5 ms·
The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it. I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel
by electric_muse 1y ago
The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
It loves to describe things “hum” that don’t usually hum, like the author wrote in the beginning. Plenty more descriptions match the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript.
I feel like there’s a meta discussion the author was prompting here about consciousness.
Reading the writing of a real human feels more intimate. Reading the auto-tune version of writing makes me feel noticeably less connected to the reader. I know the author still input something to get this output. But there’s something blocking a deeper connection when I just “know” I’m not reading the author’s words.
Edit: llamas > llms
- chis 1y agoI felt the exact same, I can't believe nobody else has commented on it. It feels so disrespectful to such a powerful story to tell it in this way. I mean there's a really interesting core but I just wish I could read the first draft before LLMs overwrote it to death. "Survivor’s euphoria.” A clinical term, woefully inadequate. It wasn’t just euphoria. It was revelation."
- zozbot234 1y agoIs it really OpenAI/ChatGPT, or just the kind of writing ChatGPT was trained to replicate?
- moffkalast 1y agoImpossible to say, a few people really do write like that and their writing gets flagged by those detection systems all the time, but I think we all know which option is far more likely.
- crowsettastoner 1y ago[dead]
- freehorse 1y agoDefinitely rewritten with ChatGpt. There are strong tells that even humans writing in this style would not do. Using "hum" 3 different times in the same text is one of them. It is really a shame that people who do have something to say think that an LLM can express it better, because that is not the case at all.
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago> The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it. > I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help. > I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5. Is it possible you are experiencing confirmation bias[0]? In other words, by your own admission, you have been "trying to see how well llms can help" as it pertains to writing. With that degree of LLM intimacy, is it possible "the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript" is a pattern you are predisposed to identify in other works? 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
- gyomu 1y agoThat wouldn’t be confirmation bias, just pattern recognition. If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago> If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias. And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?
- gyomu 1y agoI wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go “this is probably written by a non native speaker” when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.
- 1y ago
- EnPissant 1y agoI don't know if the tide has shifted on this site, but I was scolded by dang some months ago for pointing out something was obviously GPT-written. I guess that's against the rules.
- alpaca128 1y agoThere's a rule against commenting about "tangential annoyances" like text formatting or bad UX on a linked website. It's possible a comment about GPT use might have been interpreted as that, but I would disagree - this has an effect on the quality of the content. Either way this rule is not very consistently enforced as far as I observed.
- dang 1y agoThere's also the rule against generic tangents, which this subthread certainly is. The trouble with those is that they tend to get upvoted to the top of a thread (as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089350 was), where they choke out the rest of the discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 1y agoOut of curiosity, where was that? The only moderation reply I can find to you is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797043.
- andhuman 1y agoWhen I got to the third hum, I got suspicious, which is sad for this kind of beautiful experience.
- golem14 1y agoTo whom do I hum, to whom?
- grues-dinner 1y agoSend not to know for whom the hum hums, it hums for thee.
- gyomu 1y agoYeah the “No _____. No _____. Just the ______.” is such a dead ringer for AI writing these days that I just ignore any writing that features it. If you don’t care about your craft as a writer to the extent that you can’t even realize how straight-out-of-a-LLM your writing sounds, I’m not going to care about it either.
- fragmede 1y agoHow do you draw the conclusion that the writer doesn't care about their craft though? If someone uses an emdash, but spent three hours and a ton of effort on a three paragraph comment and some of that time was spent running it through ChatGPT to hone their point so it comes across better, does that invalidate the point they're trying to make? Should we start documenting how long it took to write something, regardless of if an LLM was used in some capacity to help write something instead?
- aydyn 1y agoWhy would you think a writer would spend three hours on a single paragraph when it ends up being indistinguishable from ChatGPT? Is that an efficient use of time? How would such a writer that spends that much time per paragraph even survive in today's competitive economy?
- fragmede 1y agoBecause they're human writers, and don't sit down and calculate the most efficient use of time, and then only do that? Most scientists and engineers I know aren't that obsessive about how to most optimally spend their time. "Got Milk" cost tens of thousands of dollars per word. Sometimes it's about quality not quantity.
- aydyn 1y agoYou missed the point entirely. You can't actually tell if an article is AI-assisted or not. A writer that doesn't leverage AI is going to get outcompeted full stop.
- ChaitanyaSai 1y agoYup, it's the short sentence cadence. "And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window." The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call attention to themselves and are rewarded by human RLHF participants. I don't know if incentives including spending time on essays like this but if they don't and the rater is trying to do a speed-read, these stand out. Have written about other markers here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d61a8 https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6... One along those lines: "Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something."
- te_chris 1y agoLike the rlhf is all Hemingway bros (and I love Hemingway)
- gizajob 1y agoThis short sentence cadence always stands out to me – a native British English speaker – as a hallmark of a contemporary American writer trying to write something deep and impactful and profound. Usually just comes across as the opposite.
- adithyassekhar 1y agoI wonder how it would affect those us with english as their second language. I initially learned mine through movies and tv shows from the west. Later hanging around in various forums. That era is definitely over.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anal_reactor 1y ago[dead]
- foxglacier 1y agoYou're being fooled by the humans. They're not writing intimately any more than TFA is. They've learned and practiced to write in a way that conveys whatever emotion they choose to show, whether they really feel it or not. LLMs just bring a professional writer's abilities to normal people. Just like with music, random amatures may have just the same or deeper feelings than superstars, but they don't have the technical skills to put that into their music. We still prefer to listen to the technically competent music to get feelings from it despite it being less personal.
- afro88 1y agoIt's different. Yes you can be a good writer or musician and convey whatever emotion you want. But if you have truly experienced that emotion or experience and unflinchingly hone your writing to convey the true experience of it, it shows. It's the difference between a good song and a great song, or a good story and a great story. I'm all in on AI, but not to replace true human artistic expression. There's something we feel to our core when someone nails the expression of visceral emotion or experience.
- foxglacier 1y agoIt feels like you've been cheated when you felt some emotion reading a true story then discovered it was generated by an LLM, or equally, by an artist who admits it was a lie. But I don't think that's because the writing isn't great - it often is great, which is why it affects the reader so much. I suspect the real complaint that people have is not the writing itself but the knowledge that an LLM generated it. You see people here discussing clues that helped them guess it was an LLM, and asking for authors to disclose that, etc. People worry that the emotion they feel from reading it isn't the same the author felt themselves. What they're forgetting is that good human writers can lead you to feel emotions they never experienced themselves either. You say a "great" story can't be written that way and perhaps if you set the bar high enough that might be true, but for more common writing like the TFA, there's no need to have experienced the emotion first hand if the writer is capable enough - human or LLM.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoTBH I've struggled to get through long-form writing - and this isn't even that long - for years, mostly because they're so full of filler. A compelling headline, but every time it starts to get close to an answer to the compelling headline, it diverts into telling the backstory of one of the people in it. Loads of filler. AI just seems to make it cheaper or faster to generate filler.
- racktash 1y agoAgreed. Lots of recent (last 10-20 years, say) non-fiction is annoyingly flabby.
- jijijijij 1y ago> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately This made me slightly nauseous. What's ahead is going to suck so, so bad. We shouldn't have left the ocean...