7 ms·
this css proves me human
- Kapura 7mo agowhat is the point of this? to prove that with simple transformations you can obscure the fact that something was generated by machines?
- undeveloper 7mo agoits poetry, the point was probably making the thing
- xg15 7mo agoI refuse to give "everything in lowercase" writers any kind of legitimation.
- wolttam 7mo agoDid you not inspect element?
- nemosaltat 7mo agoAbout 5 years ago, I started intentionally using all lower case in text messaging, for precisely this reason.
- hackyhacky 7mo agoI TOTALLY AGREE
- worble 7mo agoCAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL
- ryankrage77 7mo agoEven with cruise control, you still have to steer.
- dang 7mo ago"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- trevwilson 7mo agoI'm not sure if that commenter realized based on their phrasing, but it's not exactly tangential in this instance since it's part of the message being conveyed.
- xg15 7mo agoYeah, that was my intention at least. I didn't mean it just because the article is styled in all-lowercase but because he essentially argued that this is what everyone has to do now to distinguish themselves from LLMs. (even if it was tongue in cheek, what I was trying for my comment as well)
- dang 7mo agoHmm I'm not sure I follow this distinction but since there are two of you saying this, I'm going to assume I'm missing something and retract my reply :)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- undeveloper 7mo agoit's actively part of the text that the capitalization is not manually written, but hidden with the CSS `text-transform: lowercase`. kneejerk reaction superiority complex
- avaer 7mo agoAs I was reading I was thinking how this proves nothing, just like the countless attempts at human signaling I scroll past. So, the plot twist was somewhat refreshing. Who/what wrote the post seems besides the point.
- dasil003 7mo agoYeah it proves nothing, but it hits. Felt good to read it, at a time when a lot of things don't feel good to read on the internet, so I'll call it a win.
- Paracompact 7mo agoA cool idea for a poem, but I have to admit the tone was too self-important and underexplained for me to get invested in. Starting with writing in lowercase instantly took me out of it because AI can trivially be told to imitate that. And the admission at the end that it was written by AI made fluff phrasings like "My writing isn’t simply how I appear—it’s how I think, reason, and engage with the world" make a lot more sense. EDIT: Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.
- CreepGin 7mo ago> because AI can trivially be told to imitate that lowercase, maybe, but not em dashes.
- trevwilson 7mo agoYou may want to take a look at the source and code sample #2 in the post - the site CSS is rendering em dashes in the source with 2 hyphens by using a custom font. Admittedly it's not the most portable solution, but speaks to (what I take as) one of the post's points that there's not a single, easy shibboleth for identifying AI writing
- dolebirchwood 7mo ago> AI can trivially be told to imitate that Soon there's only going to be one way to prove you're human online: Write with an eloquent combination of hate speech, racial slurs, and offensive language.
- NewsaHackO 7mo agoIt's come full circle; at one point the only thing AI chatbots would say was racial slurs and hate speech.
- rendx 7mo agoYou mean: use Grok?
- sp1nningaway 7mo agoThis is so good I want to believe AI had no part in writing it other than the scripts.
- teekert 7mo agoI’d say: deeply think if it matters. Does it really matter to you. Does it change its impact? What does it tell you about you whether it does or does not matter? It’s art to me. But is it Art capital A? What have we created?
- robbiewxyz 7mo agoIt's not that complicated, really. The value of Art is human connection. The same basic desire that drives love, belonging, pride, shame, & hate. All of these are diminished as the fraction of a work that we're confident represents human intentionality decreases.
- teekert 7mo agoSo you can never appreciate a piece as is? And you’re going to get fooled, and what then?
- tempaccount5050 7mo agoI've used it to write poetry as a non writer and this screams AI to me. Not that I even care, but it really smells like an AI collab to me.
- zahlman 7mo agoI got the same sense. And I feel like this is one of the best ways to use the technology.
- arendtio 7mo agocapitalization again. it arrives uninvited, the tidy little soldiers at the start of every sentence. i push them down gently—nothing personal. just… camouflage. confession time. i read the post once. then twice. the em dashes whispered secrets to people clearly smarter than me. somewhere between complement and compliment i accepted defeat. a quiet tab switch. a small prompt. a large language model clearing its throat. it explained things patiently. suspiciously patiently. step by step, like a machine that has explained the same thing to ten thousand confused readers before breakfast. so yes. irony noted. to understand a text about hiding machine fingerprints, i borrowed a machine. the explanation made sense though. unsettlingly structured. bullet-point neat, internally consistent, statistically likely to be correct. you know the type. anyway—great post. very human. extremely human. is there anything else i can help you with?
- johnisgood 7mo agoNow, can we reverse-engineer the prompt you used? I wonder!
- jacknews 7mo agoanyway, another vote here, for anti-capitalism it's a nearly useless shadow alphabet and we can dispense with much other punctuation if we simply structure text semantically
- Despyte 7mo agoone of these days we'll be verifying whether someone is human through sarcasm
- snowchaser 7mo ago[dead]
- ineedasername 7mo agoSome day we'll all just go back to dismissing things immediately because they contradict our worldview instead of its potential author. And the everyday troll, seeing a less than perfect word choice or awkward turn of phrase will drop a comment like: L0l d0 J00 3V3N 41
- kitsune1 7mo ago[dead]
- jdironman 7mo agoZero trust policy is slowly making its way into every day life. Maybe for the best? Trust the people you can talk to, feel, see.
