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Comment by ozlikethewizard | Hacker News Reader

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What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".

Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.

These patterns aren't somehow alien to human speech. It's the quantity. In ChatGPT (and I think it must be ChatGPT specifically) the default writing voice tries for dramatic and profound by dramatically overusing these figures of speech, chaining them together one after another. But they're things most writers use occasionally, one paragraph in ten or twenty. If you're giving a TED Talk or some other elaborate, melodramatic persuasive public speaking role, you might use them one paragraph in four. ChatGPT uses them every other paragraph at least, sometimes multiple times in the same paragraph, so something like a negation comparator or a triplet is present in sentence after fatiguing sentence.

It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.

I mean I think were agreeing, in a body of text this size I'd expect to see the dramatic short sentences and standalone dramatic sentence maybe one or twice. This article they are constant. They're great devices were used appropriately, but when the whole body of text reads like it it's awful.

Not asking anyone to stop using those writing devices, just begging for any work to not be exclusively dramatic devices. And when you read a piece of work like that its generally a child or AI lol.

I thought the piece sounded like AI as well, so I ran it through Pangram, which reports it as 100% AI. Considering Pangram's extremely low false positive rate, I'm inclined to believe this was AI written.

Didn't have the same feel about the piece. But based on the parent comment, decided to also test it, using Pangram free "credits". For me it reported that only sections of it (30%) have been "touched" by an LLM. There is 60% of human written text.

Pangram does not report this as 100% LLM generated. Why do I use the word "touched" - because there are some specific details that must have come from some existing text and are not elsewhere.

How did I do the check? Please do check my results! I copied just the authored prose from the page, carefully removing any comments and site text that got mixed in. I did not have it analyze the "URL".

In looking at the details, a large part of the story is flagged as all human generated.

I've personally used LLMs when I've been very upset. I used it to rewrite / edit my rant into something with a more balanced tone. The modified text got what I wanted, my original rant would almost certainly not have.

So I do think this was a thought out piece that was largely written by a human who used an LLM as an "editor" to polish the writing. Someone took time to think about this and write it.

And? That doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Some people say that AI is glorified spellchecker and then they complain when it’s used like a glorified spellchecker.

Thing is, it might be or it might not be. At some point you have to realize that some people need wheelchairs to move, some people need glasses to see, and some people need LLMs to write.

IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.

I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.

It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.

I think we are approaching the point where collaboration with ai is going to be so ubiquitous that it becomes an unreasonable thing to criticize on its face.

Even before reading, I would assume a non-professional writer would lean on ai to try to figure out what points she wanted to hit and how to phrase things. The cost right now for that is the writing can be somewhat bland, but sometimes that isn't a big problem. Haven't we all seen enough incoherent ai slop to understand the value of editorial oversight by now?

I am working on a libretto in my free time, a hobby I've had for 15 years. Lyrics that would previously take me a week often take an evening. Nearly every suggested stanza and bar is rewritten by me still, but these models can be very helpful in explore the structure of beats to hit, imagery that may or may not land, rhyme and phonetic space etc. Maybe it's ai psychosis or cope but I think my current project is a leap beyond my last two plays. Isn't that what matters for creative expression at the end of the day?

Plaease don't spoil threads with comments like this. The writing doesn't come up as LLM-authored according to the tools we use (polished, perhaps, but not generated).

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858463 and marked it off topic.

Everything is LLM if you want it to be

Who cares? She isn't a public figure, and she never asked to be. She has some thoughts she wants to put out there after going viral due to nothing she did.

i suspect in some time people might begin to flag every bit of text they see online as "LLM sounding", even if it's very clearly not

Yup. The real risk with AI is not that something could be fake, rather that nothing can be trusted to be true

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