6 ms·

Sorry, why is this LLM slop? I only got about halfway through because I don’t care about this enough to finish the read, but I don’t see the “obvious LLM” signa

by dpark 1y ago

Sorry, why is this LLM slop? I only got about halfway through because I don’t care about this enough to finish the read, but I don’t see the “obvious LLM” signal you do.

scmccarthy 1y ago
It's clearest in the conclusion.
- dpark 1y ago
  I still don’t see it. I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too. Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.
  - dkdcio 1y ago
    I came to this thread hoping to read an interesting discussion of a topic I don’t understand well; instead it’s this I have opened a wager r.e. detecting LLM/AI use in blogs: https://dkdc.dev/posts/llm-ai-blog-challenge/ https://dkdc.dev/posts/llm-ai-blog-challenge/
    - dpark 1y ago
      I feel like it’s on every other article now. The “this is ai” comments detract way more from the conversation than whatever supposed ai content is actually in the article. These ai hunters are like the transvestigators who are certain they can always tell who’s trans.
      - PKop 1y ago
        No. These articles are annoying to read, the same dumb patterns and structures over and over again in every one. It's a waste of time; the content gives off a generic tone and it's not interesting.
        dkdcio 1y ago
        say that! that’s independent of whether AI/LLM tools were used to write it and more valuable (“this was boring and repetitive” vs “I don’t like the tool I suspect you may have used to write this”)
        sb8244 1y ago
        Are we reading the same article? Also, you do realize that writing is taught in an incredibly formulaic way? I can't speak to English as second language authors, but I imagine it doesn't make it easier.
        WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
        So is the vast majority of comments on HN (and in any comment section of any website) well before LLMs came into being, yet we give them a benefit of doubt. Users on forums tend to behave in a starkly bot-like way, often having a very limited set of responses pertaining to their particular hobby horses, so much so that others could easily predict how the most prolific users would react to any topic and in what precise words. Now, apparently, we have a generation of "this is AI slop!" "bots".
    - _dain_ 1y ago
      I don't have a million dollars but I'll take you up on it for like a grand. I'm serious, email me.
      - dkdcio 1y ago
        the problem is it’s a lot of work (not actually worth it for me for a thousand dollars) — but you cannot win just one scenario, I write 100 rather short, very similar blog posts. run 50 through Claude Code with instructions “copy this file”. have fun distinguishing! of course that’s an extreme way to go about it, but I could use the AI more and end up at the same result trivially
        _dain_ 1y ago
        This is so childish and pathetic it doesn't deserve a response.
        dkdcio 1y ago
        why? LLM/AI use doesn’t denote anything about style or quality of a blog, that’s the point — and why this type of commentary all of HackerNews and elsewhere is so annoying. obviously if a million dollars are on the line I’m going to do what I can to win. I’m just pointing out how that can be taken to the extreme, but again I can use the tools more in the spirit of the challenge and (very easily) end up with the same results
        Panzer04 1y ago
        People object to using AI to write their articles (poorly). Your answer to them saying it's obvious when it's AI written is to.. write it yourself, then pretend copy-pasting that article via an AI counts as AI-written? That's a laughable response.
        dkdcio 1y ago
        my point is using AI is distinct from from the quality of blog posts. these frequent baseless, distracting claims of AI use are silly this wager is a thought exercise to demonstrate that. want to wager $1,000,000 or think you’ll lose? if you’ll lose, why is it ok to go around writing “YoU uSeD aI” instead of actually assessing the quality of a post?
