3 ms·
I'm absolutely 100% for this policy. My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. G
by jedberg 7mo ago
I'm absolutely 100% for this policy.
My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas.
So we should make sure to follow that other HN rule, and assume the person on the other end is a good faith actor, and be cautious about accusing someone of using AI.
(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand)
- tyg13 7mo agoI don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid. Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it.
- xboxnolifes 7mo agoLLMs have good writing in the same way that technical manuals can have good writing. It might all be correct, but it's usually not a good read.
- 0______0 7mo agoExcuse me. I consider the writing within technical manuals strictly superior and meticulously written. It's fairly enjoyable to read what engineers/subject matter experts write about their own creations. Comparing those to LLM generated patronizing word vomit is a shame.
- quietsegfault 7mo agoDepends on the technical manual and their culture. Red Hat had a culture of excellent writers, and their stuff is usually readable if not always enjoyable.
- girvo 7mo agoAI driven web design has the same smell, it’s quite fascinating to see the different tells in different media. Then it’s also quite fascinating to see those same tells change and evolve over time.
- kl33 7mo agoLol love the use of 'smell', that's a great way to characterise it.
- jedberg 7mo agoThose sentence constructions that are "tells" were also learned from good writers though. But here, I'll let you be the judge. This was a comment I wrote 100% myself on reddit, which was both downvoted and I got multiple DMs referencing it and telling me to "stop posting this AI slop": https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_find_the_conversation_around_ai_and_software/nwkvbsz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_... Granted, it was in a thread about AI and maybe people were on edge, but I was still accused, which to be honest hurt a bit after the effort I put into writing it.
- nonameiguess 7mo agoI get that it's possibly contrary to the point if people are looking to truly have conversations here, but at least 99% of the time, I post a comment and never come back. I said what I had to say and don't particularly feel like getting sucked into an argument if someone disagrees, and frankly, if I'm wrong I think I'll realize it eventually anyway. I'm more likely to dig in my heels and ossify in a wrong position if someone shits on me and I immediately feel the need to defend myself. It can mesmerize you into believing things you might not have if it didn't hit your ego. I could be deluded but think I'm good at making arguments, but that at least means I'm good at making arguments that convince myself, which can be dangerous because you can convince yourself of things that are wrong. The upside is if anyone is out there accusing me of being an LLM, I don't even know so it can't insult me. It is amusing to witness this happening to others when it's someone like you who is a semi-public figure who should probably be well known on Reddit of all places.
- jedberg 7mo ago> It is amusing to witness this happening to others when it's someone like you who is a semi-public figure who should probably be well known on Reddit of all places. One of our key tenants on reddit for a long time was "upvote the content, not the author". Which is why we made the usernames so small. It actually makes me happy when people judge the merit of what I write for what I said, not who I am. But yes, it is sometimes tempting to say "do you know who I am??". :)
- 7mo ago
- ordersofmag 7mo agoSeems like the ability to distinguish LLM versus 'good human' writing depends on the size of the writing sample you have to look at (assuming you think it can be done). And that HN-scale posts are unlikely to be a long enough for useful discernment.
- b112 7mo agoWithin a few years, LLMs will be indistinguishable from human text. Think how easy it was to tell the differences a year or two ago. By 2030 there will be no way to ever tell. The same is true of all video, and all generated content. The death of the Internet comes not from spam, or Facebook nonsense, but instead from the fact that soon? You'll never know of you're interacting with a human or not. Why like a post? Reply to it? Interact online? Why read a "news" story? If I was X or Meta or Reddit, I would be looking at the end.
- mulmen 7mo agoLLMs won’t destroy social media any more than it already is. I don’t think I have ever had a meaningful human interaction with anyone on Twitter, Meta, or Reddit without already knowing them from somewhere else. Those sites are about interacting with information, not people. It’s purely transactional. Bots, spam, and bad actors are not new. Meta has been a dumpster fire of spam and bots for over 15 years, the overwhelming majority of its existence. Reddit has some pockets of meaningful interaction but you have to find them and the partitioned nature means that culture doesn’t spread across the site. It’s also full of bots and shills. Nobody tells stories about meeting people on Twitter. At best it’s a microblog platform and at worst it’s X.
- b112 7mo agoCommon people go to such sites for updates from friends, or to follow celebrities. Their friends will start using more and more AI, ans celebrities will become all AI. Why read a friend's page, if it's just AI drivel. Same for a celebrity. It doesn't even need tp be true. Burned once, people will never trust again. The humiliation of writing messages that your friend only has a bot summarize, and reply to, will kill it. Imagine you speak to your friend, and they haven't even read any measages you wrote, but their AI responded? And you in turn. Imagine you've had dozens of conversations, but it was with a bot instead of your friend. Your trust will be eroded. SPAM doesn't act like your friend. A bot does. And the inability to distinguish will be the clincher. And yes, you won't know the difference, not after the AI is trained on their sent mail folder.
