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> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy. > [...] > I've st

> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy. > [...] > I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand. > [...] > It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind. > [...] > No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate. It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading. And, I mean, none of these is even bad in isolation, but it sure feels like we’re due either a backlash where these patterns become underused even when appropriate, or them becoming so common they lose their power (is syntax subject to semantic bleaching?). Or perhaps both. Socioliguists are going to have a blast.

franga2000 6mo ago
LLMs don't "own" this writing style. By definition they can't - they were trained on human writing after all! People wrote like this before and that's fine. You might not like the style, but saying it's because LLM writing has infested their brain is wrong, dismissive and dehumanising.
- mananaysiempre 6mo ago
  LLMs don’t own these expressions in the same sense that McDonald’s doesn’t own salt: they are undoubtedly making use of a strong reaction that humans have had—have been having—long before; but they did develop a way to mash that button on an industrial scale like few before them. (With of course a great deal of help from humans, be it via customer surveys or RLHF; or you could call it help from Moloch[1] in that the humans unwittingly or negligently assembled themselves into a runaway optimizer.) So I think it’s fair to say that LLMs do own this style, as in the balance of ingredients, even if they do not own the ingredients themselves. And anyway nothing in the social perception of language cares about fairness: low-class English speakers did not invent negative agreement (“double negatives”), yet it will still sound low-class to you and even me (and my native language requires negative agreement). As for being dehumanizing, perhaps I did commit the sin of psychoanalysis at a distance here, but I’ve felt enough loose wires sticking out of my brain’s own language production apparatus that I don’t think pointing out the mechanistic aspects reduces anyone’s humanity. For instance, nobody can edit their own writing until they forget what’s in it—that’s why any publishing pipeline needs editors, and preferably two layers of them, because the first one, who edits for style and grammar, consequently becomes incapable of spotting their own mechanical mistakes like typos, transposed or merged words, etc. Ever spotted a bug in a code-review tool that you’ve read and overlooked a dozen times in your editor? Why does a change in font or UI cause a presumably rational human being to become capable of drawing logical inferences they were not before? In either case, there seems to be a conclusion cache of sorts that we can’t flush and can’t disable, requiring these sorts of actually quite expensive hacks. I don’t think this makes us any less human, and it pays to be aware of your own imperfections. (Don’t merge your copy- and line editors into a single position, please?..) As for syntactic patterns, I’ve quite often thought of a slick way to phrase things and then realized that I’d used it three times in as many sentences. On some occasions I’ve needed to literally grep every linking word in my writing to make sure I haven’t used a single specific one five times in a row. If you pay attention during meetings or presentations, you’ll notice that speakers (including me!) will very often reuse the question’s phrasing word for word regardless of how well it fits, without being aware of it in the slightest. (I’m now wondering if lawyers and witnesses train to avoid this.) Language production is stupidly taxing on the brain (or so I’ve heard), so the brain will absolutely take every possible shortcut whether we want it to or not. Thus I expect that the priming effect I’m alleging can be very real even before getting into equally real intangibles like “taste”. I don’t think it dehumanizes anyone; you could say it dehumanizes everyone equally instead, but my point of view is that being aware of these mechanical realities of the mind is essential to competent writing (or thinking, or problem solving) in the same way that being aware of mechanical realities of the body is essential to competent dancing (or fighting, or doing sports). A bit of innocence lost is a fair trade for the wisdom gained. (Not that I claim to be a particularly good writer.) [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- piva00 6mo ago
  I wonder how much marketing copy has poisoned the "default" writing style of LLMs, it surely has those undertones of pitching a sale in an uncanny valley way.
- servo_sausage 6mo ago
  Only to a limited extent, the fine tuning of these models uses a much smaller more curated set to generate tone and defaults. The whole corpus is in there, but the standard style is tuned for.
- dxdm 6mo ago
  Any style can cross the border into bad and get in the way of itself when it's turned up to 11, no matter who wrote it. There've been stylistic fads before LLMs where a thing, with results just as chalkboard-screech-inducing as the current one. That this one is just a button-push away does make it worse, though, because it proliferates so greedily. Bad writing is bad writing, and writing like an LLM is writing like an LLM. We should be able to call this out. In fact, calling out the human responsibility in it is the very opposite of dehumanizing to me.