    - internetter 1y ago
      > I will make a bet for $1,000,000! > I won't actually make this bet! > But if I did make this bet, I would win! ???
      - dkdcio 1y ago
        if two parties put up $1,000,000 each and I get a large cut I’ll do the work! one commenter already wagered $1,000, which I’d easily win, but I suspect this would take me idk at least a few days of work (not worth the time). and, again, for a million dollars I’d make sure I win see other comment though, the point is that assessing quality of content on whether AI was used is stupid (and getting really annoying)
  - PKop 1y ago
    That's your issue not ours. It's obvious; if you don't have a problem with it, enjoy reading slop; many people can't stand it and we don't have to apologize for recognizing or not liking it.
    - dpark 1y ago
      I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI. If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.
      - Jweb_Guru 1y ago
        I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to make a much narrower claim, however: each particular set of models, when not heavily prompted to do otherwise, has a "house style" that's pretty easily identifiable by humans in long-form writing samples, and content written with that house style has a very high chance of being generated by AI. When text is written in this house style, it is often a sign that not only were LLMs used in its generation, but the person doing the generation did not bother to do much editing or use a more sophisticated prompt that wouldn't result in such obvious tells, which is why the style is commonly associated with "slop." I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational, or that you think the difficulty of reliably detecting AI generated text at scale is evidence that humans can't do pretty well at this much more limited task. Do you also find claims that AIs are frequently sycophantic in ways that humans are not, or that they will use phrases like "you're absolutely right!" far more than a human would unless prompted otherwise (which are the exact same type of narrow claim) similarly conspirational? i.e., is your assertion that people would have difficulty differentiating between a real human's response to a prompt and Claude's response to a prompt when there was no specific pre-prompt trying to control the writing style of the response?
Jweb_Guru 1y ago
Parts of it were 100% LLM written. Like it or not, people can recognize LLM-generated text pretty easily, and if they see it they are going to make the assumption that the rest of the article is slop too.
- dpark 1y ago
  And yet you don’t call out any parts that are 100% AI and how you recognize them as such. I’m not saying there’s no AI here. I am asking for some evidence to back up the claim though.
  - Jweb_Guru 1y ago
    I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text. And there are a number of other tells as well. The reason I don't usually bother to bring these specific things up is that I already know the response, which is just going to be you arguing that a human could have written this way, too. Which is true. The point is that if you read the collective whole of the article, it is very clear that it was composed with the aid of AI, regardless of whether any single part of it could be defensibly written by a human. I'd add that sometimes, the writing of people who interact heavily with LLMs all day starts to resemble LLM writing (a phenomenon I don't think people talk enough about), but usually not to this extent. This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible to use "this was written with the help of an LLM, and the person posting it did not even bother to edit the article to make that less obvious" as a heuristic to not bother wasting more time on an article.
    - dpark 1y ago

