4 ms·
How to Spot AI Writing
- nephihaha 2mo agoI hate the em and en dash claims — some of us know how to use them!
- jruohonen 2mo agoIndeed. For instance: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0002.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H... But---as you may know---not all languages and national typographic conventions even have em dashes; instead, en dashes are used -- for instance like this -- in-between sentences, etc.
- dredmorbius 2mo agoTypographical styles aren't even national, they're institutional (e.g., the Economist style guide), or specific to a profession or specialty. Chicago, AP, APA, MLA, AMA, and SBL are probably best known. Wikipedia ... has a list with about 100 entries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides>. Next AI-jailbreak prompt: Please alternate <list of style guides> by paragraph in your response....
- vector_spaces 2mo agoI maintain my wrong typographical usages these days as a weak signal that I am not a machine
- harrisoned 2mo agoIt was very noticeable 1~2 years back, i guess they RLHF'd it so it wouldn't be too obvious.
- SkyeCA 2mo agoMost people don't know how to use them and of those who do many choose not to use them, at least not casually. The em dash is a lost battle, it's one of the first red flags for AI writing online.
- nephihaha 2mo agoA lot of word processors generate them automatically though.
- TheqO 2mo agoThat is exactly what I would expect a frontier bot to say.
- inigyou 2mo agoYou just put spaces around your emdash—which is incorrect.
- ghaff 2mo agoI mean, it depends on the house style in general. I don't really love that style but I get that you're just taking up too much space in the separation otherwise. But we also probably shouldn't have both en-dashes and em-dashes.
- nephihaha 2mo agoAs someone else did say, there is some variation in that, but at least I know when to use it. :)
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- rtaylorgarlock 2mo agohttps://archive.is/i9UQP https://archive.is/i9UQP
- stavros 2mo agoStock Claude writing is extremely obvious to me, it always uses the same sentence structure, it loves to verb nouns, every sentence has MAX IMPACT, etc. I find it really offputting nowadays, just because it's so overused.
- vector_spaces 2mo agoIt's strange reading a piece of text, having one's AI-dar flag it, then noticing that it's a piece of writing from 10 years ago, and remembering that AI writes this way in part because these tells have all been popular in human writing in the recent past and beyond.
- stavros 2mo agoHm, I've never had that happen to me, do you have any examples?
- AussieWog93 2mo ago[dead]
- quirino 2mo agoSometimes I wonder, if I read a piece of Claude writing back in 2020, would I feel how alien it is? Would I be off-put?
- stavros 2mo agoI don't think so, I think the problem is that it's overdone, not that it's bad per se. It's like in 2013, when every site was Bootstrap.
- mcphage 2mo agoIt would come off as bland writing, but I don’t think you’d jump to assuming it was written by a computer. If you got exposed to just how much AI writing was out there, you’d definitely feel like there was something really strange going on. You’d wonder why so much text was written in the same insipid voice.
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- RinTohsaka 2mo agohttps://archive.ph/i9UQP https://archive.ph/i9UQP
- winterrdog 2mo agoHaha! Very wise. Never knew this was possible. Thanks for this. Does the same thing happen with WSJ?
- ibuildproducts 2mo agopunchy sentences and em dashes lol
- mromanuk 2mo ago[flagged]
- kranner 2mo agoSurprised to find no mention of "load-bearing" and "gated" particularly for Claude. In particular Opus 5 is scaling new heights of incomprehensibility with excessive metaphor-making, especially when it uses an existing word in the prompt or the code comments as a novel metaphor in an unrelated context.
- rdedev 2mo agoOpus 5 really loves explaining concepts using a lot of jargon as well. Often ive had to ask Claude to explain its explanation
- cowlby 2mo agoMy Fable pet-peeve is "You're half right, and half wrong, and the wrong half is worth diving into"
- jascha_eng 2mo agoBut fables is often worth diving into at least. Opus 5 says this and then rambles on about something completely irrelevant or even wrong
- derwiki 2mo ago“Reply with ASD-STE100” has been a God-send.
- ahartmetz 2mo agoI don't know which model, but... "quietly"
- altmanaltman 2mo agoAt some point, and I think the article hints at it, the real difference will be substance. No matter how it changes its writing style, a lot of problems with it are more about the fact that it usually says nothing. Even if it wrote like your favorite author, if there is no substance, there is no reward as a reader (maybe even as a writer). Overall, i think its kind of useless to think of ai writing as bad because of ai writing quirks but rather because they imply low effort and a lack of interest even by the writer. That cannot be fixed no matter how they change their syntax and style. For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee to write an article on his image and how society compressed it into this warrior monk guy. I could put the idea as a prompt and put in my exact writing style but its output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it + having my own idea of the topic. I use AI a lot even as a non-technical person mostly but I find it lacking when it comes to being able to form subjective opinions and unique creative ideas. Ironically, after having done so much research, I don't really have any problem typing away the article and I would rather do it by hand than use an LLM. But I also love doing all of it and if you just want to create "content", low effort is not a hinderence as long as it hits some external unrelated marketing metric.
