> the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is

Well the author in this case is Claude, and AIs write like that because the assistant persona really thinks that's what good writing sounds like. They're wrong, but they're just doing what they were taught. There's a reason LLM raters consistently score LLM writing highly.

Well perhaps the LLM put that bit in for them.

Interestingly that's the one point of the article I have a disagreement with. Yeah, good thinking comes when reformulating your ideas. Also, reformulating ideas is part of the traditional writing process. However it's does not necessarily focus writers/thinkers on the reformulating ideas in their most value adding form.

I've watched some YouTube videos narrated by AI that were created by those who's native language I assume to be Chinese but the value of the content is higher and more concentrated than those from the native speakers.

While I've watched many for whom English is not their first language struggle in technical talks and lose most of the meat if their discussion to their struggle with the language conversion.

While the example of language barriers being skipped over and providing value in that circumstance is obvious I suspect more is possible by avoiding unnecessarily focus on prose or technical aspects of communication and focusing on the ideas themselves.

Imagine if the cost of not assuming a background in technical/textbook writing were zero. Freeing up authors to explain more thoroughly. Perhaps, more effort can be spent on thinking up analogies, metaphor or examples to help communicate an idea.

> believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.

I mean, it made it to the front page of HN didn't it? Probably served its purpose just fine. Not all writing is supposed to be impressive or good. Some of it is to just get attention and stir discussion, and this Claude output did exactly that.

Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name to believe things as obvious as "a long form news article cramming every AI trope it can fit from start to finish" being AI written.

At this point I'm surprised when a news article isn't largely AI written, let alone one using the default tone! I don't even mind it as much as others seem to, it's just turning into more and more of a rarity for a news article to not be these last few years and so is now what sticks out.

Em-dashes would be a loss, they can be a better flowing version of a parenthetical. “It’s not X it’s Y” is not a loss. This phrase is a symptom of a situation where the author wants to subvert expectations but doesn’t have the space, ability, or faith in their audience to organically set up X as the thing to be contrasted against.

I suspect it became an LLM tell because it is over-represented in text that’s easily available to the models but that most people don’t actually want to consume: marketing text, LinkedIn posts, that sort of thing.

That’s not common and effective, it’s buzz feed style articles.

Have you also scanned earlier work of the author with pangram to establish a baseline? Pangram is not without problems.

Why trust pangram? What are their accuracy scores in the wild? Ai detection is notoriously difficult.

All these "is this AI" checkers should be banned, as they never can reach 100% accuracy.

Fwiw, I only did the first 300 words (signed into pangram) and it seemingly correctly noted that there were 2 (mostly) human-authored sentences in there

What's wild to me is that:

1. People are responding to this article like it's hitting a nerve

2. In most Ubers you already don't talk to the driver (yellow cabs are higher variance in NYC). Doesn't seem like anything's being lost in that case.

3. There are enormous safety benefits to waymo, mobility benefits for youth (and elderly) that are afforded by this technology. It's not clear why people argue "Uber" is better than waymo. A few years ago there were arguments against Uber! (A technology which, again, provides a huge benefit, especially if you live in an area where people were previously expected to go out for drinks and then drive home)

I think it's fair to point out real issues at these companies. But we should be clear-eyed about which technologies we want to accelerate vs slow down

Yes, HN is for human discussion. It is fine to flag and remove things that are not human written and cannot facilitate human discussion due to it’s false construction.

No, it is not.

I think individually and when used sparingly, writing tropes can be fine, but when the article has every second sentence being a writing trope, it becomes pretty obvious that either a LLM wrote it, or the author simply doesn't know how to write, and regardless, it's a waste of time trying to read through it.

In this sort of way, yes, it's a clue. Obviously not dispositive just by itself.

It genuinely is--and that's the honest truth.

The real LLM tell is tortured and inappropriate metaphors and unnecessary adjectives and adverbs[1]. What purpose is "quietly" serving in this headline?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA

> saying it is "written by LLM" is not useful and misses the point.

It is useful to me. I see too much slop every day and would like to filter it out from my life. I appreciate the tip, and to me, that is the whole point.

"every hour spent aligning with a co-author is an hour not spent producing output that is legible to an evaluation system." use of the word 'legible'.

"We defund the corridor and then wonder where the corridor conversations went." this is a claude-ist construction.

"This is an old worry wearing new clothes" this is a very claude-ist construction.

(rather ironically... as @embedding-shaep pointed out earlier): "Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it." 'not X but punchy-Y' (not to be confused with 'not X but profound-Y'.

I'm not saying the author shouldn't have used an LLM - once in a while I suppose it gets used to good effect. But I wouldn't kid myself that the writing is certainly all human through-and-through.

[Incidentally, in case anyone's wondering where many of these claude-isms come from, just search within lesswrong.com .]

Can you share me the summary? I'd like to read a LLM summary of your summary.

Things are bit tight today.

Plenty of people use Oxford commas though, can't really use it as a reliable signal, too much noise.

If you check my comment history here, I have not written this before.

I like LLMs and use them daily, but I don't really like when people use them undisclosed for long-form prose writing.

In the spirit of the "That's what she said" bot, you could train an LLM detector by accusing everything of being authored by an LLM and seeing which ones get voted up.

"Novel" is not a prerequisite for something to be worth pointing out. Lots of bad things happen repeatedly, and don't quickly become not worth caring about or knowing about. People have strong spirits and curious minds and it tends to take a long time to boil that frog out of them - generations, sometimes.

People aren't treating it as a thoughtful contribution. It is more of a flag, like "spam".