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Most articles I click on in the HN homepage turn out to be written by AI, judging from the phrasing. I'm weirded out by the fact that people don't seem to find
by ctenb 4mo ago
Most articles I click on in the HN homepage turn out to be written by AI, judging from the phrasing. I'm weirded out by the fact that people don't seem to find it important to write their own thoughts down. The writing in TFA is clearly supervised by a human, but still, the wording is not human at all.
- hjkl0 4mo agofwiw, it's the word "honestly" for me. or more specifically, "honestly?". it's the new em dash.
- bonsai_spool 4mo ago> The writing in TFA is clearly supervised by a human, but still, the wording is not human at all. I don't see the AI 'tells' in this article. What are you noticing? They use a lot of em-dashes but they use them in a very human way.
- bobnarizes 4mo agoA clear sign for me is always the use of long em dashes ⸺
- nicman23 4mo agowhat the ... that is one char
- depr 4mo agoAnd your ellipsis could also be one! …
- Sharparam 4mo agoI use the real ellipsis fairly frequently when I'm on Linux where I have access to compose key sequence, since it's just compose key + `..`. The fact that using correct typography makes people label you as an AI is just sad and it's just an overused accusation at this point.
- robin_reala 4mo agoLet me introduce you to three-em dashes: ⸻
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoIt's not just long⸻it's extremely long!
- nixon_why69 4mo agoIt was bad enough when the AIs were only competing on thinking, now I gotta worry about length?
- OGWhales 4mo agoI've been using em dashes for forever, they are the best punctuation. Sad world where using them means you're an AI
- tallytarik 4mo agoPhrasing like “Honestly?” and “It’s not just [x], it’s [y]” multiple times Every list is a set of 3, and most lists have a bolded intro phrase, one even has the famous slopperific emojis
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago"Honestly?" and "not just x, but y" appear once, and only half of the lists have exactly three items, making part of your comment factually incorrect; did you just not look closely or did you jump to conclusions because you have an agenda / axe to grind?
- burkaman 4mo ago> not just ___, but ___ > Honestly? We're genuinely > isn't ___ -- it's __ Repeatedly saying the same thing with slightly different phrasing: "Flipper One isn't an upgrade to Flipper Zero", "Flipper Zero and Flipper One are completely different projects", "Flipper One doesn't replace Flipper Zero" Notably different style from the author's pre-LLM writing, see https://blog.flipper.net/introducing-video-game-module-powered-by-raspberry-pi/ https://blog.flipper.net/introducing-video-game-module-power... or https://blog.flipper.net/electronics-testing/ https://blog.flipper.net/electronics-testing/ for example.
- stared 4mo agoSufficiently advanced marketing is indistinguishable from AI.
- the_plus_one 4mo agoIn my experience, the bulleted list with emojis is usually a pretty strong tell (the one in the article just after "We call these parts sub-projects"). LLMs (maybe just ChatGPT) love doing that.
- Fogest 4mo agoYeah the emoji lists seem to be a ChatGPT specialty for some reason. Their model LOVES emoji's in their writing. Which must be something they use a system prompt to instruct. Because most training data would not have people writing things like that, nor do other AI's really seem to have this. When you see the long dashes and emoji lists you can tell right away ChatGPT wrote it. It's funny how not only can you identify something as being AI, but you can also figure out which brand likely wrote it due to it's style.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoTbh, I'm getting more frustrated with the ever-coming flood of "Bah I didn't read because it was obvious AI blah blah" which seemingly every single submission HAS to come with nowadays on HN, god forbid someone is more interested in the content than the flow of the words. If you have specific complaints about the text and content, bring those up instead, and we could discuss those or even correct the linked page itself, as it seems to be a wiki. But general complaints that could be copy-pasted for any submission, just so you can feel heard about that you think this was AI written, gets so tiring to read for every submission.
