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Did Courtney Eberhard, Senior Marketing Specialist at FamilyTreeDNA, use AI to write this article? It reads like it. Edit: ah, it helps to read the press relea
by netsharc 7mo ago
Did Courtney Eberhard, Senior Marketing Specialist at FamilyTreeDNA, use AI to write this article? It reads like it.
Edit: ah, it helps to read the press release properly, the research was done by by this company, so it makes sense that they're the primary source and that the marketing manager (and probably AI) wrote the article. I retract the accusation I've made below.
Digging into it further, googling "ötzi heddi abbad" I just find Dead Internet results leading back to this -- dare I say it -- hallucinated article. The image caption refers to "Augustin Ochsenreiter" but it seems he's just a general Ötzi researcher and his name is mentioned for the image credit.
This article from a German news service (I can trust this more than FamilyTreeDNA's marketing specialist) mentions that Ötzi has many relatives in Europe, but from the father's lineage: https://www.dw.com/de/viele-europ%C3%A4er-sind-mit-%C3%B6tzi-verwandt/a-19559741 https://www.dw.com/de/viele-europ%C3%A4er-sind-mit-%C3%B6tzi...
- alephnerd 7mo ago> use AI to write this article While I understand you retracted your assumption that someone used AI to write their response, I feel the increasingly gratuitous leveling of "AI Ghostwriting" accusations is detrimental to HN and writing as a whole - plenty of humans can write write in cohesive passive tense (and in fact, plenty of us who did really well in our writing classes do so), and more critically, if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI? And more fundamentally, ghostwriting has been the norm for decades, and something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.
- bediger4000 7mo agoI feel like it's appropriate to call out slopstyle articles. Truthful or not, slopstyle should be discouraged, same as Linkedinfluencer style should be discouraged. Neither style encourages succint communication.
- alephnerd 7mo agoHow do people define what is slop and what isn't?
- bediger4000 7mo agoJust because you can't tell that a cup of coffee is exactly at 157F doesn't mean that you can't tell if it's too hot. Next time I will use phrases like "long winded", "too vague", "never seems to come to the point" rather than "This article seems like AI slop".
- OrangePilled 7mo agoThis attempt could be refined but it's a decent start: > [...] having a polished appearance but lacking originality. None of the points it makes are novel and it doesn't connect them in novel ways either. https://lobste.rs/c/qtolag https://lobste.rs/c/qtolag I don't think this post qualifies though. It's a press release, not an article from Quanta Magazine. > [...] if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI? > [...] something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference. I don't think AI-generated writing is at that level yet. But it's getting close. "Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer": https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer I'm probably the only person who thinks that this was written with an LLM (Claude). The code supporting it likely was too. The people who talk about "taste" being the last defense against AI aren't wrong and I think that that topic, along with a lot of others that are essentially of a philosophical import are beyond the ambit of what most people want to discuss when they criticize AI generated content. We can only wave them off for so long.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago> This attempt could be refined but it's a decent start: >> [...] having a polished appearance but lacking originality. None of the points it makes are novel and it doesn't connect them in novel ways either. I have some bad news for you. Not every human is a Mozart or an Einstein. The long tail of human output has plenty of examples of the lack of originality, from bodice-rippers and pulp paperbacks and sloppy 'journalism' and 'style' magazines and articles, to carbon-copy soldiers, children in school uniforms, derivative music and film, the 5-minute Bruce Willis vehicles at the tail end of his career (though he clearly had a very good reason to make those), the cookie cutter quick-fab homes in American sub-divisions, cogs in human machines and systems of all sorts, the banality of life itself (at times) ...
- broken-kebab 7mo agoQuality of writing matters cause it affects the comfort of reading. Slop remains slop even if the argument it holds is ok. Like here for example one question is posed and answered twice within two paragraphs distance. It reads weird, and I wouldn't expect it from a human.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago> Slop remains slop even if the argument it holds is ok This sounds more like a religious argument than a logical one, tbh At what point does it turn into a cult?
- broken-kebab 7mo agoDunno, I made a concrete point which you ignored.
- netsharc 7mo agoI'm still accusing her of using AI. And to AI-speak it: It's not the fact that she's using a computer I dislike. It's the fact that this paragraph structure is now overused and is aggravating.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago> Did Courtney Eberhard, Senior Marketing Specialist at FamilyTreeDNA, use AI to write this article? It reads like it. Maybe give it a rest, yeah? Also, so what? If you have any evidence disputing the veracity or the content of the article, please present it.