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skydhash 4 hours ago

I don’t think TFA is written by AI.

But AI written pieces do have a certain feeling. A sort of saccatto in the succession of ideas that does not feel natural. They emphasize certain points, and you as a reader, you just wonder why is that. There is the “This thing, not just that thing”. There are also the three successive propositions (mostly in one sentences) to accentuate an idea and “Negation. Strong positive idea in the same direction”.

In general try reading one (vocally) to yourself and it will feel really weird.

GrinningFool an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It feels manipulative. The strong language always seems like it is trying to convince you it's right even when there is no need to, such as a factual presentation. Of course if you look at popular pre-AI blogs you can see strains of the same thing, so it's no surprise that llms blend together all of those "most persuasive" methods.

jghn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just like em-dashes, some people have always done these though. Why are they penalized with immediate AI slop witch hunts? The LLMs didn't come up with these tics out of thin air.

GrinningFool an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I've realized that even when human's write that way, I also stop reading. Manipulative writing always shuts down my interest in reading it. At least when the LLM does it, it's a byproduct of training. When a human does it's intentional.

jghn 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah see that makes a lot more sense. If one doesn't like the writing style or content, just don't read it. The reflexive "this is AI slop!" complaints have themselves become a caricature. If something was written by AI but one liked the writing style and content, who cares? But regardless of the authorship if it's vapid and annoying, then that's different.

skydhash 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You have to start with the reason there’s a witch hunt. I love reading. I read books (novels) almost every day and I’m almost always perusing a textbook pr an article for my jobs and my hobbies. The signal/noise for entertainment or information was fairly high, then come LLM tools.

You start to be interested by the title of an article or a book cover, and then you start reading it and it’s just vapor. Nothing tangible to be gained. It’s like buying something expensive and finding out a cheap trinket under the wrapping.

After a couple of times, you will develop a certain kind of heuristics for this kind of texts. It will not be perfect and will have some false positives, but that’s the only way to keep your sanity.

jghn an hour ago | parent [-]

I mean I get it. It bugs me too. And yes, obviously most of the text that people point at as being AI slop is in fact AI slop. At the same time, you also have the other set of asshats that just go respond with things like "AI slop!" to everything when they can't actually be certain. Like I said, some of these AI tells are things that actual real humans do too.

I like your vapor term. For me it's about the content anyways. If it's just some sort of vapid, pointless drivel then I'm not going to like it regardless of who or what wrote it. And in my experience text that strongly correlates with AI tells also strongly correlate with having sparse substance and lots of fluff.

In other words, if people don't like something, just don't read it. Shouting at people for AI generated text just makes you look foolish if the text is not in fact AI generated. And the person shouting "AI slop!" has no way to prove it other than vibes.

simion314 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>The LLMs didn't come up with these tics out of thin air.

LLMs were trained with a lot of synthetic data to transform them from a complete this text into a chatbot, I suspect that this tons of synthetic data that forces the LLM to answer questions into a specific ways also forced them to have this "synthetic/robotic" language. Claude users would have noticed the "belter and suspenders" phrase just started popping out after an update and I am sure is nto because lots of developers used it in their blogs and Anthropic scrapped those blogs in that update.