- lordnacho 7mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- altairprime 7mo ago(For those who have avoided reading AI writing, this is a trope referring to the tendency of some AI sometime to always agree with the user when corrected, I think? Or at least that’s as much as I have worked out, being one of those avoiders.)
- jnwatson 7mo agoLLM writing is like AI-generated photos in that you don't notice the good instances of LLM writing, i.e. you don't know your false negative rate.
- lucumo 7mo agoI would say that you also don't know the false positive rate. The only person who truly knows is the one who wrote/generated the text. And they have every incentive to say it's not AI-generated, whether or not it truly is. Personally, when I see the number of accusations thrown around, I very much suspect that the false positive rate is pretty high.
- testing22321 7mo agoI can’t help thinking how ironic it would be if your comment is from an llm
- GreenWatermelon 7mo agoPoe's law strikes. Parent's last paragraph was definitely an ironic portray of LLM writing! Notice the double-dash emdash.
- testing22321 7mo agoOh I saw that. But was it really an ironic parody, or actually an llm?
- tyg13 7mo agoNo, I only use the finest, home-grown, naturally-produced Human Brain slop to make my comments.
- mulmen 7mo ago> I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. How do you know?
- Cthulhu_ 7mo agoConfirmation bias; they don't know the LLM generated content they didn't recognize. They can't, because they didn't recognize it.
- GreenWatermelon 7mo agoPure AI slope os often extremely obvious, while for good AI writing that's indistinguishable from thoughtful human writing I'd say "Mission fucking accomplished"[0] [0] https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- crossroadsguy 7mo agoIt's not whether it "really" looks similar. It's what people think, most of the people, and most of the people are neither known for practising good writing nor consuming good writing.
- NiloCK 7mo agoI know the thing you are describing, but the real bitch is that you're actually just describing the lowest effort default outputs. The help-desk assistant persona. Sometimes speedbumps that deter the lowest effort infractions are sufficient but I don't think this is that time. On a per-prompt basis, or via a persistent system prompt or SKILL, or - god help us - via community-specific fine tuning, LLMs can convincingly affect insane variations in prose styling.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago> It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Uhh, isn't that how senior management in larger corporations communicates ...
- zahlman 7mo agoThey look similar. In my experience, they do not read similar at all. You have to pay attention and actually try to appreciate what you're reading. Then, if you try and fail, it might not be your fault.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nomel 7mo agoWhat effort was put into their prompt to make them read similarly? There could very well be a selection bias, where you're only "seeing" AI when it's obvious/default prompt.
- zahlman 7mo agoSure. There's always the possibility that LLM-generated text goes undetected, especially if false positives have a cost. But this is fine. Of course putting more effort into prompting makes the result harder to detect. It also, naturally, reduces the annoyance of LLM-generated comments. And because of the effort involved, it naturally cuts down on the volume of such comments. Arguably it cannot avoid all the possible harm. For example, someone might generate a comment that makes false statements but cannot reasonably be detected as LLM-generated except perhaps by people who know (or determine) that the statements are false. But from a policy perspective, this is again not really different from if someone just decided to lie.
- joebo921973 7mo ago> this is again not really different from if someone just decided to lie. now the lie sounds more convincing than if they had lied themselves. the LLM can extrapolate and convince in any way it likes without ... annoying social obligations
- altairprime 7mo agoThey do not read similiar to readers, an appellation not necessarily applicable to large swaths of the U.S. right now. Evidence of English composing skills is being assumed as AI because few younger than my middle-aged self can conceive of writing composition at the skill level demonstrated by AI being a human skill. (This isn’t necessarily true for first world countries, which is why I describe it for the non-U.S. folks in particular.)
- j45 7mo agoAI can make output seem very average or low effort as well if it sounds like everything else.
- semiquaver 7mo agoGood writers are often good in recognizably unique ways. To the extent that LLMs produce “good writing,” which I happen to think they mostly do, they tend to overuse specific devices which give their writing a quality that most people are already sick of.
- SchemaLoad 7mo agoYou can tell good writers from LLMs because good writers post comments that mean something, that add to the conversation, that bring in personal experiences. While LLM comments just summarize the article and end with some engagement call to action like "Curious to hear what others think"
- djeastm 7mo ago>(I've been accused multiple times of being an AI after writing long well written comments 100% by hand) Perhaps always be sure to say something especially timely, original or insightful that an LLM can't have come up with.
