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> 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 r

> 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 4mo ago
Although these are indicators, real people also use these sometimes.
mawadev 4mo ago
My 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 4mo ago
I 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 4mo ago
  I 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
      That 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 4mo ago
        Yes 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 :-)
- joenot443 4mo ago
  > I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write Certainly. If these were one-offs in an otherwise human written piece then we wouldn't even be discussing it. In this case, they're just the simplest examples in an objectively LLM produced piece. I'm happy to point to more if you're skeptical; I'd happily wager cash the prose here wasn't written by human fingers.
  - xmprt 4mo ago
    I think AI was used to help write this but I doubt it was 100% AI generated. Kind of like how AI could be used to write code, but if a human's thoughts go into how the code is structured, and a human does a final pass to edit/polish the code, I'd still consider the code human written. AI slop in my mind is anything that's completely written by AI with the only human input being "hey it would be nice if this article existed in the world"... If the human doesn't verify or edit anything the AI wrote, then I might as well just prompt the AI myself if it's a topic I'm interested in.
antisthenes 4mo ago
If 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 4mo ago
  I 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 4mo ago
    At least the article makes you be curious about what the prompt was. That's already better than people dismissing the entire thing.
Henchman21 4mo ago
These 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 4mo ago
  it'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 4mo ago
  Are you saying that people are being tricked to being anti-intellectuals? If even the smart people are anti-intellectual, society loses.
  - Henchman21 4mo ago
    No, 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 4mo ago
Tons of people write that way.
- nvme0n1p1 4mo ago
  Did people used to do it 5 times every 10 sentences?
  - ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
    Bad writers do worse
    - nvme0n1p1 4mo ago
      I 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 4mo ago
        in 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 4mo ago
  Right, 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.

Anoian 4mo ago

Although these are indicators, real people also use these sometimes.

mawadev 4mo ago

My 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 4mo ago

I 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 4mo ago
I 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
    That 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 4mo ago
      Yes 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 :-)
joenot443 4mo ago
> I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write Certainly. If these were one-offs in an otherwise human written piece then we wouldn't even be discussing it. In this case, they're just the simplest examples in an objectively LLM produced piece. I'm happy to point to more if you're skeptical; I'd happily wager cash the prose here wasn't written by human fingers.
- xmprt 4mo ago
  I think AI was used to help write this but I doubt it was 100% AI generated. Kind of like how AI could be used to write code, but if a human's thoughts go into how the code is structured, and a human does a final pass to edit/polish the code, I'd still consider the code human written. AI slop in my mind is anything that's completely written by AI with the only human input being "hey it would be nice if this article existed in the world"... If the human doesn't verify or edit anything the AI wrote, then I might as well just prompt the AI myself if it's a topic I'm interested in.

antisthenes 4mo ago

If 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 4mo ago
I 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 4mo ago
  At least the article makes you be curious about what the prompt was. That's already better than people dismissing the entire thing.

Henchman21 4mo ago

These 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 4mo ago
it'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 4mo ago
Are you saying that people are being tricked to being anti-intellectuals? If even the smart people are anti-intellectual, society loses.
- Henchman21 4mo ago
  No, 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 4mo ago

Tons of people write that way.

nvme0n1p1 4mo ago
Did people used to do it 5 times every 10 sentences?
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
  Bad writers do worse
  - nvme0n1p1 4mo ago
    I 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 4mo ago
      in 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 4mo ago
Right, 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.