  - franga2000 6mo ago
    Yes, definitely, but the parent post was quite explicitly saying it was either LLM generated or the person's style was influenced by consuming LLM content. Sure, call the style bad or even similar to LLMs, but there's no reason to believe the style came from LLMs. It existed before and people who used it before still exist and still use it now. Hell, this person seems to be a web(site) developer, that's a very marketing-speak-heavy field. It's far morely likely that's where they "caught" thos style. It happened to me too back when I was still in it.
    - dxdm 6mo ago
      I think the original comment is much more open-minded towards the author of the TFA than you are to the commenter. > explicitly saying it was either LLM generated or the person's style was influenced by consuming LLM content We might disagree here, but if we're strict they did not say "either/or", especially not explicitly. They raised two possibilities, but didn't exclude others. > there's no reason to believe the style came from LLMs They say "might" and "plausibly". I think there's no belief there until you assume it. And even if: It's not unlikely that a contemporary author's mind is influenced by the prevalent LLM style. We are influenced by what we read. This has been happening to everyone for ages, without anyone questioning the agency of writers. There's nothing wrong with suggesting like that could be the case here. It's entirely human. I know it's easy for one's mind to jump to conclusions, but I am not a fan of taking that as far as accusing someone of "dehumanizing" others. Such an escalation should ideally cause a pause and a think, before pressing submit.
- fallpeak 6mo ago
  [dead]
- watwut 6mo ago
  So I will say that things I read were not written in this style. And people I read had better ability to not put in unneceasary random completely made up facts or illogical implications.
- K0balt 6mo ago
  [dead]
delusional 6mo ago
None of those 4 look like AI slop to me. They lack the strange non-sequitur nature these contrasting statements generally have when made by AI. The version of the third example I would expect from a clanker would be more like > It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about novelty of talking to a machine Which of course doesn't connect to the rest of the article contents, because the AI doesn't have any intention in its writing.
fallpeak 6mo ago
Have courage and trust your own instincts. Unless one is extremely disagreeable it's very tempting to hedge and avoid outright saying "this is AI" just in case you're wrong, but if you're literate and regularly exposed to AI outputs your instincts are likely quite accurate. In this particular case the linked article is definitely AI generated.
- eterm 6mo ago
  Indeed, consider these two posts linked below also from this blog. They look the same, they maintain the same impersonal writing style. There's no humanity to it at all. They maintain such a consistent paragraph length that they're either a professional copyeditor or, as is clearly the case, are an LLM. Humans deviate a lot more than this, they use run on sentences or lose the thread in their writing. This blog however reads like every-other post on LinkedIn. Semi-professional tone, with a strong "You, Me" hook to most posts. I encourage everyone to make an LLM-generated blog, don't post the articles anywhere, but generate one, to get a feeling for how these things write. Because this is unmistakably LLM. I'd even go so far as to identify the model of these particular posts as ChatGPT. Yet when we point this out, we're told it is "unmistakably human" and that we're rude for pointing it out. https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-joy-of-a-simple-life-without-financial-pressure.md https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-joy-of-a-simple-life-wi... https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/finding_flow_in_code.md https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/finding_flow_in_code.md
  - joshka 6mo ago
    Is this comment LLM generated?
    - fallpeak 6mo ago
      What does that have to do with anything? These days any piece of text may or may not be AI generated (my money would be heavily on "no" for the post you asked about), but either way it isn't blatant slop so we can't tell. It feels like you're trying for a lazy gotcha, but the actual point here is something like "AI models often generate writing with specific noticeable characteristics that make it obviously AI output, and TFA is an instance of such writing, and this should be called out when possible"
sebzim4500 6mo ago
None of that feels like AI smell to me despite the "it's not X it's Y" framing. I can't really explain why though.
xtiansimon 6mo ago
> “…there’s this record-scratch feeling…” The op is a blog post. You’re talking about blog post writing. Maybe you just don’t like their style? It’s also true llm second drafts are a thing. And it’s true both can ‘record scratch’ you right out of attention. As well as the now present trend as readers to be impatient and quickly bored. And this criticism of writing style (for my take this article is perfectly readable)—what is the aim? Call for writers to perform some kind of disclosure? Because without a goal, it sounds like complaining you don’t like the soup.
xigoi 6mo ago
I hate AI slop, but I also hate the HN trend of “this article uses a rhetorical device, therefore it’s AI-generated.”
Legend2440 6mo ago
The hilarious irony of AI-generating an article about overusing AI.