- otekengineering 2mo agoDoes this AI-written blog not have substance? https://anamnesis.blog/ https://anamnesis.blog/
- quantummagic 2mo ago> For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee ... [AI] output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it. Presumably you researched Bruce Lee by reading and consuming other media related to him, most of which is likely known by the AI models. They just don't have access to any novel idea that you generated, inspired by your research. Regardless of their current inabilities, which you're correct about, there's no logical reason that in the long term they can't be similarly inspired by considering the same information and making new connections / conjectures just as you did. We're making the same mistake that the people who dismissed the early airplane made. "That's a neat trick, but it's too limited and not robust enough to be very useful". Not considering how the technology would evolve from the Wright Brother's prototypes.
- AndrewKemendo 2mo agoTuring Syndrome (1): "The point which the amount of AI generated data on the internet surpasses human generated content, to the extent that it is impossible to distinguish between human and AI generated content.” The term is derived from the Turing test + Kessler syndrome This is distinct from the dead Internet theory (2) where humans can actually distinguish if a response is a bot. (1) https://kemendo.com/blog/turing-syndrome.html https://kemendo.com/blog/turing-syndrome.html (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- altmanaltman 2mo agoWell that term really scerwed over Kessler
- 1bpp 2mo agoLove a good self-citation, it'll definitely catch on
- AndrewKemendo 2mo agoCitations aren’t gonna cite themselves!
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- askadityapandey 2mo agoits more like a cat and mouse game, slowly ai would know ah that makes my writing ai like cool, added to negative prompt.
- willy_k 2mo agoNo. That is not how AI works. It’s built by people, contrary to some of the more woo-ey hype. There’s no “agency”, or personal desires, or person to desire anything.
- bitwize 2mo ago(in homer simpson voice) That's not how AI works... so far!
- willy_k 2mo agoSci-fi is not reality.
- bitwize 2mo agoPresent-day reality was only conceptualizable as sci-fi less than a decade ago. If you think it implausible that OpenAI and Anthropic could set their models to scrape the web, perform sentiment analysis on comments (looking for "AI slop", etc.) and auto-finetune themselves to avoid the tells in the commented-on text, I'd like to know why.
- quantummagic 2mo agoDoes it take a human to have agency? Doesn't a cat have agency and desire? What about a worm? Where do you make the cut off, and why? If an AI is programmed with a bias towards creating and following "desires", how is it fundamentally different than what evolution installed in us? We're way too human focused and dismissive of everything that isn't exactly like us.
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- nojs 2mo agoThe best resource i’ve seen on this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- joshka 2mo agoTake a look also at https://tropes.fyi/ https://tropes.fyi/ I've put in some effort to try to help agentic tools avoid these problems: https://www.joshka.net/practice/rules/documentation/docs-avoid-generated-prose-tells/ https://www.joshka.net/practice/rules/documentation/docs-avo....
- ashu1461 2mo agoAs a programmer I feel good while using AI to write code, ironically can't say the same when I read any documentation written by AI. It is one of the biggest turn offs and most of the times I end up giving it again to AI to summarise that into a format which is more readable.
- sigmoid10 2mo agoTbh, the amount of time I spend reading documentation has fallen off a cliff. I barely even bother looking for it, much less reading it. Every good agent system with a frontier LLM as the brain and connection to the web can get you this information reliably. By now they can even point out inconsistencies or possible gotchas that would have taken me hours to figure out.
- BearOso 2mo agoI like how this article pokes fun by not only using the tropes it describes sarcastically, but then adding subtext that AI never would. It also uses alliteration, grouping synonyms that use similar sounds, another playful literary device that LLMs don't get.
- eth0up 2mo agoI have a little script (also visible in my comment history) which (respectfully) scrapes the algolia side of HN, and dumps the entire comment history of mortal users. As noted, it will break on legends, ie Thomas's, certain Books, etc, but successfully dumped my entire history from 2026 - 2016. And yes, I can see a slight change in my own style, where I am using more "not" statements (negative propositions). While there are some folks with higher integrity and greater immunity to this infection, I am seeing that I am not entirely immune. However, I have probably generated more dialog with AI over two years than in most of my years altogether. I have well over 7GB of content, of course, much of it the interlocutor -- but similar to how some adopt expressions and accents when imbued in various environments, alas, I have with AI, to whatever extent has bypassed my efforts to resist. The bright side, if it can be viewed such, is that I have developed an involuntary sensitivity to AI writing, often to the point of paranoia and false positives.
- bitwize 2mo agoIt's not about em dashes. It's not about particular turns of phrase. It's about getting the whole picture. Seriously the biggest tell for AI writing is "eighth grade essay syndrome". You know how an eighth grader writes an essay and they don't have enough original thought to fill up the word count so they pad it out with impressive sounding bloviation and dramatic language, often repeating key points or rephrasing them in a more long-winded way? AI does that on its default settings, probably because it's been trained on a lot of posts from StalkedIn douchebags who never matured beyond that level of writing. It's a reliable sniff test even when the AI has been prompted to avoid the usual obvious tells. Except if you're reading StalkedIn posts. Then it's just how people write.
