9 ms·
There's no reason to presume that the author 'thinks' that.
by yreg 10mo ago
There's no reason to presume that the author 'thinks' that.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo ago“This isn’t just an email address; it is my core digital identity” If he doesn’t think like that, then why does he act like it?
- evanelias 10mo ago[flagged]
- lapcat 10mo ago> That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks. The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes. It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI.
- evanelias 10mo agoI didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! If this isn't AI writing, why say "The “New Account” Trap" with then further sub-headers "The Legal Catch", "The Technical Trap", "The Developer Risk"... I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
- lapcat 10mo ago> I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI. > I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years. What would you have written instead?
- evanelias 10mo agoMost of those section headers and bolded bullet-point summary phrases should simply be removed. That's why I described them as superfluous. In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in the case of what AI commonly spews out). This is fairly basic writing advice! To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. For me, it reduces the trustworthiness of the claims in the article, especially combined with the key missing detail of why/how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased.
- lapcat 10mo ago> To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking here. It's a blog post, not a book. Look at the last line of the article: "No permission granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)." The author has also written several previous articles that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the article was written by AI.
- evanelias 10mo agoIt's a difference of opinion and that's fine. But I'll just say, notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them.
- lapcat 10mo ago> notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them. The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..." headers. Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style.
- rafabulsing 10mo agoLLMs learned from human writing. They might amplify the frequency of some particular affectations, but they didn't come up with those affectations themselves. They write like that because some people write like that.
- evanelias 10mo ago[flagged]
- dahart 10mo agoThat seems like straw man. Image generation matches style quite well. LLM hallucination conjures untrue statements while still matching the training data style and word choices.
- evanelias 10mo ago[flagged]
- dahart 10mo ago> AI may output certain things at a vastly different rate than it appears in the training data That’s a subjective statement, but generally speaking, not true. If it were, LLMs would produce unintelligible text & images. The way neural networks function is fundamentally to produce data that is statistically similar to the training data. Context, prompts, and training data are what drive the style. Whatever trends you believe you’re seeing in AI can be explained by context, prompts, and training data, and isn’t an inherent part of AI. Extra fingers are known as hallucination, so if it’s a different phenomenon, then nobody knows what you’re talking about, and you are saying your analogy to fingers doesn’t work. In the case of images, the tokens are pixels, while in the case of LLMs, the tokens are approximately syllables. Finger hallucinations are lack of larger structural understanding, but they statistically mimic the inputs and are not examples of frequency differences.
- wpm 10mo ago
- the_af 10mo agoHeuristics are nice but must be reviewed when confronted with actual counterexamples. If this is a published author known to write books before LLMs, why automatically decide "humans don't write like this". He's human and he does write like this!
- amelius 10mo agoThe author is reputable, just look at the rest of their website. Your accusation on the other hand is based on far-fetched speculation.
- cgriswald 10mo agoYou’re pointlessly derailing a conversation with a claim you can’t support that isn’t relevant even if true. Regardless of whether AI wrote that line he published it and we can safely assume it is what he thinks.
- evanelias 10mo ago[flagged]
- cgriswald 10mo agoI don’t think you even know what you’re arguing about anymore. You claimed that what the author wrote wasn’t what the author thinks. As evidence you provided weak arguments about other parts of it being AI written and made an appeal to your own authority. It doesn’t matter if AI wrote that line, he wrote it, a ghost writer wrote it or a billion monkeys wrote it. He published it as his own work and you can act as if he thinks it even if you don’t otherwise trust him or the article.
- evanelias 10mo agoAh, I see the confusion, you're still focusing entirely on this one "this isn't just x; it's y" line. I was mostly talking about the piece as a whole, for pretty much everything other than the first sentence of my first comment above. Sincere apologies if I didn't state that clearly.
- dahart 10mo ago> humans simply didn’t write this way prior to recent years. Aren’t LLMs evidence that humans did write this way? They’re literally trained to copy humans on vast swaths of human written content. What evidence do you have to back up your claim?
- evanelias 10mo agoDecades of reading experience of blog posts and newspaper articles. They simply never contained this many section headers or bolded phrases after bullet points, and especially not of the "The [awkward noun phrase]" format heavily favored by LLMs.
- dahart 10mo agoSo what would explain why AI writes a certain way, when there is no mechanism for it, and when the way AI works is to favor what humans do? LLM training includes many more writing samples than you’ve ever seen. Maybe you have a biased sample, or maybe you’re misremembering? The article’s style is called an outline, we were taught in school to write the way the author did.
- evanelias 10mo agoWhy did LLMs add tons of emoji to everything for a while, and then dial back on it more recently? The problem is they were trained on everything, yet the common style for a blog post previously differed from the common style of a technical book, which differed from the common style of a throwaway Reddit post, etc. There's a weird baseline assumption of AI outputting "good" or "professional" style, but this simply isn't the case. Good writing doesn't repeat the same basic phrasing for every section header, and insert tons of unnecessary headers in the first place.
