| ▲ | jedberg 9 hours ago |
| I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI. (I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand) |
|
| ▲ | tyg13 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid. Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it. |
| |
| ▲ | NiloCK 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I know the thing you are describing, but the real bitch is that you're actually just describing the lowest effort default outputs. The help-desk assistant persona. Sometimes speedbumps that deter the lowest effort infractions are sufficient but I don't think this is that time. On a per-prompt basis, or via a persistent system prompt or SKILL, or - god help us - via community-specific fine tuning, LLMs can convincingly affect insane variations in prose styling. | |
| ▲ | ordersofmag 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems like the ability to distinguish LLM versus 'good human' writing depends on the size of the writing sample you have to look at (assuming you think it can be done). And that HN-scale posts are unlikely to be a long enough for useful discernment. | | |
| ▲ | b112 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Within a few years, LLMs will be indistinguishable from human text. Think how easy it was to tell the differences a year or two ago. By 2030 there will be no way to ever tell. The same is true of all video, and all generated content. The death of the Internet comes not from spam, or Facebook nonsense, but instead from the fact that soon? You'll never know of you're interacting with a human or not. Why like a post? Reply to it? Interact online? Why read a "news" story? If I was X or Meta or Reddit, I would be looking at the end. | | |
| ▲ | chipotle_coyote 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When will Teslas be self-driving again? | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | mulmen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | LLMs won’t destroy social media any more than it already is. I don’t think I have ever had a meaningful human interaction with anyone on Twitter, Meta, or Reddit without already knowing them from somewhere else. Those sites are about interacting with information, not people. It’s purely transactional. Bots, spam, and bad actors are not new. Meta has been a dumpster fire of spam and bots for over 15 years, the overwhelming majority of its existence. Reddit has some pockets of meaningful interaction but you have to find them and the partitioned nature means that culture doesn’t spread across the site. It’s also full of bots and shills. Nobody tells stories about meeting people on Twitter. At best it’s a microblog platform and at worst it’s X. |
| |
| ▲ | 5o1ecist 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
| |
| ▲ | crossroadsguy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not whether it "really" looks similar. It's what people think, most of the people, and most of the people are neither known for practising good writing nor consuming good writing. | |
| ▲ | girvo 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AI driven web design has the same smell, it’s quite fascinating to see the different tells in different media. Then it’s also quite fascinating to see those same tells change and evolve over time. | | |
| ▲ | kl33 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Lol love the use of 'smell', that's a great way to characterise it. |
| |
| ▲ | jnwatson 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | LLM writing is like AI-generated photos in that you don't notice the good instances of LLM writing, i.e. you don't know your false negative rate. | |
| ▲ | xboxnolifes 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | LLMs have good writing in the same way that technical manuals can have good writing. It might all be correct, but it's usually not a good read. | | |
| ▲ | 0______0 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Excuse me. I consider the writing within technical manuals strictly superior and meticulously written. It's fairly enjoyable to read what engineers/subject matter experts write about their own creations. Comparing those to LLM generated patronizing word vomit is a shame. | | |
| ▲ | quietsegfault 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Depends on the technical manual and their culture. Red Hat had a culture of excellent writers, and their stuff is usually readable if not always enjoyable. |
|
| |
| ▲ | jedberg 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those sentence constructions that are "tells" were also learned from good writers though. But here, I'll let you be the judge. This was a comment I wrote 100% myself on reddit, which was both downvoted and I got multiple DMs referencing it and telling me to "stop posting this AI slop": https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_... Granted, it was in a thread about AI and maybe people were on edge, but I was still accused, which to be honest hurt a bit after the effort I put into writing it. | | |
| ▲ | svachalek 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Interesting, that's one of the most AI-like comments I've read but it still feels human in a way that's hard to define. The headings, the punctuation, the word choices, the paragraph sizes all look GPT-approved. But there's just some catch in the flow, like inclusions in a diamond, that reads "natural" vs "synthetic". I've been talking to Opus a lot lately though, and this could almost be something it wrote; it also has the tendency to write AI-ish looking blurbs that are missing the information-free pitter-patter that bloats older and lesser LLMs. People are going to hate me for saying it but sometimes it words things in a way that are actually a joy to read, which is not an experience I've had with other models. Which is to say, maybe what we hate about AI has less to do with the visual patterns and more to do with what we expect them to mean about the content. But I think there will always be that feeling of: a human being took the effort to write this. No matter how informative or well written an AI article or comment is, it isn't something we instinctively want to respond to, the way we do when we know there is a person behind the words. | | |
