4 ms·
Wild tale, but very annoying that he wrote it with an AI. It's horribly jarring to read.
by divvvyy 11mo ago
Wild tale, but very annoying that he wrote it with an AI. It's horribly jarring to read.
- Grimblewald 11mo agoHow do you know? I'm not trying to be recalcitrant, rather I am genuinly curious. The reason I ask is that no one talks like a LLM, but LLMs do talk like someone. LLMs learned to mimic human speech patterns, and some unlucky soul(s) out there have had their voice stolen. Earlier versions of LLMs of LLMs that more closely followed the pattern and structure of a wikipedia entry were mimicking a style that that was based of someone elses style and given some wiki users had prolific levels of contributions, much of their naturally generated text would register as highly likely to be "AI" via those bullshit ai detector tools. So, given what we know of LLMs (transformers at least) at this stage it seems more likely to me that current speech patterns again are mimicry of someones style rather than an organically grown/developed thing that is personal to the LLM.
- gmzamz 11mo agoLooks like AI to me too. Em dashes (albeit nonstandard) and the ‘it’s not just x, it’s y’ ending phrases were everywhere. Harder to put into words but there’s a sense of grandiosity in the article too. Not saying the article is bad, it seems pretty good. Just that there are indications
- lynndotpy 11mo agoIt's also strange to suggest readers use ChatGPT or Claude to analyze email headers. Might as well say "You can tell by the way it is".
- jclarkcom 11mo agoI don’t understand this comment. I’ve found AI a great tool for identifying red flags in scam emails and wanted to share that.
- fn-mote 11mo ago1. They are all scam emails. 2. AI detecting a scam, sure - it’s a scam. AI saying the email is ok… then what? I’d never trust it.
- Grimblewald 11mo agoI agree with this, my experience is that a small light weight LLM is a fantastic spam filter.
- lynndotpy 11mo agoThe content ChatGPT returns is non-deterministic (you will get different responses on the same day for the same email), and these models change over time. Even if you're an expert in your field and you can assess that the chatbot returned correct information for one entry, that's not guaranteed to be repeated. You're staking personal reputation in the output of something you can expect to be wrong. When someone gets a suspicious email, they follow your advice, and ChatGPT incorrectly assures them that it's fine, then the scammed person would be correct in thinking you're a person with bad advice. And if you don't believe my arguments, maybe just ask ChatGPT to generate a persuasive argument against using ChatGPT to identify scam emails.
- jclarkcom 11mo agoIt's a good point and I should make a distinction on what models are appropriate. I think of chatGPT 4 like a college student and chatGPT 5.1 5 Pro (deep thinking model) more like a seasoned professional. I wouldn't trust non-frontier, non-thinking models with a result for this kind of question. But the determinism of the result does not scare me, the out output may vary but not directionally. The same thing would happen if you asked the foremost security expert in the world, you'd get slightly different answers on different days. One time as a I test I ran a very complex legal analysis through chat GPT pro 10 times to see how the results would vary and it was pretty consistent with ~10% variation in numbers it suggested.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- drabbiticus 11mo agoJust chiming in here - any time I've written something online that considers things from multiple angles or presents more detailed analysis, the liklihood that someone will ask if I just used ChatGPT go way up. I worry that people have gotten really used to short, easily digestible replies, and conflate that with "human". Because of course it would be crazy for a human to expend "that much effort" on something /s. EDIT: having said that, many of the other articles on the blog do look like what would come from AI assistance. Stuff like pervasive emojis, overuse of bulleted lists, excessive use of very small sections with headers, art that certainly appears similar in style to AI generated assets that I've seen, etc. If anything, if AI was used in this article, it's way less intrusive than in the other articles on the blog.