franga2000 6mo ago

LLMs don't "own" this writing style. By definition they can't - they were trained on human writing after all! People wrote like this before and that's fine. You might not like the style, but saying it's because LLM writing has infested their brain is wrong, dismissive and dehumanising.

mananaysiempre 6mo ago
LLMs don’t own these expressions in the same sense that McDonald’s doesn’t own salt: they are undoubtedly making use of a strong reaction that humans have had—have been having—long before; but they did develop a way to mash that button on an industrial scale like few before them. (With of course a great deal of help from humans, be it via customer surveys or RLHF; or you could call it help from Moloch[1] in that the humans unwittingly or negligently assembled themselves into a runaway optimizer.) So I think it’s fair to say that LLMs do own this style, as in the balance of ingredients, even if they do not own the ingredients themselves. And anyway nothing in the social perception of language cares about fairness: low-class English speakers did not invent negative agreement (“double negatives”), yet it will still sound low-class to you and even me (and my native language requires negative agreement). As for being dehumanizing, perhaps I did commit the sin of psychoanalysis at a distance here, but I’ve felt enough loose wires sticking out of my brain’s own language production apparatus that I don’t think pointing out the mechanistic aspects reduces anyone’s humanity. For instance, nobody can edit their own writing until they forget what’s in it—that’s why any publishing pipeline needs editors, and preferably two layers of them, because the first one, who edits for style and grammar, consequently becomes incapable of spotting their own mechanical mistakes like typos, transposed or merged words, etc. Ever spotted a bug in a code-review tool that you’ve read and overlooked a dozen times in your editor? Why does a change in font or UI cause a presumably rational human being to become capable of drawing logical inferences they were not before? In either case, there seems to be a conclusion cache of sorts that we can’t flush and can’t disable, requiring these sorts of actually quite expensive hacks. I don’t think this makes us any less human, and it pays to be aware of your own imperfections. (Don’t merge your copy- and line editors into a single position, please?..) As for syntactic patterns, I’ve quite often thought of a slick way to phrase things and then realized that I’d used it three times in as many sentences. On some occasions I’ve needed to literally grep every linking word in my writing to make sure I haven’t used a single specific one five times in a row. If you pay attention during meetings or presentations, you’ll notice that speakers (including me!) will very often reuse the question’s phrasing word for word regardless of how well it fits, without being aware of it in the slightest. (I’m now wondering if lawyers and witnesses train to avoid this.) Language production is stupidly taxing on the brain (or so I’ve heard), so the brain will absolutely take every possible shortcut whether we want it to or not. Thus I expect that the priming effect I’m alleging can be very real even before getting into equally real intangibles like “taste”. I don’t think it dehumanizes anyone; you could say it dehumanizes everyone equally instead, but my point of view is that being aware of these mechanical realities of the mind is essential to competent writing (or thinking, or problem solving) in the same way that being aware of mechanical realities of the body is essential to competent dancing (or fighting, or doing sports). A bit of innocence lost is a fair trade for the wisdom gained. (Not that I claim to be a particularly good writer.) [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
piva00 6mo ago
I wonder how much marketing copy has poisoned the "default" writing style of LLMs, it surely has those undertones of pitching a sale in an uncanny valley way.
servo_sausage 6mo ago
Only to a limited extent, the fine tuning of these models uses a much smaller more curated set to generate tone and defaults. The whole corpus is in there, but the standard style is tuned for.
dxdm 6mo ago
Any style can cross the border into bad and get in the way of itself when it's turned up to 11, no matter who wrote it. There've been stylistic fads before LLMs where a thing, with results just as chalkboard-screech-inducing as the current one. That this one is just a button-push away does make it worse, though, because it proliferates so greedily. Bad writing is bad writing, and writing like an LLM is writing like an LLM. We should be able to call this out. In fact, calling out the human responsibility in it is the very opposite of dehumanizing to me.
- franga2000 6mo ago
  Yes, definitely, but the parent post was quite explicitly saying it was either LLM generated or the person's style was influenced by consuming LLM content. Sure, call the style bad or even similar to LLMs, but there's no reason to believe the style came from LLMs. It existed before and people who used it before still exist and still use it now. Hell, this person seems to be a web(site) developer, that's a very marketing-speak-heavy field. It's far morely likely that's where they "caught" thos style. It happened to me too back when I was still in it.
  - dxdm 6mo ago
    I think the original comment is much more open-minded towards the author of the TFA than you are to the commenter. > explicitly saying it was either LLM generated or the person's style was influenced by consuming LLM content We might disagree here, but if we're strict they did not say "either/or", especially not explicitly. They raised two possibilities, but didn't exclude others. > there's no reason to believe the style came from LLMs They say "might" and "plausibly". I think there's no belief there until you assume it. And even if: It's not unlikely that a contemporary author's mind is influenced by the prevalent LLM style. We are influenced by what we read. This has been happening to everyone for ages, without anyone questioning the agency of writers. There's nothing wrong with suggesting like that could be the case here. It's entirely human. I know it's easy for one's mind to jump to conclusions, but I am not a fan of taking that as far as accusing someone of "dehumanizing" others. Such an escalation should ideally cause a pause and a think, before pressing submit.
fallpeak 6mo ago
[dead]
watwut 6mo ago
So I will say that things I read were not written in this style. And people I read had better ability to not put in unneceasary random completely made up facts or illogical implications.
K0balt 6mo ago
[dead]

