Funny, this reads even more AI written than the article itself.

marcellus23 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It really doesn't.

lambda 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of non-native English speakers use LLMs to translate to English, or to polish their English prose; they may not realize that it causes the translation to come out in a very LLM-style tone. Not sure if that's the case here, but it looks like OP is a native Chinese speaker so may be using tools to translate to English.

	▲	jacquesm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It looks like you were right about that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858409 But: this was never a problem and now we have to distinguish between LLM generated, human generated, LLM polished and human generated. I'd much prefer it if people just wrote their own text, warts and all.

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CodeMage 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It does, but what does that say about the state of communication in our industry? I've seen a lot of writing that reads like an AI produced it in contexts where I could be pretty sure no AI was involved. We want to sound professional, so we sanitize how we write so much that it becomes... whatever this current situation is.

No offense intended to @yz-yu, by the way. I miss the times when more people wrote in an eccentric style -- like Steve Yegge -- but that doesn't detract from what you wrote.

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yz-yu 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The comments here turned out much more interesting than I expected—this has become a great place to discuss the difference between AI-generated, AI-written, and AI-assisted content.

So let me start from @jbarrow's comment: "AI written, generated from the codebase."

My actual learning process looked like this:

1. I walked through the nano-vLLM codebase, asking Claude Code some high-level questions to warm up. 2. Then I asked detailed questions one by one, let it explore, and double-checked the code myself. As someone without an ML background, it sometimes took hours to understand a single concept. 3. Once I felt I understood enough, I started drawing Excalidraw diagrams to explain what I learned.

Does this count as "generated from the codebase"? I don't think so.

Where we might disagree is the writing process.

As a non-native English speaker, my workflow looks like this:

1. Write a short paragraph (<100 words), then ask my writing agent to "fix this for readability and grammar." 2. Review the output. *If it changes any technical meaning, I correct it.* I consider this a responsible way to write a tech blog. 3. Move to the next paragraph.

Is this "AI-written"? I'd call it "AI-assisted." Every idea in every sentence is mine. Honestly, things like "em dashes" never stood out to me when reviewing. I suspect that's common for non-native speakers.

I wrote this comment the same way. The LLM fixed 14 grammar mistakes that I think would distract readers more than any LLM-ish phrasing.

That said, I'm open to suggestions on how to improve my writing process :)

	▲	tubs 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When text is (clearly) non native English I think most native readers don’t even register grammar errors. To be honest most native readers wouldn’t register grammar errors full stop. I guess I have more awe of people who speak a foreign language at all compared to piping it through some agent malarkey.

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Juvination 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The em dashes really aren't helping their case.

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_alternator_ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wait—do people here really think the em dash was nonexistent before LLMs? It’s widely used by people like me who care about writing style. The reason LLMs use it is because they reflect care and concern about writing style.

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CodeMage 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, people do seem to think that em dashes are an indicator of GenAI. I have been accused of using AI to write my posts on a forum, precisely because of em dashes. That's how I found out about that particular sniff test people use.

Hasn't made me change the way I write, though. Especially because I never actually type an em dash character myself. Back when I started using computers, we only had ASCII, so I got used to writing with double dashes. Nowadays, a lot of software is smart enough to convert a double dash into an em dash. Discourse does that and that's how I ended up being accused of being an AI bot.

	▲	1718627440 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Shouldn't a double dash result in an en dash and only a triple in an em dash?

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WhitneyLand 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, people think humans use it a lot less often than AI, because it’s true. Especially for casual writing.

The contrast might become even greater because some humans that did use them have stopped to avoid false accusations.

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Juvination 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nobody ever said that they were nonexistent before LLMs. When you are investigating and trying to determine if something is AI generated they are the number one indicator.

So if you're being accused of just spewing AI, then double down and spew what looks EVEN MORE like AI. What are you even doing?

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selfsimilar 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Number one indicator? A single punctuation mark that's trivial to make on most keyboards (option-dash on macOS). And generally people who write software are extra fixated on punctuation for obvious reasons: missing semi-colons break your build, etc. Maybe in some other niche message board people will use dash and em dash interchangeably, but here?

Also, if the a single character is how you're red-flagging LLM output, do you know how easy it is to avoid? I didn't use it here at all, but how do you know I didn't run this through some slop-machine to tighten my prose? It's really low-effort take to say "just avoid em dashes so we know you're not an AI".

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-em-dash-responds-to-...

	▲	pessimizer 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, number one indicator. Yes, of course you can go through the output and take out all of the em-dashes. Then the number one indicator will obviously not work.

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mmaunder 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My guess it's a translator they're using.

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yz-yu 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cool, humans hallucinate too. — AI

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Der_Einzige 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]