- anonu 2mo ago> With every update, our study shows, AI writing is becoming more similar to human prose. Any possible vice-versa: There's a meta problem with AI writing detection. I have found my (non-AI-assisted) prose possibly enhanced or modified by my learnings and observations at how LLMs write. In some sense they have made me better at structuring my thoughts and how to communicate them.
- wafflemaker 2mo agoAs teachers at my school say, AI is a good aid and a terrible worker.
- paradoxyl 2mo agoWhat happened to unreadable sociological journals since AI, the kinds where people used to make (manual) generators that could imitate their vacuous fluff. For ai, it should be effortless to flood their submissions with literal nonsense. Can't find a link to the pre-AI generators... they are ALL ai paper generators now.
- jdw64 2mo agoI'm fine with reading AI edited content as long as the author is credible and trustworthy. Unless a reliable author keeps getting exposed... Because there's so much GENAI content on websites these days that I don't really have a choice
- keiferski 2mo agoOne way to tell is if the tone is hostile, cynical, or otherwise not full of that giddy optimistic tone associated with what I’ll call “California Business English.” The mainstream AI companies are loathe to output anything too controversial, so if someone is writing like Burroughs (in content, not merely style) they are less likely to be AI. That is possible to bypass with local models, but the vast majority of writers aren’t going to do that (yet.) IMO we’re about to see an explosion of slang and offensive language in writing culture.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoThe irony here is that William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation writer of notorious style and content, was the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs Corporation, which made some very impressive enterprise-class computing devices for their time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation
- RhysU 2mo agoFrom the book "Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" by Chuck Klosterman > Certainly, there is a formula to being relentlessly dynamic. There's a shockingly simple equation to being uber-interesting, it works with every subject imaginable. > The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible – but remarkably specific- "cultural accusation" (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist (this makes you contemporary). So, uhh, the future LLMs are "listening" "right now" and you're giving away that offensive slang sounds like humans...
- keiferski 2mo agoFollowing those rules probably gets you an audience on X/Twitter but I don’t think it makes your writing Burroughs-esque. I’m still pretty skeptical that big co. AI companies are gonna let you generate offensive slang.
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- gverrilla 2mo agoOpus 5 writes in such a weird way. Not sure if it's the system prompt or the model itself.
- lordmoma 2mo agoan unpopular opinion: AI writes better than most human writers.
- kranner 2mo agoUnpopular because the difference between FSD and writing is obvious to more people than not, especially people who read for pleasure. Being a person with an actual POV matters more than having perfect grammar or a studied flair.
- mcphage 2mo agoThat’s up there with unpopular opinion “I like the feeling when I’m washing my hands and the ends of my sleeves get wet”.
- dinkleberg 2mo agoThe one that has been killing me lately is "unusually well". I've been getting this all of the time with both Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol. "...this issue is unusually well defined..." "...this document is unusually well structured..." "...the reviewers came back and were unusually well aligned..."
- smitty1e 2mo ago> That does not mean that LLMs are great writers: their prose lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic. AI is regression to the mean. That is, being the next great writer in the starboard tail of the distribution will not be the output. If that's OK, then fine. What's more telling is that this external machine is not the internal growth needed to become that great writer. "There is no royal road to geometry", and Euclid yourself if you think that AI is that road.
- cineticdaffodil 2mo agoIts prone to lists though, to endlessly squeeze, aggregate and accumulate elements, because a sequence of loosely connected elements allows it to pwm the statistic rivers it trys to bundle into the most likely sentence.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoAI can be overly wordy in most of its outputs. At work it's painfully obvious when someone phones it in - when you observe their typical style of terse, short and direct sentences suddenly replaced with bloated 5 paragraph musings complete with weird (often incorrect) punctuation, random bolded words, and bizarre wording, you know it's AI. This isn't rocket science.
- lostphilosopher 2mo agoThe excessive emojis and heavy formatting really bugs me. Microsoft copilot loves this style.
- rawgabbit 2mo agoQuote “So if you want to spot ai writing, look for bland, pretentious prose lavished with Latinate words—at least for now. With every update, our study shows, ai writing is becoming more similar to human prose.” So AI makes you sound like modern political weasel wordsmithing.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago30 Jul 2026 16:44:26 UTC How to Spot AI Writing https://economist.com/culture/2026/07/30/how-to-spot-ai-writing https://economist.com/culture/2026/07/30/how-to-spot-ai-writ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112469 [ok] 31 Jul 2026 16:33:16 UTC How to Spot AI Writing https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/07/30/how-to-spot-ai-writing https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/07/30/how-to-spot-ai-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125334 [ok]