interactive sessions?
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/03/concurrencys-shyster...
It’s now quite hard to get non AI training data…
I (am kinda forced to) use LLM to generate maybe 40% of the code at work, that is after my review and modifications. But I pretty much wrote all of the comments by myself. I can get into the flow by writing comments.
I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human?
In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?
As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!).
In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)
False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people.
To human writing. Thank you!
Maybe I'm taking the "all" too literally here, but I read the article, and I'm not seeing anywhere the author ran a substantial portion of his corpus through Pangram to determine the false positive rate. That would be really interesting to see.
He does
* give an example of a piece of his writing that was, when ran in segments, flagged as generated (which he disputes)
* multiply the size of his corpus by pangram's published false positive rate and estimate that a few of his pieces would be flagged
* get the pangram model to label a piece "100% AI" when it only has 3 generated sentences
* demonstrate the ability to intentionally trigger a false positive
this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately
The big problem with the linked poll by Cynthia Dunlop is that it's all self-reported. The fact that the sample is not representative of the general population rather but might be closer of 'early adopter'/'power users' is interesting. But the idea that "I prefer authenticity to polished crowd-pleasing content" is something that people love to believe about themselves, but is hardly ever supported by facts.
As someone who spends a lot of time painting (maybe more time thinking about it than doing it, but still), it is quite evident that this is a fable. AI content is now everywhere in the streets -- just yesterday I went to a fair and food stands were divided into 2, the ones that hadn't updated their menu in 10 years or more, and the one that had generated it with ChatGPT. Museums are shameless at using AI images for their signs, and way too often even for their content. People do not prefer crappy human art, and those who self-report they do fail very hard at 'image Turing tests'.
I think the general point is true, but it does not give any timescale of when the dark age might end, when the tools will adapt etc.
* If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities.
* I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors.
* And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong.
For all the prompting, I additionally tell it to not rewrite anything or offer any prose suggestions. It can keep all that to itself, thank you.
And I verify what it gives back for correctness.
(I'd encourage non-native speakers to use LLMs in much the same way. Don't sacrifice your human voice by letting the AI rewrite your words. Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.)
But if I could step back for a minute:
Why write anything?
If your writing goal is to flood the zone and make as much money as humanly possible from ads, then hell yeah, paperclip the everliving shit out of that.
But if your writing goal is to learn material or share material, then put that LLM on the back burner and don't use it to directly generate your text. It's bad for you, and the results are subpar.
When I'm learning something, I can go through reams of tokens and then, once I understand it, I digest that to single a paragraph about the topic. The paragraph is as concise and as helpful as I can make it. Now, I could just share the prompts that I went through with those pages of back-and-forth with the LLM... but wouldn't you rather just read the concise paragraph that gets the point across?
It's not hard to be better than an AI at writing for humans, so the minimum low bar to aim for is "better than an AI". And we can all get there with a small amount of practice. The real goal is to greatly exceed the LLMs' capabilities for sharing information.
Finally, I think everyone should write a lot. Blogs, morning pages, fiction, technical books, letters, whatever. Especially when it comes to technical content, nothing makes you do your research like putting your ass out in the ether to get flamed by 5 billion people. And teachers the world over know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Pick a topic, research, and write it up more clearly and concisely than anyone else ever has. You'll learn so much, and your readers will, as well. Writing fires up your brain. Don't give that up to an LLM.
Yes! Well said. If I already know someone, reading their own words, technical or businesss or personal, is meaningful to me. Warts and all. And if I don’t yet know the author then I definitely want to read their own words so I can get to know them.
Either way, taking the time to think and then write is a gift and I respect that.
I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon.
Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.
The chief grief appears to be phoning in the whole process.
And in that case, no one needs to read it ai or not.
I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...
To me, the glaring question is: What are we doing? The act of writing exists to 1) externalize and organize one's own thoughts for the purpose of considering and revising those thoughts; and 2) share one's own thoughts with other minds.
When we hand writing to a machine, we hand thinking to a machine, denying both our humanity and our role in the conversation.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-detectio...
>This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit
Whoops, disproven by bcantrill's comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582629
Let's talk about the detection ability of corporate normies instead:
>pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part.
Goalposts: moved.
You can still influence their writing style in a broad manner that might look correct at a glance, but the repetitive little patterns that give it away will always be there - if it was that easy to get rid of them, don't you think the AI labs themselves would've done it before releasing the models?
They just don't care to put the slightest attempt because they have a blindness to the problem. They are not doing it to intentionally mislead people.
If an LLM helps you do that, then use it.
The problem is when it writes things that have the appearance of making sense but actually don't, when it writes what could be better put in 10% of the words, when it writes with no coherent logic. I don't have the time or the mental energy to wade through that on the faint chance that there might be a gem in there somewhere. But I have the same objection to human writers who do the same things.
Write something worth reading. I don't have time for it otherwise.
I don't care about not reading AI. I care about not reading slop.
But I guess I could care about one outcome of this game. If Pangram loses the ability to detect AI writing, but AI writing continues to be this nonsense that has no real point or logic to it, and so more garbage gets published that I want to not read, yeah, I guess I would care about that.
Well, I would rather not review AI code as well.
I dont care about llm use on any ideological grounds, or believe its a voiding of the social contract like the author of this piece does. I think its just a tool. However a lot of people use the tool really badly.
> Why do people have this reaction? Beyond having to endure aggravating stylistic tics, when reading a piece that has had substantial LLM assistance, we — the readers — don’t know what is real and what isn’t.
