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Comment by wrsh07 | Hacker News Reader

Fwiw, I only did the first 300 words (signed into pangram) and it seemingly correctly noted that there were 2 (mostly) human-authored sentences in there

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

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Have you actually read the article? They point out multiple times that they like the Waymo ride and would use one again and loved it. It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research.

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.)

You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different.

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.

> You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different.

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.

I think they were referring to your fake llmism

Ah thanks. Fair.

They were pointing out that "It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research." does not sound like LLM-generated text.

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.)

Correct. I was already pretty sure, but I wouldn't have written that post without checking Pangram first.

"It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research." is not an LLMism. It superficially resembles one, but that's it.

(Nor is what I just wrote, there.)

Calling it "witch hunting" is just dishonest. That term implies a baseless overreaction to a heavily exaggerated or imagined threat.

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.

Yes AI slop is prevalent. But the casualties that get thrown under the bus are also real, don't you agree? Is it really worth it to sacrifice those? In the name of the larger good?

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.

The rule of thumb is simple: if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector

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.

> if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector

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.

It's super obviously AI-written. I can smell this shit from a mile away now, after using Claude Code so much.

In the just first few sentences I could tell.

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