5 ms·
For those keeping track, this is now (at least) the third wholly or partially AI-generated article on the theme of "taste" as enduring source of human comparati
by cribbles 2mo ago
For those keeping track, this is now (at least) the third wholly or partially AI-generated article on the theme of "taste" as enduring source of human comparative advantage to hit the HN front page.
Previously:
Taste in the age of AI and LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241
You Had No Taste Before AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551
- tfrancisl 2mo agoThis article is not AI generated. Everyone is asserting it is but the author is well known as a critic of these tools in his communities. Why would he lie and use it to write an article with his genuine views, edit it to assuage the feelings of HN commenters, and then double down? Speedrunning losing his credibility, or, his writing style got on some people's nerves?
- no_multitudes 2mo ago"And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it." I'm 100% confident that a human did not write this sentence unless they were deliberately trying to sound like an LLM. Just look at it! You don't need Pangram. There's a classifier model between your ears that knows how humans write.
- tfrancisl 2mo agoI'd retrain that model if I were you.
- no_multitudes 2mo agoI'm generally quite open to the possibility that I'm wrong. I said 100% for this one because it is tooth-grindingly obvious. Could you give me some examples of long-form writing like this from before 2024? Generally to retrain my model I need data.
- Tiberium 2mo agoTo be honest with you, I think this is pointless. However hostile this might sound, the active userbase of HN seems to be extremely dismissive to the thought of LLM detectors and they think that all those LLM written articles are actually human written. I don't know if this will change, perhaps it'll only get worse from now. (You can see my recent experience in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212027 )
- slopinthebag 2mo agoIf you don’t know how to write well, the AI slop is less obvious. That’s my theory at least, I don’t understand how people can read these nonsense sentences and believe a human actually wrote it.
- runtime_terror 2mo agoRunning Llama 3 between your ears? Don't you and all the people in this thread claiming AI slop know that AI was trained on human writing?
- no_multitudes 2mo ago>Don't you and all the people in this thread claiming AI slop know that AI was trained on human writing? Do you think this implies that it is impossible to distinguish LLM-generated text from human text? I don't think that follows at all. >Running Llama 3 between your ears? I'm always happy for a chance to improve my classifier! Can you provide some long-form writing from before 2024 that uses this style?
- runtime_terror 2mo agoNo, I dont think there is any reliable data to be able reliably classify AI text. So far what I've seen is humans actually fail this task reliably
- no_multitudes 2mo agoInteresting hypothesis! I find that my internal sense of whether the article is AI almost always agrees with Pangram when I check it, and almost never triggers on pre-2024 text, even if I didn't know beforehand when it was written. I think this cuts against your hypothesis -- if I was just recognizing a generic style of writing, I would expect it to fire on pre-2024 text, and if I was just recognizing text written in 2026, I would expect it to fire much more often when reading blog posts of already-established writers who I trust.
- jmilloy 2mo agoThat sentence doesn't read as llm to me.
- no_multitudes 2mo agoCan you give an example of long-form writing that sounds like this from before 2024?
- aself101 2mo agoI agree with your assessment. Read the article and did not come back thinking an LLM authored. I read more LLM content now than from humans and while there were fingerprints of LLM writing, it still read as institutionalized English. It seems like we are in a weird transition period where LLMs trained on proper English prose are now training humans to identify prose that is apparently not common enough to be labelled as human authored. So what are people looking for in writing? The mistakes, disjointed sentences, less em dashes?
- MiscIdeaMaker99 2mo agoConsidering all the minor grammatical issues I'm seeing, I think it's very much written by a human.
- efilife 2mo agoThere's even a typo there, a space on one side of an em-dash and not on the other. I'm serious, noticing this makes me believe it's 100% human written
- lolpython 2mo agoThe author has updated the bottom of the post to clarify that it was not AI-generated. https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left#post-mortem https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left#post-mor...
- MichaelDickens 2mo agoPangram says "100% AI-generated". I trust Pangram more than I trust this author's word.
- pilingual 2mo agoPaul Graham mentioned Pangram the other day. I went to the site and pasted something into the text box. The next step was to sign up. I don't trust Pangram.
- serhalp 2mo agoWell, that is a shame, in my opinion. I trust humans significantly more, and I hope that never changes.
- lolpython 2mo agoThat's idiotic, frankly.
- alansaber 2mo agoI get the market need for AI detection, but the fundamentals of it are so woo-woo that I despair
- kif 2mo agoHere's another AI detector I just built: text.indexOf("—") > -1
- epihelix 2mo agoHoly shirt balls, they had AI in the 1800s! Fricken' Dickens was a bot, and Austen was a clanker.
- lackoftactics 2mo agoI showed some old Olga Tokarczuk essays to my friends to pick what was ai slop and what was not as experiment, pre- 2020 ones from Czuły Narrator to be exact. Guess what, they picked the ai one as human and her as most ai. Maybe because she uses a lot of big words and em dashes. We are at the point, when there is too much cognitive energy needed to discern writing from human, human ai assisted and all ai. Should we know make mistakes on purpose to avoid being labelled as ai slop? :)
- rpdillon 2mo agoThis is why I'm tired of the "this is AI slop" commentary. I'm well past trying to determine whether a human wrote something, and have fallen back to my old ways of critical reading to search for value in the thing I'm reading. And if I don't find it, it doesn't matter who wrote it. Everyone is so excited to be clever and call out others for using AI, when it's far more useful to cite and elevate good work, regardless of tooling.
- jimmydoe 2mo agoAI community's obsession with the word taste has become somewhat distasteful for me. Isn't aesthetic a better word for this?
- noahmichael89 2mo agoTaste is the ability to perceieve an aesthetic.
- manlymuppet 2mo agoThe article had a more specific definition that more closely aligned with intuition. For what it's worth though--taste, aesthetic, intuition--they really boil down to one thing: feeling. Something you can't reason. Almost emotional.
- gwbas1c 2mo agoIn this article, it's very obvious that a person put a lot of time into writing about their feelings; something that AI doesn't do. Your statement is unfair and mean: The biggest flaw in the article is that the author is unable to be concise.
- KolenCh 2mo agoHave you read the article? It has an unbalanced emdash: `word— another word`. A novice mistake that an LLM likely will not commit nowadays. In standard typography—depending on which guide you need to follow — it can only be padded by space on both side or neither.