I think there's a lot more than just that, but I think part of the problem is that you just get an uncanny valley feeling. All of the phrases and rhetorical tricks that these tools use are perfectly valid, but together they feel somehow thin?

That said, some specific things that feel very AI-y are the mostly short, equally-sized paragraphs with occasional punchy one-sentence paragraphs interspersed between them; the use of bold when listing things (and the number of two-element lists); there are a couple of "it's not X, it's Y"-style statements; one paragraph ends with an "they say it's X, but it's actually Y" construct; and even the phrasing of some of the headings.

None of these are necessarily individually tells of AI writing (and I suspect if you look through my own comments and blog posts on various sites, you'd find me using many of the same constructs, because they're all either effective rhetorically, or make the text clearer and easier to understand). But there's something about the concentration of them here that feels like AI - the uncanny valley feeling.

I would put money on this post at least having gone through AI review, if not having been generated by AI from human-written notes. I understand why people do that, but I also think it's a shame that some of the individual colour of people's writing is disappearing from these sorts of blog posts.

Using threes is common in English writing and speaking. It has an optimal balance of expressiveness (three marking a pattern or breadth; creating momentum) without being overwhelming.

It’s not uncommon, as basic writing advice, to use sets of three for emphasis. That isn’t a signifier of LLM generation, in my opinion.

I’m not a native speaker so my level of AI recognition is already low. I find it very interesting what patters people bring up to declare it’s AI. The 3 punchline one for instance is a pattern I use while speaking. Can’t say I would write like this though.

OK I've seen many people make this point on this site over just the last few months, but where do you think LLMs pick up these patterns? How did this rule of threes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing) get into the LLM so they are so damn recognizable as LLMs and not as humans?

HN Note: Yes the rule of threes is broader than just this particular pattern here, but in my opinion this common writing and communication pattern is a specific example of the rule of threes.

Punchy repetition in a set of 3. Yes. LLMs are able to capably mimic the common patterns that how to write books have suggested for the last 100 years as ways to make your writing more "impactful" and attention-grabbing. So are humans. They learned it from watching us.

I am a little bit worked up on this as I have felt insulted a couple times at having something I've written been accused of being by an LLM, in that case it was because I had written something from the viewpoint of a depressed and tired character and someone thought it had to be an LLM because they seemed detached from humanity! Success!

I too would like to be able to reliably detect when something has been written by an LLM so I can discount it out of hand, but frankly many of the attempts I see people make to detect these things seem poorly reasoned and actively detrimental.

People have learned in classes and from reading how to improve their writing. LLMs have learned from ingesting our output. If something matches a common writing 101 tip it is just as likely to be reasonably competent as it is to be non-human. The solution to escape being labelled an LLM is not to become less competent as a writer.

I have been overly verbose here, as I am somewhat worked up and angry and it is too late in the morning to go back to sleep but really too early to be awake. I know verbosity is also a symptom of being an LLM, but not giving a damn is a symptom of humanity.

> It's too well structured and the message is too clean. HN (and the whole internet) is allergic to proper writing. We praise human sloppiness now.

Yes. And it's only a matter of time that the model companies start to try to train in that "human sloppiness." After all, a lot of their customers want machines that can pass for humans.

> No, I'm not being sarcastic. People have given up em-dash, which is an official punctuation you use in proper writing. And it's all a downhill from there.

I wouldn't be surprised if the internet language of people devolves into a weird constantly-changing mish-mash of slang and linguistic fads. Basically an arms race where people constantly innovate in order to stay distinct from the latest models.

But the end result of that would be probably fragmentation, isolation, and a kind of dark ages. Different communities would have different slang, and that slang would change so fast that old text would quickly become hard to understand.

Strongly disagree. The post is really poorly structured and circles the drain a few times getting to the thesis.

The issues of style are annoying, but I find it much worse to wade through these 3000 word posts which are far longer than they need to be just because they're so damn cheap to compose.

This is the first time I've seen people accuse AI text of being "too structured and consistent" compared to human text. Usually it's about specific patterns or tons of repetition or outright mistakes.

AI was trained on human writing.

> guess humans will eventually also start writing more like the AIs they learn from.

With the AI feedback loop being so fast and tight for some tasks, the focus moves on to delivery than learning. There is no incentive, space or time for learning.

I've reached the point where if any blog post has a subheading with some variant of "The Problem", I assume it's been edited with an LLM, because it co-locates with other indicators so strongly.

Yup, it was actually an interesting article but there are a few telltale parts that sound like every AI spam post on /r/webdev and similar. "No warning. No confirmation dialog. No email notification." is another. The three negatives repeated is present in so many AI generated promotional posts.