| ▲ | nobody9999 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >But I think there will always be that feeling of: a human being took the effort to write this. No matter how informative or well written an AI article or comment is, it isn't something we instinctively want to respond to, the way we do when we know there is a person behind the words. Over and over again, when reading comments from some folks who lionize the usage of LLM outputs, as well as other folks who demonize such usage, I'm reminded of this bit from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle[0], specifically from the "Books of Bokonon"[1]: Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds
himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people
who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
And I wonder if, (myself included) those who demonize LLM usage are those who "came by their ignorance the hard way."I'll admit that the analogy isn't great, but there is something to it IMNSHO. Mostly that many who distrust (and often rightly so) LLM outputs have a strong negative impression (perhaps not "murderous resentment," but similar) of those who use LLMs to spout off. I suppose this is a bit tangential to the topic at hand, but if it gets anyone to read Cat's Cradle who hasn't already, I'll take the win. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle [1] https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html |
| |
| ▲ | strken 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a really interesting example because, to me, it reads as AI- or corpospeak-influenced human. I can't imagine anyone writing the text in the year 2000, but I believe you when you say you wrote it, and the actual information seems worth communicating. | |
| ▲ | dddgghhbbfblk 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the comment you linked doesn't sound like AI at all, though. I do empathize with people worried about getting falsely accused of using AI in their writing, either hypothetically or in your case in actuality, but at the same time I kinda just think that's a skill issue on the part of the accusers. This is very much a general "English reading skills" kind of test. A lot of people don't speak English as a first language, in which case I think it's entirely forgiveable. It's hard being attuned to things like writing style in a foreign language (I know from experience!). It's a pretty high level language skill, all things considered. And even among those who do speak English as a first language, there are many in this industry who don't have strong reading skills. I do believe that personally my hit rate for calling out AI content is likely very high. Like many of us I've had the misfortune of reading more LLM output than is probably healthy for my brain. One quick point: >Those sentence constructions that are "tells" were also learned from good writers though. I don't agree at all, I think the LLM style of writing is cribbed from like, LinkedIn and marketing slop. It's definitely not good writing. | |
| ▲ | linkregister 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's the paragraph headings that look AI-ish. It seems to be rare for human commenters. | |
| ▲ | quietsegfault 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nothing about that article screams AI slop to me. What a weird world. | |
| ▲ | nonameiguess 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I get that it's possibly contrary to the point if people are looking to truly have conversations here, but at least 99% of the time, I post a comment and never come back. I said what I had to say and don't particularly feel like getting sucked into an argument if someone disagrees, and frankly, if I'm wrong I think I'll realize it eventually anyway. I'm more likely to dig in my heels and ossify in a wrong position if someone shits on me and I immediately feel the need to defend myself. It can mesmerize you into believing things you might not have if it didn't hit your ego. I could be deluded but think I'm good at making arguments, but that at least means I'm good at making arguments that convince myself, which can be dangerous because you can convince yourself of things that are wrong. The upside is if anyone is out there accusing me of being an LLM, I don't even know so it can't insult me. It is amusing to witness this happening to others when it's someone like you who is a semi-public figure who should probably be well known on Reddit of all places. | | |
| ▲ | jedberg 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It is amusing to witness this happening to others when it's someone like you who is a semi-public figure who should probably be well known on Reddit of all places. One of our key tenants on reddit for a long time was "upvote the content, not the author". Which is why we made the usernames so small. It actually makes me happy when people judge the merit of what I write for what I said, not who I am. But yes, it is sometimes tempting to say "do you know who I am??". :) |
|
| |
| ▲ | lordnacho 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're absolutely right! | | |
| ▲ | altairprime 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | (For those who have avoided reading AI writing, this is a trope referring to the tendency of some AI sometime to always agree with the user when corrected, I think? Or at least that’s as much as I have worked out, being one of those avoiders.) |
| |
| ▲ | ninjagoo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Uhh, isn't that how senior management in larger corporations communicates ... | |
| ▲ | mulmen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. How do you know? | |
| ▲ | testing22321 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can’t help thinking how ironic it would be if your comment is from an llm |
|
|
| ▲ | visarga 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. People moving to careless writing for authenticity while good writing will be considered AI? funny |
|
| ▲ | semiquaver 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Good writers are often good in recognizably unique ways. To the extent that LLMs produce “good writing,” which I happen to think they mostly do, they tend to overuse specific devices which give their writing a quality that most people are already sick of. |
| |
| ▲ | SchemaLoad 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can tell good writers from LLMs because good writers post comments that mean something, that add to the conversation, that bring in personal experiences. While LLM comments just summarize the article and end with some engagement call to action like "Curious to hear what others think" |
|
|