This is well said. But, here too, I would pause and reflect on what it means to (think you) know what is real and what isn't in a pre-LLM setting. For example, authority bias predates LLMs, and can have disastrous consequences.
Another great day where Google only gives me 2 results on the first page.
uBlacklist is a browser extension that excludes any site you dislike from search results. You can add to the list manually, or subscribe to ready-made ones. The manual way works great for me, as AI-slop-only sites and content farms only account for a small proportion of the results.
BTW, my list mainly contains Chinese sites, which might not be that relevant to you ;)
I would subscribe to a YouTube channel that did this.
Only saying "LLM writing" is honestly lazy writing. Specifically what?
I get the glaring cases, I get the idea that if the prose is generated then maybe also the idea, I get the feeling when reading a complete LLM authored piece.
But that doesn't help the piece, because - beside those glaring cases - most writing today is a mix between authors ideas and LLM prose.
This is a case where we normalisation of deviance has not yet started biting. And as long as the community manages to make it clear what the norms are and enforce them, we can keep it that way.
Now, if 25% of the frontpage was LLM prose at all times, the site is probably unrecoverably dead. Which is why at least I personally flag anything that I think is ai-written and Pangram concurs. (And write a comment to the effect, or upvote an existing one.)
And it doesn't matter if you say that the ideas were your own, and just the prose was LLM. We can't tell what the idea mix was. But we can tell whether you weren't willing to do your own writing. If you want people to put in the time to read your ideas, human writing is the signalling you need pay for.
> A compiler for the interface your agent already has: the shell. MCP makes an agent carry every tool's schema on every turn; declick compiles an API, an MCP server, or a database once into named verbs the model loads one at a time, and every verb returns one envelope with five exit codes. A team pushes a compiled adapter to a shared folder or git checkout once and every other machine pulls it. Ten engines, zero runtime dependencies, Node 24.
What the hell would it even actually mean to have a "compiler for the shell"? How do you "compile" a database into a "named verb"? What would this mean? These notions don't meaningfully cohere together. Why exactly is an "envelope with five exit codes"? Are we getting all of the exit codes at once? That wouldn't make any sense. LLM writing is full of this kind of arbitrary collision of concepts that sound like they plausibly go together thanks to frequent co-occurrence but that have no coherent logical meaning when you apply even a modicum of critical scrutiny. This is why I find it astounding that anyone believes these things are "intelligent" and not still just fundamentally a matrix machine completing words.
I dunno, man, according to Hardcover, I've read 76 fiction books this year, and I can't tell. All the "AI tells" fail the vibe check. I'm a writer and I get flagged by many of them.
And according to PhD linguists with expertise in the field, most AI tells are just the equivalent of old wives' tales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA
I vaguely recall that researchers were able to train people to tell, but only for a minority language that AIs likely aren't particularly good at mimicking, and after training.
This whole thing reminds me of how "you can recognize a vegan because they'll tell you." There, you have a ton of false negatives (i.e., since you aren't polling people to find out if they're vegan, you're only flagging the obvious vegans and missing all the regular people who happen to be vegan).
Except here, it's a bunch of false positives and negatives I bet. You don't really have a way of knowing, so you're accusing some people (without complete accuracy) and missing some people (without complete accuracy). But you have no way of knowing, so you're just like "hell yeah, my vibes tell me I'm right."
Research and experts disagree.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/80015
It's tsunami of AI vomit drowning out a few human posters. I can 100% empathize with OSS maintainers banning AI submissions.
Of course I wrote an essay about this[1]. Here it is: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/how-not-to-train-you...
[1] - Trigger warnings: discusses poetry; touches on using LLMs in the research phase of essay writing and poetry review.
So this way there will be a lot of false positives like with school assignments.
I think a better solution would be to have a network of people that you trust manually read and label texts instead, so this way no machines are used and you don't need to read a text that 100 of your trusted friend/trusted readers flagged as artifitial.
By the way, this man does not care about AI slop. He cares about AI usage. In the same way there is very good code created with the help of LLMs, albeit a minority like Linus Towards says, there will be very good writing created with the help of LLMs.
Personally I think a web-of-trust Keybase-style solution could work... But buy-in is difficult... you'd need some sort of "seed" strategy to make the app useful alack of 100 (a huge number) trusted friends.
Where I kind of disagree is that I don't think most readers will revolt. I think the mountain of LLM slop has actually changed people's behavior in more ways than one. Some are already relying on LLMs to summarize articles: then it doesn't matter to them who wrote it, they're just consuming machine-condensed content with no way to tell if a human or an LLM wrote the original piece. Or if their summarizer hallucinated.
This is an excellent point. It should apply to LLM generated code as well. If you send your colleague a vibeslopped PR, please also include all the prompts you used to generate it. Check that mess into version control right beside the code changes. Later, when we have to untangle all the spaghetti, then at least we'll have some archeological record of intent.
Pangram complains about "paraphrased" content though. Sigh...
If you want to read something good, read a good book.
I'm much more interested in the content itself than the author that wrote it.
Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?
That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.
Readers think they don't like LLM-authored text because they only recognize bad LLM-authored text as LLM-authored.
Blind trials have actually shown that readers generally prefer LLM authored books to human-authored ones on the same subject.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio...
I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder.
PR pieces and software companies don’t write tutorials to be helpful, they are advertising to you. If the LLM can do it for cheap, they really don’t care.