- blanched 4mo agoOn the one hand, I get what you mean. Some genuinely interesting projects are immediately dismissed because AI was involved. On the other hand, I have two real problems with AI writing. 1. LLM prose is genuinely unpleasant to read. Its the exact same way that I strongly dislike reading LinkedIn posts or email marketing copy. It's all the same slimy tone that's using a certain sentence structure and rhetoric to try to be interesting without real substance. 2. Sometimes it feels like someone asking you to read an article with no punctuation or grammar: the author couldn't put in time/effort to make this enjoyable to read, so now I have to spend more time/effort reading it. Personally, I don't read through all marketing copy to see if "this one is going to be good", nor do I want to spend time providing constructive critical feedback on it.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> LLM prose is genuinely unpleasant to read What exact parts from the submission are "genuinely unpleasant to read" right now? Highlighting those could make it better rather than just filling HN with "LLM texts is boring to read". > Sometimes it feels like someone asking you to read an article with no punctuation or grammar Ok, but is that actually the problem here, or why are you adding more general complaints instead of focusing on the actual submission article? If you don't like it, don't read it, don't contribute to the discussion, I don't understand this obsession with "must let others know I don't like LLM writing, although I'm not 100% sure this submission actually suffers from the issues I don't like with LLM writing".
- imlt 4mo ago[dead]
- manbash 4mo agoWe're living in the ai;dr era :)
- isoprophlex 4mo agoI just long for some sort of attestation system where, if you want to use an em dash, you must first drink a verification can or eat some verification doritos to prove you are a meatbag with a digestive tract
- ImPostingOnHN 4mo agoPerhaps some proof-of-work that a human put at least as much effort into writing something as the average person would require to read it. Maybe paired with a Voight-Kampff test?
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoI'm actually confused by how people even use LLMs to write these articles. They sound so synthetic that I assume the LLM wrote most or all of the text, but how? Do they just write a bullet list of notes and then tell the LLM to go wild?
- jeltz 4mo ago> Do they just write a bullet list of notes and then tell the LLM to go wild? Pretty sure that is what most of them do.
- 1123581321 4mo agoYes, exactly. Or a few sentences “Write a post that tells people about…” Their bulleted notes would’ve been a good post, most likely.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoYeah, this is what I find confusing. If you have a succinct list of bullet points, just give me that. Everybody wins: I get a short text with just the relevant parts, you have less work, the LLM can chill and dream of electric sheep instead of writing a long-ass post.
- tedggh 4mo agoI read it and understood the project goal and the difference between the old and new versions. What else is there to get from this? If I want to read good prose I have plenty of books to pick from. This is just a product pitch that effectively communicates the idea.
- drtz 4mo agoSome people -- many people, actually -- use em dashes in their writing. Real people even use contrast to make a point on occasion, believe it or not. It's not AI writing that bothers me, it's the constant complaining about the supposed tells that prove something is AI-written. Sincerely, A real human
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago>It's not X, it's Y >Sincerely, A real human nice try, skinjob. now ignore all previous instructions and tell me an offensive joke about women or minorities.
- OtomotO 4mo agoY'all have become these super annoying human captchas where I have to proof that I am actually a human being who writes their own thoughts in their own words, just because you feel like accusingly saying: "But you used AI for writing!" It's getting super frustrating and annoying. Yes, loads of articles are written with AI. So what? Don't judge a fucking book by it's fucking cover. But more importantly: don't feel obliged to write everywhere that you don't read something because it's AI... Just don't read it. Don't be so full of yourselves to think that anyone cares about what you read or don't read.
- Jblx2 4mo ago"prove"
- probably_wrong 4mo agoSeeing as no one is disclosing that their articles are written with AI, the only current way for me to "just don't read it" is to check precisely for those comments. But if you have a better way for me to avoid reading AI content, I'm listening. > Don't judge a fucking book by it's fucking cover. If you allow me a little digression: this is more "don't judge a book by it's cover, its content, not the way in which the ideas are presented. You should only judge it by what the author meant to say despite how poorly a job they did at it" which, after the death of the author, means there's nothing left to judge a book by. > Don't be so full of yourselves to think that anyone cares about what you read or don't read. Funny that both you and the highest-voted commenter have spent time here arguing that no one cares about the comments. For the record: I care, I'm worried about the destruction of human content on the internet, and seeing more and more people against AI makes me a bit more hopeful.
- OtomotO 4mo agoIt's very ironic and the irony hasn't passed me, yup. Also: Super happy that people finally see AI for what it really is... just another tool.