- jclarkcom 11mo agoAuthor here - yes, this was written using guided AI. I consider this different than giving a vague prompt and telling it to write an article. My process was to provide all the information, for example I used AI to: 1. transcribe the phone call into text using whisper model 2. review all the email correspondence 3. research industry news about the breach 4. brainstorm different topics and blog structures to target based on the information, pick one 5. Review the style of my other blog articles 6. write the article and redact any personal info 7. review the article and suggest iterate on changes multiple times. To me this is more akin to having a writer on staff who can save you a lot of time. I can do all the above in less than 30mins, where it could take a full day to do it manually. I had a blog 20 years ago but since then I never had time to write content again (too time consuming and no ROI) - so the alternative would be nothing. There are some still some signs you can tell content is AI written based on verbosity, use of bold, specific HTML styling, etc. I see no issues with the approach. I noticed some people have an allergic reaction to any hint of AI, and when the content produced is "fluff" with no real content I get annoyed too - however that isn't the case for all content.
- shayway 11mo agoThe issue is that the article is excessively verbose; the time you saved in writing end editing comes at the cost of wasting readers' time. There is nothing wrong with using AI to improve writing, but using it to insert fluff that came at no cost to you and no benefit to me feels like a violation of social contract. Please, at least put a disclaimer on top so I can ask an AI to summarize the article and complete the cycle of entropy.
- yuvadam 11mo agoThis blog post isn't human speech, it's typical AI slop. (heh, sorry.) Way too verbose to get the point across, excessive usage of un/ordered bullets, em dashes, "what i reported / what coinbase got wrong", it all reeks of slop. Once you notice these micro-patterns, you can't unsee them. Would you like me to create a cheat sheet for you with these tell tale signs so you have it for future reference?
- rdos 11mo agoHello, would you add something to this list? I think it's pretty good > Over‑polished prose – flawless grammar, overly formal tone, and excessive wordiness. > Repetitive buzzwords – phrases like “delve into,” “navigate,” “vibrant,” “comprehensive,” etc. > Lack of perspective shifts – AI usually sticks to a single narrative voice; humans naturally mix first, second, and third person. > Excessive em‑dashes – AI tends to over‑use them, breaking flow. > Anodyne, neutral stance – AI avoids strong opinions, trying to please every reader. > Human writing often contains minor errors, idiosyncratic punctuation, and a more nuanced, opinionated voice. > It's not just x, it's y
- abanana 11mo agoOveruse of bold markup, particularly to begin each bullet point. Overuse of "Here's..." to introduce or further every concept or idea. A few parts of this article particularly jump out, such as the 2 lists following the "The SMS Flooding Attack" section (which incidentally begins "Here's where..."). A human wouldn't write them as lists (the first list in particular), they'd be normal paragraphs. Short bulleted lists are a good way to get across simple bite-sized pieces of information quickly, but that's in cases where people aren't going to read a large block of text, e.g. in ads. Overusing them in the wrong medium, breaking up a piece of prose like this, just hurts its flow and readability.
- stefan_ 11mo agoSorry but I think you just don't know a lot about LLMs. Why did they start spamming code with emojis? It's not because that is what people actually do, something that is in the training data. It's because someone reinforcement learned the LLM to do it by asking clueless people if they prefer code with emojis. And so at this point the excessive bullet points and similar filler trash is also just an expression of whatever stupid people think they prefer. Maybe I'm being too harsh and it's not the raters are stupid in this constellation, rather it's the ones thinking you could improve the LLM by asking them to make a few very thin judgements.
- Grimblewald 11mo agoI know the style that most LLM's are mimicking quite well, and I also know people who wrote like that prior to the LLM deluge that is washing over us. The reason people are choosing to make LLMs mimic those behaviours is because it used to be associated with high effort content. The irony is now it si associated with the lowest effort content. The irony is I have stopped proof reading my comments etc. and put zero effort into styling or flow, because right now the only human thing left to do is make low effort content of the like only a human can.
- glitchc 11mo agoSupporting evidence required.
- gnabgib 11mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948625
- anonym29 11mo ago[flagged]
- KomoD 11mo agoCoherent? It's really annoying to read. The post just repeats things over and over again, like the Brett Farmer thing, the "four months", telling us three times that they knew "my BTC balance and SSN" and repeatedly mentioning that it was a Google Voice number.