- dahart 10mo agoYes, training data is a plausible answer to your own question there, as well as mine above. And that explanation does not support your claims that AI is writing differently than humans, it only suggests training sets vary. Repeating your thesis three times in slightly different words was taught in school. Using outline style and headings to make your points clear was taught in school. People have been writing like this for a long time. If your argument depends on your subjective idea of “good writing”, that may explain why you think AI & blog styles are changing; they are changing. That still doesn’t suggest that LLMs veer from what they see. All that aside, as other people have mentioned already, whether someone is using AI is irrelevant, and believing you can detect it and accusing people of using AI quickly becoming a lazy trope, and often incorrect to boot.
- heavyset_go 10mo agoMy writing from 5+ years ago was accused of being AI generated by laymen because I used Markdown, emojis and dared to use headers for different sections in my articles. It's kind of weird realizing you write like generic ChatGPT. I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now.
- lapcat 10mo ago> I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now. Don't give in to the nitwits!
- flatter 10mo agoDid you even read the article? "The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan" a 6TB plan is $29.99 monthly.. It's not farfetched to assume he purchased a $500 gift card so he could keep the subscription without worrying about it! "The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)" There's not much of a reason to assume someone else unaffiliated with the author bought this card, he mentions talking to the vendor and getting a replacement which means he has the receipt
- cwillu 10mo ago“Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". ” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hamdingers 10mo agoDid you read the comment you're responding to? Where in the article does it explain why an adult is buying a $500 gift card to pay their apple subscription instead of just paying for it directly?
- evanelias 10mo agoYes, I read the article and it simply does not directly address who purchased the card. It certainly implies the author bought the card for himself, yes; but that seems rather unusual to me, especially in such a high amount. Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest question, I literally don't understand that motivation at all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually runs out. Second question: why did you create an HN account just to write this comment?
- rvnx 10mo agoI wonder if you can prepay using a card ? But otherwise to answer your potential question, I understand OP as I like to prepay things like my phone operator. I put 500 USD there, and come back one year later. This way it can free-up my limit of 10 virtual cards I have, and most of all, can keep their limits as close as possible to the minimum. If you have a mix of services on the same card it is much more difficult and more risky. If you have 100 USD + 50 USD + 25 USD + 75 USD + 60 USD in monthly spend. Then you have 310 USD at risk, when your risk could be way lower.
- Gabrys1 10mo ago> I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?) The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers). I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc
- evanelias 10mo agoI don't understand. Gift cards typically cannot be returned, at least in the US. And the author said the gift card was redeemed "to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan", which also cannot be returned I'd imagine.
- Gabrys1 10mo agoBut gift cards aren't supposed to work that, right? If it wasn't "legal" or "okay" to have a 500 dollar card, they shouldn't be sold. They are available, therefore they should be perfectly usable. I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases for them is for people that choose to not use cards online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be able to buy digital goods with cash. Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift card, we're blaming the victim
- evanelias 10mo agoI'm not blaming anyone; I just find it surprising that this detail wasn't mentioned or explained. Its omission makes the article less trustworthy to me. People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally omitting details which can help explain the other side's actions. Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of thing instead, or use various services which generate virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with the options in other countries.
- xuki 10mo agoThe author lives in Australia. You get points from supermarket for purchasing some gift cards during some promotion, it's around 10% of the card value.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoGift cards are associated with money laundering and many online scams. I would guess any usage of them (especially in larger denominations) would attract increased attention and additional risk. That's nonsensical of course, why does Apple sell them if they are also suspicious of them, but I would guess if he had paid with a credit card there would have been no issue. If you receive them as a gift, use them only in a situation unconnected with your cloud ID, such as to pay for new hardware at an Apple store.
- nullfield 10mo agoRe: AI writing: AI tends to (and might be getting better) use commas for such claims, in the form of, “it’s not just X, but [optional:also] Y”. Even if it feels sus, remember that AI is trained on what it sees: even the posts here will make it more and more effective at “writing like a human”. As for the OP, the claims to exist and have published books, etc. are relatively easily publicly verifiable. No, $500 isn’t a large amount, doubly so anymore. I consistently have to try to re-anchor, but $100 is the new $20 (sadly).
- evanelias 10mo agoAI used em-dashes initially in that type of sentence structure, but more recently moved to a mix of semicolons and commas, at least from what I've been seeing. I never claimed the author doesn't exist. $500 is objectively a large amount for a gift card. Off-the-shelf gift cards with predetermined amounts are almost always substantially less than this.
- haspok 10mo agoThen why did he mention it (their credentials)? It has literally zero relevance in this case. Maybe they were trying to show off?
- jeromegv 10mo agoIt's relevant because it shows they are not newbie on the platform and are unlikely to have misbehave in some capacity to warrant a full deactivation. It adds credibility to their story.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoThere is if you want to blame the victim and/or work for Apple.