This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)
> There is a deeper cost still, and it concerns the thing LLMs do most impressively: writing. [...] Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it.
I think the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is, which would explain both how they could put that part into the article, and how they seemingly believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.
I mean, it made it to the front page of HN didn't it? Probably served its purpose just fine. Not all writing is supposed to be impressive or good. Some of it is to just get attention and stir discussion, and this Claude output did exactly that.
I've watched some YouTube videos narrated by AI that were created by those who's native language I assume to be Chinese but the value of the content is higher and more concentrated than those from the native speakers.
While I've watched many for whom English is not their first language struggle in technical talks and lose most of the meat if their discussion to their struggle with the language conversion.
While the example of language barriers being skipped over and providing value in that circumstance is obvious I suspect more is possible by avoiding unnecessarily focus on prose or technical aspects of communication and focusing on the ideas themselves.
Imagine if the cost of not assuming a background in technical/textbook writing were zero. Freeing up authors to explain more thoroughly. Perhaps, more effort can be spent on thinking up analogies, metaphor or examples to help communicate an idea.
Well the author in this case is Claude, and AIs write like that because the assistant persona really thinks that's what good writing sounds like. They're wrong, but they're just doing what they were taught. There's a reason LLM raters consistently score LLM writing highly.
I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.
At this point I'm surprised when a news article isn't largely AI written, let alone one using the default tone! I don't even mind it as much as others seem to, it's just turning into more and more of a rarity for a news article to not be these last few years and so is now what sticks out.
I kind of assumed it is, given how it suddenly seemed to start getting namedropped in multiple comment threads. And it's often in response to someone saying content is obviously LLM (with examples) and the shill wedges pangram into the conversation "omg you're right, I didn't believe you but I checked this new product and wow it agreed with you" as though that adds anything to the discussion at all.
The authors are so often dishonest that it’s hard to believe that the things they’re saying are anything but a random hallucination.
Also Pangram is basically the only AI detector that's actually put in the work to build an accurate classifier, so if you try to discuss AI writing detection without being specific that you mean Pangram you'll get half a dozen commenters screaming about how awful some of the snake-oil salesmen like GPTZero are.
"Weather forecasts should be banned because they can never reach 100% accuracy"
Which is ironic since they are a tool folks are trusting blindly supposedly used to argue against tool use with blind trust.
What's wild to me is that:
1. People are responding to this article like it's hitting a nerve
2. In most Ubers you already don't talk to the driver (yellow cabs are higher variance in NYC). Doesn't seem like anything's being lost in that case.
3. There are enormous safety benefits to waymo, mobility benefits for youth (and elderly) that are afforded by this technology. It's not clear why people argue "Uber" is better than waymo. A few years ago there were arguments against Uber! (A technology which, again, provides a huge benefit, especially if you live in an area where people were previously expected to go out for drinks and then drive home)
I think it's fair to point out real issues at these companies. But we should be clear-eyed about which technologies we want to accelerate vs slow down
And here you have it — I used an LLM-ism. Oh, and now another one! Time to downvote me for supposed LLM use! (Which I obviously didn't, I'm typing this on an ancient smartphone waiting for a train, but that doesn't deter the witch hunters.)
I use LLMs all day every day. I think they're great. I just don't like humans who put their name to what an LLM did.
Well I know that I did, so you are wrong with that claim, which sheds a strong (negative) light on other statements of fact that you posted in this discussion.
You may disagree with me, or I may even have gotten something wrong, but just claiming I didn't read the article ... sorry man, I thought HN had higher standards than that.
It would sound kind of LLM-y if you had said "It's not an anti-Waymo article. It's an article about how assistive technology is quietly degrading research."
(Of course, the correct approach to detecting AI is not counting LLM-isms, but feeding long-form text through a classifier model and picking up statistical correlations that are more in-distribution with LLM text than human text.)
(Nor is what I just wrote, there.)
That's hardly what's going on here. Unlike witches, AI slop really is everywhere and it's pretty clear that this article is slop.
