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| ▲ | cgriswald 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You’re pointlessly derailing a conversation with a claim you can’t support that isn’t relevant even if true. Regardless of whether AI wrote that line he published it and we can safely assume it is what he thinks. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | cgriswald 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don’t think you even know what you’re arguing about anymore. You claimed that what the author wrote wasn’t what the author thinks. As evidence you provided weak arguments about other parts of it being AI written and made an appeal to your own authority. It doesn’t matter if AI wrote that line, he wrote it, a ghost writer wrote it or a billion monkeys wrote it. He published it as his own work and you can act as if he thinks it even if you don’t otherwise trust him or the article. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Ah, I see the confusion, you're still focusing entirely on this one "this isn't just x; it's y" line. I was mostly talking about the piece as a whole, for pretty much everything other than the first sentence of my first comment above. Sincere apologies if I didn't state that clearly. |
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| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > humans simply didn’t write this way prior to recent years. Aren’t LLMs evidence that humans did write this way? They’re literally trained to copy humans on vast swaths of human written content. What evidence do you have to back up your claim? | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Decades of reading experience of blog posts and newspaper articles. They simply never contained this many section headers or bolded phrases after bullet points, and especially not of the "The [awkward noun phrase]" format heavily favored by LLMs. | | |
| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent [-] | | So what would explain why AI writes a certain way, when there is no mechanism for it, and when the way AI works is to favor what humans do? LLM training includes many more writing samples than you’ve ever seen. Maybe you have a biased sample, or maybe you’re misremembering? The article’s style is called an outline, we were taught in school to write the way the author did. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Why did LLMs add tons of emoji to everything for a while, and then dial back on it more recently? The problem is they were trained on everything, yet the common style for a blog post previously differed from the common style of a technical book, which differed from the common style of a throwaway Reddit post, etc. There's a weird baseline assumption of AI outputting "good" or "professional" style, but this simply isn't the case. Good writing doesn't repeat the same basic phrasing for every section header, and insert tons of unnecessary headers in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | dahart 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, training data is a plausible answer to your own question there, as well as mine above. And that explanation does not support your claims that AI is writing differently than humans, it only suggests training sets vary. Repeating your thesis three times in slightly different words was taught in school. Using outline style and headings to make your points clear was taught in school. People have been writing like this for a long time. If your argument depends on your subjective idea of “good writing”, that may explain why you think AI & blog styles are changing; they are changing. That still doesn’t suggest that LLMs veer from what they see. All that aside, as other people have mentioned already, whether someone is using AI is irrelevant, and believing you can detect it and accusing people of using AI quickly becoming a lazy trope, and often incorrect to boot. |
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| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI. > I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years. What would you have written instead? | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Most of those section headers and bolded bullet-point summary phrases should simply be removed. That's why I described them as superfluous. In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in the case of what AI commonly spews out). This is fairly basic writing advice! To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. For me, it reduces the trustworthiness of the claims in the article, especially combined with the key missing detail of why/how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased. | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking here. It's a blog post, not a book. Look at the last line of the article: "No permission granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)." The author has also written several previous articles that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the article was written by AI. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's a difference of opinion and that's fine. But I'll just say, notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them. | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them. The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..." headers. Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | To me those "And..." headers read as intentional repetition to drive home a point. That isn't bad writing in my opinion. Notice each header varies the syntax/phrasing there. They aren't like "And [adjective] [noun]". We're clearly not going to agree here, but I just ask that as you read various articles over the next few weeks, please pay attention to headers especially of the form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem", "The ___ Solution". | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > I just ask that as you read various articles over the next few weeks, please pay attention to headers especially of the form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem", "The ___ Solution". No, I'm going to try very hard to forget that I ever engaged in this discussion. I think your evidence is minimal at best, your argument self-contradictory at worst. The issue is not even whether you and I agree but whether it's justifiable to make a public accusation of AI authorship. Unless there's an open-and-shut case—which is definitely not the case here—it's best to err on the side of not making such accusations, and I think this approach is recommended by the HN guidelines. I would also note that your empirical claim is inaccurate. A number of the headers are just "The [noun]". In fact, there's a correspondence between the headers and subheaders, where the subheaders follow the pattern of the main header: > The Situation • The Trigger • The Consequence • The Damage > The "New Account" Trap • The Legal Catch • The Technical Trap • The Developer Risk This correspondence could be considered evidence of intention, a human mind behind the words, perhaps even a clever mind. By the way, the liberal use of headers and subheaders may feel superfluous to you, but it's reminiscent of textbook writing, which is the author's specialty. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | lapcat 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > please don't make it out like a throwaway "AI bad" argument. The issue isn't whether AI is good or bad or neither or both. The issue is whether the author used AI or not. And you were actually the one who suggested that the author's alleged use of AI made the article less trustworthy. The only reason you mentioned it was to malign the author; you would never say, for example, "The author obviously used a spellchecker, which affects how trustworthy I find the article." > If you think this is good writing then you're welcome to your opinion I didn't say it's good writing. To the contrary, I said, "the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style." The debate was never about the author's style but rather about the author's identity, i.e., human or machine. > Textbooks don't contain section headers every few paragraphs. Of course they do. I just pulled some off my shelves to look. Not all textbooks do, but some definitely do. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I said it affects how trustworthy I find the article, when considered in combination with other aspects of this situation that don't add up to me. After going through my technical bookshelf I can't find a single example that follows this header/bullet style. And meanwhile I have seen countless posts that are known to be AI-assisted which do. Apparently we exist in different realities, and are never going to agree on this, so there is no point in discussing further. |
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| ▲ | dahart 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Textbooks don’t contain section headers every few paragraphs. Yes they absolutely do. What are you even talking about? | | |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | xigoi 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI. The difference is that using em dashes is good, whereas the cringe headings should die in a fire whether they’re written by an LLM or a human. |
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| ▲ | the_af 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Heuristics are nice but must be reviewed when confronted with actual counterexamples. If this is a published author known to write books before LLMs, why automatically decide "humans don't write like this". He's human and he does write like this! | |
| ▲ | rafabulsing 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | LLMs learned from human writing. They might amplify the frequency of some particular affectations, but they didn't come up with those affectations themselves. They write like that because some people write like that. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | rafabulsing 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Those are different levels of abstraction. LLMs can say false things, but the overall structure and style is, at this point, generally correct (if repetitive/boring at times). Same with image gen. They can get the general structure and vibe pretty well, but inspecting the individual "facts" like number of fingers may reveal problems. | |
| ▲ | dahart 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That seems like straw man. Image generation matches style quite well. LLM hallucination conjures untrue statements while still matching the training data style and word choices. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | dahart 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > AI may output certain things at a vastly different rate than it appears in the training data That’s a subjective statement, but generally speaking, not true. If it were, LLMs would produce unintelligible text & images. The way neural networks function is fundamentally to produce data that is statistically similar to the training data. Context, prompts, and training data are what drive the style. Whatever trends you believe you’re seeing in AI can be explained by context, prompts, and training data, and isn’t an inherent part of AI. Extra fingers are known as hallucination, so if it’s a different phenomenon, then nobody knows what you’re talking about, and you are saying your analogy to fingers doesn’t work. In the case of images, the tokens are pixels, while in the case of LLMs, the tokens are approximately syllables. Finger hallucinations are lack of larger structural understanding, but they statistically mimic the inputs and are not examples of frequency differences. |
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| ▲ | wpm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a bad faith argument and you know it. | | |
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| ▲ | amelius 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The author is reputable, just look at the rest of their website. Your accusation on the other hand is based on far-fetched speculation. |
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