I enjoyed the humour. (We’re heading towards a sad world if any attempt at levity in an article is interpreted as evidence of LLM usage by critical killjoys.)

Edit: total random thought: something in your prose shouted ‘Brit’ to me very quickly. Is it possible that part of this is simply cultural differences in humour and writing, and over-interpretation of subtle differences as evidence of LLM use?

Or do LLMs just write in a subtlety more British style because, well, Shakespeare and Dickens and Keats and Milton? Or does ChatGPT just secretly channel PG Wodehouse?

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spuz 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Authors use humour as a form of connection with their audience. It's a way of saying hey I'm a human and I have the same human experiences as you dear reader. Take the first paragraph for example:

> Wednesday, 11:15 AM. I'm at the PureGym entrance doing the universal gym app dance. Phone out, one bar of signal that immediately gives up because apparently the building is wrapped in aluminum foil

It says, "Hey I'm a human who goes to the gym and experiences the same frustrations as you do". Now imagine for a second this paragraph was written by AI. The AI has never been to the gym, the AI doesn't feel impatience trying to pass through the turnstile, the AI has never experienced the anxiety of a dodgy internet connection in a large commercial building. The purpose of any humour in this paragraph is completely undermined if you assume it was actually written by AI.

So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite. We want humour because we want to feel a connection with our fellow humans and for the same reason we should also want writing that comes from a human, not a machine.

	▲	mft_ 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite. I'm not. I'm trying to analyse, or hypothesise, why this author's particular writing style seemed to trigger people's nascent LLM warning heuristics. I considered the humour, because, well, other people brought it up. From the surrounding discussion, it seemed that the jocular writing style was one of the points generating suspicion.

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ifwinterco 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Does sound like some people just don't get the humour which is fine, personally I liked it (but then I am british).

British people do tend to have a fairly humorous indirect way of communicating that can take some getting used to for people from other cultures, but that doesn't mean we're all secretly LLMs