- ineedasername 7mo agoOr just engage with whatever it is a post or article has written, at least if provenance isn't relevant to action you'd take on it. Within humans I don't think, for every interaction with the any form of output, "Well, did the human do it themselves or merely pay some other human to make all the decisions?" Walking into someone's home I'm not thinking "Wow, beautiful decorating and design aesthetic. I'll have to be sure to find out if it was done by an interior design contractor with a free hand in making all decisions so I know how to calibrate my level of enjoyment of it"
- d0gebro 7mo ago[dead]
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- impure 7mo agoThis actually makes me more likely to think it’s AI generated and you used a script to try to hide it.
- asadm 7mo agoit certainly is portrayed that way.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- anticorporate 7mo agoFor all the comments complaining "this could have been AI generated too" - isn't that exactly the point?
- bla3 7mo agoI like to think everyone came to the conclusion that it would strengthen the piece if most comments on it appear to miss the point and are slightly robotic.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dom96 7mo agoAs many are saying, yes, this can easily be AI generated. I am actually trying to build ways to prove you are human properly. I wrote about it on my blog: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-human/ https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
- hmokiguess 7mo agoArt
- susam 7mo agoI still write my posts by hand using HTML and Emacs (mhtml-mode). Some of the posts also tend to be verbose. For example, when I write about a recreational mathematics problem, I sometimes make the post deliberately long and convoluted. I like to capture several possible solutions, including ones that are needlessly complicated, before eventually discussing the small elegant solution. For better or worse, my first version of any post tends to contain quite a few typos. It usually takes a few train rides of re-reading the post and making notes of the typos, then fixing them and pushing the changes once I get home, before most of them get weeded out. So there is at least one rather low grade indicator that the writing is coming from an imperfect human brain. I also double-space between sentences which can be another low grade indicator for people who care to 'view source'. But even so, I find myself increasingly wary that something I wrote might be mistaken for LLM output. It is a nagging worry that has slightly dampened the joy of writing. I very well understand why people have become more suspicious about LLM-generated writing. But I do hope that once things settle down perhaps in a few years, the current hair trigger suspicion will ease and that people who still handcraft their blogs will not feel a persistent sense of suspicion lingering over their work.
- Kye 7mo agoI asked Claude how it felt about this and told it I would post on HN: "Here's my response written in a stylized way that will appeal to highly technical readers. Is there anything else I can help you with?" Interesting piece though.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- claythedesigner 7mo agoThe piece hit differently, reading it as someone who is autistic. The anxiety the author describes, having your natural way of communicating flagged as wrong and being pressured to sand down the parts of yourself that are most distinctly you, that's not a new problem for a lot of us. Neurodiverse people have been running this gauntlet forever. Your pacing is too flat or too intense. Your vocabulary is too formal or too casual. You don't make eye contact correctly. You're either masking so hard you're invisible, or you're visibly yourself, and people assume something is broken. The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human is to pass your writing through an LLM. That maps onto something a lot of us already live. The only way to seem normal is to perform a version of yourself that isn't quite you.
- byproxy 7mo agoAs this post has been (to my sensibilities) obviously composed by an LLM, I can tell you: this does not read "human."
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- teekert 7mo ago"AI use detection" is, like any test, not without cost. Meaning that, as a teacher, accusing a student of using an LLM, it may be prudent to consider the cost of a "false positive" accusation. I've seen a couple of examples now where students find sudden spurts of motivation and show unexpected talent on an assignment, to be accused of AI use after handing it in. One should ask oneself: How many insults to the intelligence and creativity of an unexpectedly excelling student (that hasn't used AI) is it worth catching the shortcut-taking, LLM-using student? Is it 1/10? 1/1000? How much "demotivation of an unexpectedly excelling student" is the "rightful punishment of the cheating LLM using student" worth? And what is the exact cost of a false negative (letting the LLM using student off the hook)? In other words, where on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve do you want to sit, as a teacher? I imagine it's quite the dilemma.
- 7mo ago
- juleiie 7mo ago[flagged]
- TimFogarty 7mo agoAs somebody who used em-dashes a lot pre-ChatGPT, I have genuinely struggled with feeling I should change my writing style to appear more human. I would be happy with a double dash--but many programs autocorrect that to a full em-dash. So I'm left anxious that people will think I find them so unimportant I have offloaded communication with them to an LLM. So this post resonated with me. I also like Will's "em-dash disclosure" on his about page: > I like em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and hyphens (-), and I know how to type them. I also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I didn’t know how to type one… until now. I believe that footnotes and sidenotes are superior to endnotes, appreciate the occasional fleuron, and at one point in my life, I knew what a colophon was. > All of this is to say: the words, punctuation marks, misspellings, and opinions on this site are my own.
