There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

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rezonant 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't.

My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in:

> My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end.

Ostensibly this is supposed to add gravitas, but it's very often done in places where that gravitas isn't needed, and it comes off as if I'm reading the script for an action movie trailer.

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lelanthran 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well.

Quite paradoxical: when its a person's native language we can spot it a mile away but there's no shortage of engineers who claim how good the code output is.

Whatever the reason for the default tone of AI in English, it's still there when generating code. It makes me think that the senior engineers who claim that it produces awesome output just don't understand the specific programming language as a someone who thinks in it almost natively.

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ykonstant 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unnecessary emphasis can get... quite comical... indeed.

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

People have also started copying the AI tropes, especially your period/comma example.

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microtonal 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I am not sure if it is necessarily copied. A lot of influencer-style people used some of these patterns (periods, not X but Y). So I'm not sure who is copying who?

	▲	throwaway219450 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		These patterns are learned from magazine articles and other long-form publications. The tendency to have unnecessarily pithy/hooky section titles is one that particularly irks me, but it's not like AI invented that. I was reading some DIY books that are published by a company that does a lot of web/magazine work and they structure the text in the same way (this is all pre-LLM). Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too. It's uncanny when you (literally) hear it.

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concinds 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The uncanny valley is an attractor basin.

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

Made me stop reading a few paragraphs in. I don't have a "problem" in the ethical sense either, but as the sibling comment notes, the way LLMs write is rather grating. To make matters worse, a) people seem to use them to add pointless volume / "filler" to their texts, so now I have to wade through pages and pages of this stuff, and b) I have no easy way to distinguish between an article at least based on novel human insights vs entirely LLM-generated from a "write me something about X topic" prompt. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the latter just isn't worth reading given the state of the art.

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

I don't have a problem with AI assistance either, but this undermines the point the article is making. For me it is like a priest preaching gay sex is wrong and then being caught in bed with a male prostitute (snorting cocaine optional). Leaves bad taste in the mouth.

	▲	sph 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Many such cases. Both the priest anecdote, and AI-critical posts being AI-generated.

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A_D_E_P_T 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on?

The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.

	▲	allending 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sort of a taste receptor I’m sure many have developed now. The most obvious patterns here are: antithesis constructions, words choices and distribution, attempt at profundity in every paragraph but instead are runs of text that doing say anything, and even the perfect use of compound hyphenation. I think and can appreciate that there is definitely an attempt at personalization and guidance to make it less LLM-y and not just a default prompt, but it’s still kind of obvious. You could use a detector tool too of course.
	▲	bonsai_spool an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		What are the obvious tells? List them, because I think our sense of the tells may not overlap. This article is clearly LLM-generated, even the title. A key indicator is that it almost makes sense: we forgot how to manufacture because that got sent to a different nation. The coding thing isn’t getting sent anywhere, so humanity is forgetting how to code. The distinction undermines a lot of the emotional baggage about offshoring that the article wants you to bring along.
	▲	lkm0 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The blog post reads nothing like Hemingway. Here's a classic example: https://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Hemingway/hemingway-... Hemingway writes simple sentences with a kind of detachment to make the emotional flow of his stories as transparent as possible. LLM slop reads more like slide bullet points extrapolated to prose-length text
	▲	lelanthran 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Blog posts aren't typically written like Hemingway. Find some pre 2020 that are, and you'd have a point.