- jjk166 7mo agoNah, just write not good like rest of we
- alexjplant 7mo ago> Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes I use semicolons a lot. If this is the nouveau tell du jour for LLMs then I'm in trouble.
- jjgreen 7mo agoGood writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. - You seem to have a rather high opinion of your own writing :-) - Why the mix of tense (use/used)? - Oxford commas are a monstrosity
- altairprime 7mo ago> Oxford commas are a monstrosity Please don’t present your personal aesthetic beliefs as if those who disagree are morally wrong ‘bad people’. This ‘monstrosity’ comment in this context is derogatory-by-proxy of everyone (including the person you’re criticizing) who uses them, whether they know anything at all about your arguments that they should not, and that’s not really a good tone for us users here to be taking with each other.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- smt88 7mo ago"Used" seems to be a typo. Being anti-Oxford comma is baffling. It's almost zero extra effort and reduces confusion.
- dolebirchwood 7mo ago> Oxford commas are a monstrosity This is objectively wrong.
- carefree-bob 7mo agoI laughed, but people are downvotin' like crazy when it comes to the oxford comma
- prmoustache 7mo agoAnd here I am, having to search what an Oxford comma even is. Conclusion: I thought it was the only proper way to list more than 2 things and will likely continue using it.
- unethical_ban 7mo agoSome things to think about: * A comment should be judged on its merits mostly, and if a comment seems to be substantive, interesting, or ask a thoughtful question, it should be acceptable. I think some LLM comments look superficially relevant, but a moment's thought can make me wonder if a comment actually added anything to the discussion, or did it sound like a rephrasing or generalization of a topic? * Unfortunately for decent new users, account age is one metric on which to judge here. * People who post here, should want to engage on a subject when they can, and disengage and be quiet when they can't. There is nothing wrong if you're not an expert on something, and it is not desired by the people here to have you alt-tab to an LLM to plug in extra perspective. We can all do that on our own.
- quietsegfault 7mo agoMuch like not dumping motor oil down the drain, it’s probably near impossible to catch skilled AI-users. I think we all want to have a nice space to chat, just like we don’t want a polluted planet, so we’ll just have to be on the honor system. I don’t think there’s a lot to AI generated stuff on here that really bothered me to the point I wanted to call someone out.
- threatofrain 7mo agoIf you're looking for the odd visual artifact or textual tic then you're fighting a cat and mouse game that will change by the month. It's either easy to identify the soul of the human or it's not.
- smt88 7mo agoText is extremely lossy and non-deterministic, so it's not often possible to find evidence of humanity in it
- didgetmaster 7mo ago>My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. While that might be ideal, is that really the case with most LLM training data? Does the curation process weed out all the slop from bad writers?
- crossroadsguy 7mo agoI use dash a lot while people rather usually use and are used to seeing a hyphen. I was called out on a certain app "wtf dude.. the least u can do is nt use ai". Well, the person was using shorthand and textpeak a lot, so it was already getting nauseating for me, so this outburst helped me eject, but not before I politely asked why they thought so and dash was the trigger along with "all da time crct grmr and spelling". Also "hu da hell writes dis long sentences". Guilty as charged.
- ModernMech 7mo agoI find that most AI writing reads like ad copy to me. The presence of semicolons or em-dashes say nothing either way.
- visarga 7mo ago> My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. People moving to careless writing for authenticity while good writing will be considered AI? funny. We want authentic human thought but can only detect human style. This reddit thread that came out today is the perfect inversion of the discussion here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPromptGenius/comments/1rr19kc/chatgpt_prompt_to_humanize_without_using_ai/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPromptGenius/comments/1rr19k...
- streetfighter64 7mo ago> Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. I disagree; good writing communicates an idea effectively. Using em dashes and semicolons — even though they have some meaning — confuses the reader because they add unnecessary noise. Surely you wouldn't say that adding such unnecessary punctuation as an interrobang is a sign of a good writer‽
- palmotea 7mo ago> My only caution is that good writers and LLMs look very similar, because LLMs were trained on a corpus of good writers. Good writers use semicolons and em-dashes. Sometimes we used bulleted lists or Oxford commas. No, only if you oversimplify "good writing" to a set of linguistic tics. LLM writing isn't good, it just overuses certain features without much judgement or context awareness. Some of those are writerly.
- patrickmay 7mo ago> Sometimes we use . . . Oxford commas. Good writers ALWAYS use the Oxford comma.
- wolvesechoes 7mo agoYou confuse good writing with following rigid set of rules that describe something akin to mechanistic process of manufacturing. No wonder that machines fit perfectly into this shape. Good writing is not created by Oxford commas or em-dashes. It comes from taste.
- jedberg 7mo agoIt's both actually. First you have to have good taste, but if you don't execute well, then no one can see it.