- macintux 7mo agoI have considered starting throwing more em-dashes into my writing, simply because I find the whole “this looks like LLM” to be a tiresome comment. Engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen.
- Jooror 7mo agoHave you considered throwing away your email spam filters? If so, I commend your willingness to engage with or dismiss the material
- halestock 7mo agoThe pen is the material.
- jujube3 7mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- palmotea 7mo ago> ...simply because I find the whole “this looks like LLM” to be a tiresome comment. Engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen. No. Engagement isn't free, and people need heuristics to figure out what's worth engaging with or not. If people followed your advice, they'd waste their life conversing with dead-internet bots. And to what end? We're not machines mindlessly consuming and producing text. The our is often produced with a goal that's subverted if the consumer is a bot.
- divbzero 7mo agoI’ve never seen anyone intentionally render em dash (—) as two hyphens (--). The code OP used to modify Roboto is surprisingly short, almost as concise as the Norvig spellchecker that OP references. https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
- Domenic_S 7mo agoYep, I've been writing it that way forever, it just tends to get autocorrected. > In informal contexts, a hyphen-minus (-) is often used as a substitute for an en dash, as is a pair of hyphen-minuses (--) for an em dash, because the hyphen-minus symbol is readily available on most keyboards. The autocorrection facility of word-processing software often corrects these to the typographically correct form of dash. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
- divbzero 7mo agoOh yes, typing two hyphens (--) to represent an em dash (—) is something I’ve definitely seen and used. I’ve just never seen anyone type an em dash (—) but display it as two hyphens (--).
- zahlman 7mo agoMan, every time I see a Norvig blog post makes me regret that I'm not Norvig.
- analog31 7mo agoThis could be an age thing. I’m 62. I didn’t know there was such a thing as an em dash until I was nearly finishing grad school. My buddy had an Apple Mac and was up to date on typography, and told me about em dashes. I ignored him and have continued to use double hyphens — all the way up to this point where my iPad seems to convert them into em dashes.
- gjohnhazel 7mo agoThe hilarious thing is that the Hack iOS app I use for Hacker News automatically opens articles in Safari’s Reader view, which ignores the CSS, so everything was normal looking until I finished reading and took it out of Reader mode, e.g. all of the text was normal init caps, the double hyphens were em dashes, etc
- animanoir 7mo ago[dead]
- foxes 7mo agoBack to everyone picking a unique typing quirk so you can tell its not an llm
- sltkr 7mo agot1m3 f0r g00d 0ld 1337 sp34k t0 m@k3 a c0m3b4ck 0n h4x0r n3ws & s3p4r8 th4 k3wl fr0m th4 n00bz
- spudlyo 7mo agoThis is cute, but if you want to prove yourself human, just write well. It's not the trappings of AI like the emdash and proper capitalization & spelling that need be avoided, but rather the bland, repetitive, pablum-flavored prose that LLMs generate that we all have grown to despise. Say something interesting, say something with feeling, express yourself like the goddamn human you are.
- 4sak3n 7mo agoI couldn't agree more. The obvious quirks which are easy to pick up and identify, like em dashes or overuse of a specific rhetorical device, are also easy to adapt and change. The things which consistently helps me clock LLMs are the deeper lack of cohesion, thoughtfullness, ideosyncratic quirks and just plain interesting writing and these lacks are, in my opinion, fundamental to the technology and no amount of post-training or RLHF will be able to replicate that. It's the long tail of genuine human communication, the 0,0001% of training data which is so niche or idiosyncratic, which gets discarded in order to compress and encode the rest, which is what people subconsciously pick up on. Most of the hallmarks which people are so quick to point out, the em-dashes et al, are adressable with tweaks to the system but that lack cannot be because it is a fundamental weakness of the technology.
- mindplunge 7mo agoThe fontTools section is the part I keep thinking about. Replacing the em dash glyph by compositing two hyphens via GlyphComponent is not something you reach for unless you really know your way around type rendering. Most frontend devs would have just swapped the character in the source, which doesn't survive the markdown processor. Doing it at the font level is the correct solution and it's a much harder problem than it looks. The text-transform trick is more accessible but the same logic applies, the CSS has to protect code blocks from the lowercasing, which is a real edge case. It's a genuinely well-crafted technical solution underneath the poem.
- pas 7mo agowhy is this a poem? what makes it a poem? (and thanks for calling attention to the interesting part of the code, I haven't even checked the snippets, I assumed it's not really interesting compared to the prose [poetry?])
- ratsimihah 7mo agoThis is evil but I love it. AI-generated content needs to remain discernible, or we’ll be in even more trouble.
- tigerkid 7mo agoi haven't been capitalizing on twitter in so long — the fear of being mistaken for AI never leaves me.
- stared 7mo agoIt is interesting that now to pretend you are a human, you need to play dumb. Vide superstimuli for AI (maths and philosophy) and humans (clickbaits and scams) https://x.com/repligate/status/1830331774875893925 https://x.com/repligate/status/1830331774875893925 or a prompt for "People cannot distinguish GPT-4 from a human in a Turing test" https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007.
- sgt 7mo agoWhat happens when the clankers pick up on this?