| ▲ | zahlman 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They look similar. In my experience, they do not read similar at all. You have to pay attention and actually try to appreciate what you're reading. Then, if you try and fail, it might not be your fault. |
| |
| ▲ | altairprime 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They do not read similiar to readers, an appellation not necessarily applicable to large swaths of the U.S. right now. Evidence of English composing skills is being assumed as AI because few younger than my middle-aged self can conceive of writing composition at the skill level demonstrated by AI being a human skill. (This isn’t necessarily true for first world countries, which is why I describe it for the non-U.S. folks in particular.) | |
| ▲ | nomel 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What effort was put into their prompt to make them read similarly? There could very well be a selection bias, where you're only "seeing" AI when it's obvious/default prompt. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure. There's always the possibility that LLM-generated text goes undetected, especially if false positives have a cost. But this is fine. Of course putting more effort into prompting makes the result harder to detect. It also, naturally, reduces the annoyance of LLM-generated comments. And because of the effort involved, it naturally cuts down on the volume of such comments. Arguably it cannot avoid all the possible harm. For example, someone might generate a comment that makes false statements but cannot reasonably be detected as LLM-generated except perhaps by people who know (or determine) that the statements are false. But from a policy perspective, this is again not really different from if someone just decided to lie. |
| |
| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
|
|
| ▲ | crossroadsguy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I use dash a lot while people rather usually use and are used to seeing a hyphen. I was called out on a certain app "wtf dude.. the least u can do is nt use ai". Well, the person was using shorthand and textpeak a lot, so it was already getting nauseating for me, so this outburst helped me eject, but not before I politely asked why they thought so and dash was the trigger along with "all da time crct grmr and spelling". Also "hu da hell writes dis long sentences". Guilty as charged. |
|
| ▲ | alexjplant 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes I use semicolons a lot. If this is the nouveau tell du jour for LLMs then I'm in trouble. |
| |
| ▲ | 317070 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Keep using "nouveau tell du jour" and you'll be just fine! | | |
|
|
| ▲ | threatofrain 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you're looking for the odd visual artifact or textual tic then you're fighting a cat and mouse game that will change by the month. It's either easy to identify the soul of the human or it's not. |
| |
| ▲ | smt88 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Text is extremely lossy and non-deterministic, so it's not often possible to find evidence of humanity in it |
|
|
| ▲ | ModernMech 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I find that most AI writing reads like ad copy to me. The presence of semicolons or em-dashes say nothing either way. |
|
| ▲ | j45 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| AI can make output seem very average or low effort as well if it sounds like everything else. |
|
| ▲ | unethical_ban 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some things to think about: * A comment should be judged on its merits mostly, and if a comment seems to be substantive, interesting, or ask a thoughtful question, it should be acceptable. I think some LLM comments look superficially relevant, but a moment's thought can make me wonder if a comment actually added anything to the discussion, or did it sound like a rephrasing or generalization of a topic? * Unfortunately for decent new users, account age is one metric on which to judge here. * People who post here, should want to engage on a subject when they can, and disengage and be quiet when they can't. There is nothing wrong if you're not an expert on something, and it is not desired by the people here to have you alt-tab to an LLM to plug in extra perspective. We can all do that on our own. |
|
| ▲ | didgetmaster 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. While that might be ideal, is that really the case with most LLM training data? Does the curation process weed out all the slop from bad writers? |
|
| ▲ | quietsegfault 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Much like not dumping motor oil down the drain, it’s probably near impossible to catch skilled AI-users. I think we all want to have a nice space to chat, just like we don’t want a polluted planet, so we’ll just have to be on the honor system. I don’t think there’s a lot to AI generated stuff on here that really bothered me to the point I wanted to call someone out. |
|
| ▲ | jjgreen 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. - You seem to have a rather high opinion of your own writing :-) - Why the mix of tense (use/used)? - Oxford commas are a monstrosity |
| |
| ▲ | altairprime 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Oxford commas are a monstrosity Please don’t present your personal aesthetic beliefs as if those who disagree are morally wrong ‘bad people’. This ‘monstrosity’ comment in this context is derogatory-by-proxy of everyone (including the person you’re criticizing) who uses them, whether they know anything at all about your arguments that they should not, and that’s not really a good tone for us users here to be taking with each other. | | | |
| ▲ | dolebirchwood 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Oxford commas are a monstrosity This is objectively wrong. | | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | to be honest, these little petty attacks bug me more than some ai comments. at least some of the ai comments generate good conversation afterwards. | |
| ▲ | smt88 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Used" seems to be a typo. Being anti-Oxford comma is baffling. It's almost zero extra effort and reduces confusion. |
|
|
| ▲ | djeastm 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand) Perhaps always be sure to say something especially timely, original or insightful that an LLM can't have come up with. |
| |