delusional 6mo ago

None of those 4 look like AI slop to me. They lack the strange non-sequitur nature these contrasting statements generally have when made by AI. The version of the third example I would expect from a clanker would be more like > It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about novelty of talking to a machine Which of course doesn't connect to the rest of the article contents, because the AI doesn't have any intention in its writing.

fallpeak 6mo ago

Have courage and trust your own instincts. Unless one is extremely disagreeable it's very tempting to hedge and avoid outright saying "this is AI" just in case you're wrong, but if you're literate and regularly exposed to AI outputs your instincts are likely quite accurate. In this particular case the linked article is definitely AI generated.

eterm 6mo ago
Indeed, consider these two posts linked below also from this blog. They look the same, they maintain the same impersonal writing style. There's no humanity to it at all. They maintain such a consistent paragraph length that they're either a professional copyeditor or, as is clearly the case, are an LLM. Humans deviate a lot more than this, they use run on sentences or lose the thread in their writing. This blog however reads like every-other post on LinkedIn. Semi-professional tone, with a strong "You, Me" hook to most posts. I encourage everyone to make an LLM-generated blog, don't post the articles anywhere, but generate one, to get a feeling for how these things write. Because this is unmistakably LLM. I'd even go so far as to identify the model of these particular posts as ChatGPT. Yet when we point this out, we're told it is "unmistakably human" and that we're rude for pointing it out. https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-joy-of-a-simple-life-without-financial-pressure.md https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-joy-of-a-simple-life-wi... https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/finding_flow_in_code.md https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/finding_flow_in_code.md
- joshka 6mo ago
  Is this comment LLM generated?
  - fallpeak 6mo ago
    What does that have to do with anything? These days any piece of text may or may not be AI generated (my money would be heavily on "no" for the post you asked about), but either way it isn't blatant slop so we can't tell. It feels like you're trying for a lazy gotcha, but the actual point here is something like "AI models often generate writing with specific noticeable characteristics that make it obviously AI output, and TFA is an instance of such writing, and this should be called out when possible"

sebzim4500 6mo ago

None of that feels like AI smell to me despite the "it's not X it's Y" framing. I can't really explain why though.

xtiansimon 6mo ago

> “…there’s this record-scratch feeling…” The op is a blog post. You’re talking about blog post writing. Maybe you just don’t like their style? It’s also true llm second drafts are a thing. And it’s true both can ‘record scratch’ you right out of attention. As well as the now present trend as readers to be impatient and quickly bored. And this criticism of writing style (for my take this article is perfectly readable)—what is the aim? Call for writers to perform some kind of disclosure? Because without a goal, it sounds like complaining you don’t like the soup.

xigoi 6mo ago

I hate AI slop, but I also hate the HN trend of “this article uses a rhetorical device, therefore it’s AI-generated.”

Legend2440 6mo ago

The hilarious irony of AI-generating an article about overusing AI.