- anonym29 11mo agoAlmost sounds like the posts of people whining about LLMs. Of course, unlike those people, LLMs are capable of expressing novel ideas that add meaningful value to diverse conversations beyond loudly and incessantly ensuring everyone in the thread is aware of their objection to new technology they dislike.
- lxgr 11mo agoLLMs are definitely capable of helping with writing, connecting the dots, and sometimes now of genuine insight. They're also still very capable of producing time-wasting slop. It's the task of anybody presenting their output to third parties to read (at least without a disclaimer about a given text being unvetted LLM output) to make damn sure it's the former and not the latter.
- anonym29 11mo agoThankfully, the 8 millionth post whining about LLMs with zero additional value added to the conversation is far less time-wasting than a detailed blog post about a real-world security incident in a major corporation that isn't being widely covered by other outlets. The article isn't paywalled. Nobody was forced to read it. Nobody was prohibited from asking an LLM to summarize the article. Whining about LLM written text is whining about one's own deliberate choice to read an article. There is no implied contract or duty between the author and the people who freely choose to read or not read the author's (free) publication. It's like walking into a (free) soup kitchen, consuming an entire bowl of free soup, and then whining loudly to everyone else in the room about the soup being too salty.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- BobAliceInATree 11mo agoI don't know if he wrote it via AI, but he repeats himself over and over again. It could have been 1/3 the length and still conveyed the same amount of information.
- d1sxeyes 11mo ago'I don't know if he wrote it via AI, but he repeats himself'.
- FinnKuhn 11mo agoSome people just aren't good writers.
- garbagewoman 11mo agoIts AI, he said it himself
- FinnKuhn 11mo agoThat still doesn't mean that something is AI just because a text is repetitive.
- alwa 11mo agoI know I shouldn’t pile on with respect to the AI Slop Signature Style, but in the hopes of helping people rein in the AI-trash-filter excesses and avoid reactions like these… The sentence-level stuff was somewhat improved compared to whatever “jaunty Linked-In Voice” prompt people have been using. You know, the one that calls for clipped repetitive phrases, needless rhetorical questions, dimestore mystery framing, faux-casual tone, and some out-of-proportion “moral of the story.” All of that’s better here. But there’s a good ways left to go still. The endless bullet lists, the “red flags,” the weirdly toothless faux drama (“The Call That Changed Everything”, “Data Catastrophe: The 2025 Cyber Fallout”), and the Frankensteined purposes (“You can still protect yourself from falling victim to the scams that follow,” “The Timeline That Doesn't Make Sense,” etc.)… The biggest thing that stands out to me here (besides the essay being five different-but-duplicative prompt/response sessions bolted together) are the assertions/conclusions that would mean something if real people drew them, but that don’t follow from the specifics. Consider: “The Timeline That Doesn't Make Sense Here's where the story gets interesting—and troubling: [they made a report, heard back that it was being investigated, didn’t get individual responses to their follow-ups in the immediate days after, the result of the larger investigation was announced 4 months later]” Disappointing, sure. And definitely frustrating. But like… “doesn’t make sense?” How not so? Is it really surprising or unreasonable that it takes a large organization time, for a major investigation into a foreign contractor, with law enforcement and regulatory implications, as well as 9-figure customer-facing damages? Doesn’t it make sense (even if it’s disappointing), when stuff that serious and complex happens, that they wait until they’re sure before they say something to an individual customer? I’m not saying it’s good customer service (they could at least drop a reply with “the investigation is ongoing and we can’t comment til it’s done”). There’s lots of words we could use to capture the suckage besides “doesn’t make sense.” My issue is more that the AI presents it as “interesting—and troubling; doesn’t make sense” when those things don’t really follow directly from the bullet list of facts afterward. Each big categorical that the AI introduced this way just… doesn’t quite match what it purports to describe. I’m not sure exactly how to pin it down, but it’s as if it’s making its judgments entirely without considering the broader context… which I guess is exactly what it’s doing.
- gblargg 11mo agoThe page background slowly fades in and out with a blue color. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.