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.

>but where do you think LLMs pick up these patterns?

>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.

Don't forget that LLMs (at least the "instruct" versions) undergo substantial post-training to align them with the authors' objectives, so they are not a 100% pure reflection of the distribution seen on the internet. For example, it's common for LLMs to respond with "You're absolutely right!" to every second message, which isn't what humans usually do. It's a result of some kind of RLHF: human labelers liked to hear that they're right, so they preferred answers containing such phrases, and those responses became amplified. People recognize LLM-generated writing because LLMs' pattern distribution is different from the actual pattern distribution found in articles written by humans.