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I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am
by vodou 3mo ago
I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.
- gusmally 3mo agoThe multiple uses of "it's worth X" made me question the authorship, for one
- joenot443 3mo ago> It is not age verification. It is identity verification. > You can change a password. You cannot change your face. > This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice. It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.
- Anoian 3mo agoAlthough these are indicators, real people also use these sometimes.
- mawadev 3mo agoMy brain skims the entire blog before reading it and if I see two short sentences with dots and negation or even one single em dash, I ctrl+w out
- xmprt 3mo agoI agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write. I use the "it's not X it's Y" framing a lot of the time because it's a quick way to get my point across. It's probably the sign of a bad writer because I can't come up with a different/better way to say the same thing, but I'm not AI.
- schrodinger 3mo agoI could tell it was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless. FWIW, I don't think AI enablement is inherently bad; this can be a game changer for an individual with an interesting thought yet difficulty expressing themselves in written word. (Obviously, it's also created a real problem with the ability to create near infinite well-written content, especially in the case of propaganda.) I do agree with you that the quotes cited out are literary constructs used by humans, and there's a risk we get trigger-happy in calling out AI-slop. Still, those are just the most obvious tells — there were absolutely other, less notable mannerisms that confirmed it for me. If you interact enough with an LLM, you can become quite good at detecting their output through subtle subconscious cues that are hard to put to words. I do wonder where some of the tropes came from. Claude tends to say "____ is doing a lot of work in this sentence", yet I don't recognize that as a common construction for humans overall or even a specific community (e.g. journalists). Perhaps I'm just unfamiliar with some vernaculars found in training data. Yet sometimes, it legitimately feels like they've actually developed a lingo of their own — an emergent property. I find it all truly fascinating (along with other feelings…), and I never expected computers to be able to "understand" language anywhere near the degree we see today. Will it soon plateau, requiring another breakthrough? Or is there plenty of juice left to squeeze?
- KajMagnus 3mo ago> was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless I suspect the prompt given to the AI was 3 sentences, maybe interesting sentences, and everything else was AI expanded, a waste of everyone's time? (Those who read everything)
- schrodinger 3mo agoThat would imply that all of the knowledge held with these models is an uninteresting waste of everyone's time. I don't believe that's true.
- KajMagnus 3mo agoYes I guess there exists such blog posts. And that it varies from person to person of course (what they already know or dont). This blog post in particular though, I got so bored so I couldn't finish reading it. I gave it another quick try now because of your comment :-)
- antisthenes 3mo agoIf anyone uses a couple of these red flags to dismiss the entire article and the underlying idea, that says a lot more about them than the author.
- joenot443 3mo agoI personally don't like reading text written by LLMs, I'd rather just read the prompt itself. I suspect you feel differently. I imagine this says a lot about the reader :)
- antisthenes 3mo agoAt least the article makes you be curious about what the prompt was. That's already better than people dismissing the entire thing.
- Henchman21 3mo agoThese are normal patterns in US English. The zeal to accuse limits the scope of possible responses. There are all sorts of things humans do when writing that LLMs mimic — em-dashes for instance — that are entirely legitimate ways to communicate but get shouted down for… reasons? Surely you’re aware that LLMs were trained on the ways humans write specifically to mimic them? Yes? So what’s the gripe? Someone cranked out a “thought piece” with no effort or actual thinking on their own? But thats the promise of AI. So are you advocating doing away with AI tools and research? Maybe we start asking “should we” not “can we”? Now that is a position I might get behind. But really how the hell am I supposed to write at all when nearly ANYTHING I write could be interpreted as AI-generated and then shouted down in some quasi-ad-hominem attack on me while not engaging with any points made? It is the utter end of written discussion.
- thefroh 3mo agoit's like AI-generated images, though those tend to be more obvious than AI-generated text due to the "average" effect being visually obvious. Yes, these are normal patterns in English, but it is not normal to use them with the frequency that triggers people's llm-lese senses. I don't see a way out of it until either generated content is either completely unable to be distinguished from authored content (unlikely?), or there's a silver bullet for identifying generated content (also unlikely?)
- fragmede 3mo agoAre you saying that people are being tricked to being anti-intellectuals? If even the smart people are anti-intellectual, society loses.
- Henchman21 3mo agoNo, I don’t think anyone is being tricked. I think people aren’t used to accepting information from all parties, and are looking for a quick way to determine if an article (or whatever) is valid and worthy of their time. I think this applies equally to all levels of intelligence, from the dumbest to the smartest. We all want a quick filter. I do find it more troubling when people who are very intelligent dismiss things out of a sense that “AI did it” so it isn’t worth engaging at all.
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo agoTons of people write that way.
- nvme0n1p1 3mo agoDid people used to do it 5 times every 10 sentences?
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo agoBad writers do worse
- nvme0n1p1 3mo agoI didn't ask about other worse things, I asked about this specific bad thing. Since you dodged the question, I guess your real answer is "no, people never did this" and therefore "yes, this is AI slop"
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo agoin human conversation "seen worse than that", "do worse than that" usually means the thing in question is not a concern in given context. "worse" obviously includes the thing. Are you AI?
- antonvs 3mo agoRight, it's either bad writing, or an LLM that's been trained on bad writing. I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt and assuming the latter.
- chwtutha 3mo agoStraight quotes were my first clue, followed by “it’s not this it’s that” and subheads.
- ShadowOfThePit 3mo agoStraight quotes? I thought an LLMs thing was always using the curly ones?
- chwtutha 3mo agoClaude uses straight, at least for me. I assume they’d use straight so that the curly ones can’t ever be wrong.
- da_grift_shift 3mo agoSpecific article aside, you may be interested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AISIGNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AISIGNS https://github.com/blader/humanizer/blob/main/SKILL.md#content-patterns https://github.com/blader/humanizer/blob/main/SKILL.md#conte...
- edg5000 3mo agoThe em-dashes
- lenkite 3mo ago> Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Just read a few fiction books written in 2026 in Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Your brain will be trained to recognize AI-Slop Speak in No Time.
- archagon 3mo agoI think it will become pretty simple. Does the author say somewhere on their site that they don't use AI for writing? If yes, then great. Otherwise, it's very likely LLM-generated — particularly if the author spends a lot of time writing positively about AI. (And what if they lie? They will be discovered eventually, at which point they can be blacklisted.)
- amalcon 3mo agoI know, right? It used to be easy: just look for writing in a very long-winded style, almost as if the author is being paid per word, in a place where that sort of writing didn't belong. I think it was because that type of writing represented a disproportionate fraction of the tokens in the training data due to the long-winded-ness. Somewhere around a year ago, they figured out some way to deal with that problem.
- shantnutiwari 3mo ago>>Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... Its quite simple, at least by HN rules. If you dont like an article, post "This is LLM" and move on. Within 5 minute your post will be voted t o the top. Easy karma farming!