I find complaining about AI callouts to be itself deeply distasteful although it would take some thought to put my finger on the exact reasons why.
I'm arguing that we're losing something by doing so, as a community.
> I find complaining about AI callouts
If they are correct then I'm all for it. But just suspicions turned into statements of fact are not helping anybody. People used em dashes before LLMs Not nearly as much as LLMs, but superficially judging people isn't doing any good.
I'd compare this with pitchforks coming out agains criminal immigrants. Yes, some immigrants are criminal. Doesn't mean that if you stand in central Copenhagen and have a dark skinned person in front of you that it's a criminal.
Unfortunately, many of the largest voices against pangram simply don't like it because it gives their lies less credibility.
I don't mind reading llm writing, indeed, I read more llm writing per day than most. But if you're using LLMs to increase the level of slop (blog posts, comments, tweets, etc) then we should call people out.
It's a colossal waste of everyone's time and attention, and we should be mad about it.
Late edit: if people are actually writing and it's consistently flagged by pangram (this is a statement I have not yet seen validated), the pangram folks are extremely proactive and excited to understand what's going on. This notion that somehow the authors of slop are victims is complete nonsense.
I would agree to that approach.
But that didn't happen here. Nobody has done that due diligence and folks are just blindly accusing. The author has published for many years. That's what I'm calling out.
> This notion that somehow the authors of slop are victims is complete nonsense.
Strawman? I didn't claim that or anything close to it. I also find the prevalence of slop writing hugely annoying.
In the just first few sentences I could tell.
I suspect it became an LLM tell because it is over-represented in text that’s easily available to the models but that most people don’t actually want to consume: marketing text, LinkedIn posts, that sort of thing.
The reason why AI detection tools other than Pangram are awful is because they are not really trying to solve the problem -- they just want to appear good enough to convince people to use them.
We should criticize whether text is poorly written, inaccurate, wastes words to get to the point and anything like. Saying that it is "written by LLM" just bypasses this and is not useful and misses the point. AI written text can be really good if used correctly. Criticize the content, don't speculate how it was written. If AI helps us to write better text, that is great. But often it is not good.
It is better blame the author for the bad text, so they get consequences and might do better next time, if the text is bad.
By the way, I think this piece of text was quite good.
It is useful to me. I see too much slop every day and would like to filter it out from my life. I appreciate the tip, and to me, that is the whole point.
I don't like AI slop like everybody else, but I'm also growing skeptical of the very fast determinations that sth is supposedly made by LLM just because it uses some phrase that Claude also uses. Models are trained on text written by human writers and if human text resembles it, this goes both ways. I have looked at the authors work from the pre-AI era and it reads similar to me.
So please, if you come with such a claim, please include what you base it on, so we all have a chance to determine how much to trust your verdict.
"We defund the corridor and then wonder where the corridor conversations went." this is a claude-ist construction.
"This is an old worry wearing new clothes" this is a very claude-ist construction.
(rather ironically... as @embedding-shaep pointed out earlier): "Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it." 'not X but punchy-Y' (not to be confused with 'not X but profound-Y'.
I'm not saying the author shouldn't have used an LLM - once in a while I suppose it gets used to good effect. But I wouldn't kid myself that the writing is certainly all human through-and-through.
[Incidentally, in case anyone's wondering where many of these claude-isms come from, just search within lesswrong.com .]
Things are bit tight today.
I like LLMs and use them daily, but I don't really like when people use them undisclosed for long-form prose writing.
(It's possible AI rewrote an article first written by a human here or whatever, but the point is that I can just tell this is mostly or entirely LLM output.)
That's honorable but not how accusations work. There is a first level indirect effect of painting somebody in a light that damages the reputation of their work or their person which isn't reversed by a donation or a sorry or anything since retractions/corrections/apologies don't get the same public attention. And there is a broader effect of chilling what people do since they don't want to get falsely accused.
I'd recommend keeping such suspicions to oneself unless there is unrefutable proof, and if there is, then please provide it.
I’d also donate $100 if I’m wrong. I feel quite confident.