by dpark 1y ago

Sorry, why is this LLM slop? I only got about halfway through because I don’t care about this enough to finish the read, but I don’t see the “obvious LLM” signal you do.

scmccarthy 1y ago

It's clearest in the conclusion.

dpark 1y ago
I still don’t see it. I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too. Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.
- dkdcio 1y ago
  I came to this thread hoping to read an interesting discussion of a topic I don’t understand well; instead it’s this I have opened a wager r.e. detecting LLM/AI use in blogs: https://dkdc.dev/posts/llm-ai-blog-challenge/ https://dkdc.dev/posts/llm-ai-blog-challenge/
  - dpark 1y ago
    I feel like it’s on every other article now. The “this is ai” comments detract way more from the conversation than whatever supposed ai content is actually in the article. These ai hunters are like the transvestigators who are certain they can always tell who’s trans.
    - PKop 1y ago
      No. These articles are annoying to read, the same dumb patterns and structures over and over again in every one. It's a waste of time; the content gives off a generic tone and it's not interesting.
      - dkdcio 1y ago
        say that! that’s independent of whether AI/LLM tools were used to write it and more valuable (“this was boring and repetitive” vs “I don’t like the tool I suspect you may have used to write this”)
      - sb8244 1y ago
        Are we reading the same article? Also, you do realize that writing is taught in an incredibly formulaic way? I can't speak to English as second language authors, but I imagine it doesn't make it easier.
      - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
        So is the vast majority of comments on HN (and in any comment section of any website) well before LLMs came into being, yet we give them a benefit of doubt. Users on forums tend to behave in a starkly bot-like way, often having a very limited set of responses pertaining to their particular hobby horses, so much so that others could easily predict how the most prolific users would react to any topic and in what precise words. Now, apparently, we have a generation of "this is AI slop!" "bots".
  - _dain_ 1y ago
    I don't have a million dollars but I'll take you up on it for like a grand. I'm serious, email me.
    - dkdcio 1y ago
      the problem is it’s a lot of work (not actually worth it for me for a thousand dollars) — but you cannot win just one scenario, I write 100 rather short, very similar blog posts. run 50 through Claude Code with instructions “copy this file”. have fun distinguishing! of course that’s an extreme way to go about it, but I could use the AI more and end up at the same result trivially
      - _dain_ 1y ago
        This is so childish and pathetic it doesn't deserve a response.
        dkdcio 1y ago
        why? LLM/AI use doesn’t denote anything about style or quality of a blog, that’s the point — and why this type of commentary all of HackerNews and elsewhere is so annoying. obviously if a million dollars are on the line I’m going to do what I can to win. I’m just pointing out how that can be taken to the extreme, but again I can use the tools more in the spirit of the challenge and (very easily) end up with the same results
        Panzer04 1y ago
        People object to using AI to write their articles (poorly). Your answer to them saying it's obvious when it's AI written is to.. write it yourself, then pretend copy-pasting that article via an AI counts as AI-written? That's a laughable response.
        dkdcio 1y ago
        my point is using AI is distinct from from the quality of blog posts. these frequent baseless, distracting claims of AI use are silly this wager is a thought exercise to demonstrate that. want to wager $1,000,000 or think you’ll lose? if you’ll lose, why is it ok to go around writing “YoU uSeD aI” instead of actually assessing the quality of a post?
  - internetter 1y ago
    > I will make a bet for $1,000,000! > I won't actually make this bet! > But if I did make this bet, I would win! ???
    - dkdcio 1y ago
      if two parties put up $1,000,000 each and I get a large cut I’ll do the work! one commenter already wagered $1,000, which I’d easily win, but I suspect this would take me idk at least a few days of work (not worth the time). and, again, for a million dollars I’d make sure I win see other comment though, the point is that assessing quality of content on whether AI was used is stupid (and getting really annoying)
- PKop 1y ago
  That's your issue not ours. It's obvious; if you don't have a problem with it, enjoy reading slop; many people can't stand it and we don't have to apologize for recognizing or not liking it.
  - dpark 1y ago
    I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI. If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.
    - Jweb_Guru 1y ago
      I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to make a much narrower claim, however: each particular set of models, when not heavily prompted to do otherwise, has a "house style" that's pretty easily identifiable by humans in long-form writing samples, and content written with that house style has a very high chance of being generated by AI. When text is written in this house style, it is often a sign that not only were LLMs used in its generation, but the person doing the generation did not bother to do much editing or use a more sophisticated prompt that wouldn't result in such obvious tells, which is why the style is commonly associated with "slop." I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational, or that you think the difficulty of reliably detecting AI generated text at scale is evidence that humans can't do pretty well at this much more limited task. Do you also find claims that AIs are frequently sycophantic in ways that humans are not, or that they will use phrases like "you're absolutely right!" far more than a human would unless prompted otherwise (which are the exact same type of narrow claim) similarly conspirational? i.e., is your assertion that people would have difficulty differentiating between a real human's response to a prompt and Claude's response to a prompt when there was no specific pre-prompt trying to control the writing style of the response?

Jweb_Guru 1y ago

Parts of it were 100% LLM written. Like it or not, people can recognize LLM-generated text pretty easily, and if they see it they are going to make the assumption that the rest of the article is slop too.

dpark 1y ago
And yet you don’t call out any parts that are 100% AI and how you recognize them as such. I’m not saying there’s no AI here. I am asking for some evidence to back up the claim though.
- Jweb_Guru 1y ago
  I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text. And there are a number of other tells as well. The reason I don't usually bother to bring these specific things up is that I already know the response, which is just going to be you arguing that a human could have written this way, too. Which is true. The point is that if you read the collective whole of the article, it is very clear that it was composed with the aid of AI, regardless of whether any single part of it could be defensibly written by a human. I'd add that sometimes, the writing of people who interact heavily with LLMs all day starts to resemble LLM writing (a phenomenon I don't think people talk enough about), but usually not to this extent. This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible to use "this was written with the help of an LLM, and the person posting it did not even bother to edit the article to make that less obvious" as a heuristic to not bother wasting more time on an article.
  - dpark 1y ago