There are some obvious tells like the headings ("Markdown is nice for LLMs. That’s not the point", "What Lee actually built (spoiler: a CMS)"), the dramatic full stops ("\nThis works until it doesn't.\n"), etc. It's difficult to describe because it's sort of a gut feeling you have pattern matching what you get from your own LLM usage.

It sort of reminds me of those marketing sites I used to see selling a product, where it's a bunch of short paragraphs and one-liners, again difficult to articulate but those were ubiquitous like 5 years ago and I can see where AI would have learned it from.

It's also tough because if you're a good writer you can spot it easier and you can edit LLM output to hide it, but then you probably aren't leaning on LLM's to write for you anyways. But if you aren't a good writer or your English isn't strong you won't pick up on it, and even if you use the AI to just rework your own writing or generate fragments it still leaks through.

Now that I think about it I'm curious if this phenomenon exists in other languages besides English...

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munch117 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This article is just about as un-AI written as anything I've ever read. The headings are clearly just the outline that he started with. An outline with a clear concept for the story that he's trying to tell.

I'm beginning to wonder how many of the "This was written by AI!" comments are AI-generated.

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kmelve 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It's strange to see folks here speculate about something you've written.

And if you only knew how much those headings and the structure of this post changed as I wrote it out and got internal feedback on it ^^_

	▲	munch117 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I struggled a bit with what to point to as signs that it's not an LLM conception. Someone else had commented on the headlines as something that was AI-like, and since I could easily imagine a writing process that would lead to headlines like that, that's what I chose. A little too confidently perhaps, sorry. But actually, I think I shouldn't have needed to identify any signs. It's the people claiming something's the work of an LLM based on little more than gut feelings, that should be asked to provide more substance. The length of sentences? Number of bullet points? That's really thin.

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kmelve 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Author here.

I don't know folks... Maybe I have been dabbling so much with AI the last couple of years that I have started taking on its style.

I had my digits on the keyboard for this piece though.

	▲	samdoesnothing 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for sure because I can see it's style rubbing off. Someone linked this article you wrote from 7 years ago. https://www.sanity.io/blog/getting-started-with-sanity-as-a-... It's well written and obviously human made. Curious what you think as to the differences.