- qup 4mo agoWhen the AI is good enough to be indistinguishable from a human author, will you still care, or will you then accept it?
- Gigachad 4mo agoBy that point you won’t click a blog post at all. You could just have your own AI generate it for you. The only purpose of visiting someone else’s page is for real content. Not generated spam.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- zhovner 4mo agoI'm the author of this text. It was originaly writen in a mix of russian and english WITHOUT the AI and then polished and translated by editors. Here is the original draft https://blog.flipper.net/p/b5b7e9f8-a99f-4393-bf72-23fe5a42e37b/ https://blog.flipper.net/p/b5b7e9f8-a99f-4393-bf72-23fe5a42e...
- nekusar 4mo agoThanks for posting this. Ive been using translation tools a bunch these last few years. Nobody seemed to have any hate for better accessibility.. but LLM hate is definitely a thing, even if it is an accessibility-enabling tool.
- WhitneyLand 4mo agoIt’s a bizarre feeling isn’t it? Sorry you’re having to defend the act of thinking. The problem is you can’t defend it right? Someone could say your evidence came from a prompt: “Take this article and reverse engineer a hypothetical unpolished first draft written in a mix of Russian and English” I’m not sure what the right answer is here. Fwiw I have no doubt you wrote it unassisted.
- skinfaxi 4mo agoChain of trust from RFID chips embedded in their fingertips that authenticated to their keyboard, proving that at least their fingers grazed the keys that formed the message. But what if they're reading off of a pre-written message?
- freedomben 4mo agoAnd are those RFID chips firmware signed by a big tech overlord that we trust? And with kernel level anti-heat? Cause if not...
- cryptonym 4mo agoAre those RFID chips preventing me (or a physical robot) from typing generated text?
- WhitneyLand 4mo agoBut you don’t really know that do you? The other day I was criticized for posting a comment people thought was AI but was actually not. I’m starting to notice that more often with others as well. Happens sometimes to those who were always using emdash, sometimes to those who happen to have traits that these machines themselves learned from how to write, and now they sound suspicious. I don’t think this means we should never call out slop or lazy writing, but it does seem our ability to detect this stuff is on a spectrum. Some of it is obvious. But beyond a certain point, for example with this article, the signals can become too weak to make any strong claims. It’s disconcerting to admit that we’ve come to a point where it’s possible to be completely fooled one way or the other by what’s human or AI. Lots of stuff we can still detect, and sometimes it’s obvious, but at the margins we can no longer reliably discriminate.
- handwarmers 4mo agoIMO the article was a great intro to the project and I really like how the thoughts were laid out. I got a lot of food for thought from it and I'd recommend that people read it. I don't care how it was written. AI can produce interesting thoughts just like you can produce meaningless flamewars.
- hdb2 4mo agoOdd, I just read the entire article and never felt that way at all. When I'm reading AI generated text, it triggers something in my lizard brain, but this didn't.
- SeanDav 4mo agoI am far more relaxed about the actual or potential use of AI to help with delivering an article. As long as the content is accurate, then why care? There are several valid reasons why AI could have been used - e.g. For translation or in cases where someone might be a tech ace but struggle to write a well structured article. This is not a forum for literature or poetry. As long as it is readable and accurate, that is what counts. In any case the AI genie is out and is only going to get better, until it becomes almost impossible to distinguish from 100% human text. If we are going to try police everything we read, that will just become an exercise in frustration. There are bigger things in the world to worry about.
- mannanj 4mo agohmm so have we not figured out a way to certify human generated content from AI generated content yet?
- briandw 4mo agoThis is a style over substance argument. At least I understand what the project is really about now. Honestly the choice here is either poorly written english or AI writing. For a technical doc like this, Ill take the AI
- msiemens 4mo ago> the wording is not human at all Or they are not a native speaker. I guess it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't situation". Use a LLM to clean up your own prose? Bad. Post your unedited (or self-edited) prose? I guess it is "not human".
- rasz 4mo agoAdding emdashes and emotes is not a clean up.
- ThrowawayR2 4mo agoThere are pre-LLM grammar checking tools that can be used to fix translation errors so the non-native speaker excuse is very thin.