Comment by Tiberium
1 year ago
Am I overthinking it or is this blog post heavily AI-edited? The way the text is very similar to what modern GPT models would give you.
This paragraph was the last straw that made me think so: >This story isn’t just about a TV; it’s about preserving history and celebrating the people who make it possible. Shank’s journey serves as a reminder of the lengths we’ll go to honor the past and connect through shared enthusiasm.
Also
>Shank Mods’ video is not just a celebration of retro tech but a love letter to the communities that keep these technologies alive. From the daring extraction to the meticulous restoration, every moment of this story is a testament to what can be achieved with determination and collaboration.
That last one is a huge tipoff:
> "Shank Mods’ video is not just a celebration of retro tech but a love letter to the communities that keep these technologies alive. From the daring extraction to the meticulous restoration, every moment of this story is a testament to what can be achieved with determination and collaboration"
Not just a X but a Y
From the A to the B
GPT LOVES this kind of verbose garbage - it's the non-fiction equivalent of purple prose and reads like a 6th grader desperately trying to pad out their MLA-formatted 5 paragraph essay.
Yes, it’s obvious AI writing. The fact that some people can’t tell is actually scary. Eventually (soon?) none of us will be able to tell.
> The fact that some people can’t tell is actually scary.
It really is, and I see more and more of it in Reddit comments, and even at work.
I had some obvious AI writing sent to me by a lawyer on the other side of a dispute recently and I was pissed - I don't mind if you want to use it to help you (I do myself), but at least have the decency to edit so it doesn't read like ChatGPT trash.
> It really is, and I see more and more of it in Reddit comments, and even at work.
I have a morbid fascination with how bad Reddit has become. LLMs have supercharged the problem, but even before ChatGPT became popular Reddit was full of ragebait, reposts, lies, and misinformation.
The scary and fascinating thing to me is that so many people eat that content right up. You can drop into the front page (default subreddits or logged out) and anyone with basic adult level understanding of the world can pick out obvious lies and deliberate misinformation in many of the posts. Yet 1000s of people in the comments are getting angry over obviously fabricated or reposted AITA stories, clear ragebait in /r/FluentInFinance, and numerous other examples. Yet a lot of people love that content and can’t seem to get enough of it.
If you're below-average, AI writing looks great. If you've above, it looks horrible. That goes not just for writing but anything else created by AI --- it's the average of its training data, which is also going to be average in quality.
I didn't notice that this was AI myself. I tend to start skimming when the interesting bits are spread out.
There's two variations of this that are very common:
* Watering down - the interesting details are spread apart by lots of flowery language, lots of backstory, rehashing and retelling already established points. It's a way of spreading an cup of content into a gallon of text, the same way a cup of oatmeal can be thinned.
* High fiber - Lots of long-form essays are like this. They start with describing the person being interviewed or the place visited as though the article were a novel and the author is paid by the word. Every person has some backstory that takes a few paragraphs. There is some philosophizing at some point. The essay is effectively the story of how the essay was written and all the backstory interviews rather than a treatise on the supposed topic. It's basically loading up your beef stew with cabbage; it is nutritive but not particularly dense or enjoyable.
Both are pretty tedious. AI can produce either one, but it can only hallucinate or fluff to produce more content than its inputs. As such, AI writing is a bit like a reverse-compression algorithm.
It won't be long before you'll have people who learn English with ChatGPT and then it'll get even more confusing.
I have posted about this before on HN. I push back against this sentiment. I had a post-doc roommate who was a native German speaker, who regularly used ChatGPT to improve his English grammar and phrasing while writing papers. He told me that ChatGPT was an excellent tutor to improve his English. A few times, he showed me the improvements. I agreed: It was pretty good.
This is certainly already happening because TikTok and YouTube are packed with AI content
More likely it'll be normalised until we all start to think of it as normal and start to write like that ourselves.
I doubt it, because it is a style that people who’re bad at writing already use. Like, our magical robot overlords did not make it up wholesale; plenty examples of that particular sort of stylistic suck were already out there.
(I am semi-convinced that the only job that’ll really be impacted by LLMs is estate agent copywriters, because estate agents already love that awful style.)
I can never be 100% sure it is AI writing or someone who cheated their English homework using AI and thinks normal people write like that.
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What's worse is that this obvious AI writing is going to become a part of new AI training datasets, as it gets scraped, so we'll end up with some kind of ouroborus of AI slop.
It's in the third person and is frequently mentioning the third party in most sections and it appears (to me) to be written by that same party. The third party is presented as a human entity but not particularly human. There's nothing in the article about that entity which one should expect in such a format.
Feels like it's written as if it's a press release. Normally a press release would have notes for editors with biography and additional info. Feels off.
I think you should try using GPT-4o for writing text - it'll generate blog posts in a style that's very similar to this.
Just a random example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6769d176-af34-8006-9c47-e40f1efca0...
You can clearly see lots of similarities, especially the "Why it matters" section. Of course the substack post fed the actual video transcript to the model to write or refine the contents, but it's still very obvious.
Yes I wouldn't be surprised, you are not overthinking.
I really enjoy reading this blog in general, but I do agree with you that it absolutely has that AI-assisted-writing style.
Looking at this and other posts, they often feel like if one prompted ChatGPT with something like "please write a timeline of the Walkman". I think they may want to dial it back for a more natural feeling.
It has that "stretched to maximize Youtube engagement revenue" feel. There is apparently an SEO advantage to "long form" Youtube videos. You also have to hit 4,000 viewing hours per year before Google pays out.[1] So there's an incentive to bloat videos with background material. That's why so many Youtube videos have a collection of stock photos and clips at the beginning giving a history of something, before they get to the new thing.
Now we need local crap blockers which will delete that crap. Good AI problem.
[1] https://www.72works.com/marketing/how-long-should-a-youtube-...
Solving problems caused a tech company using measurements that were turned into requirements by using AI to get around the effects of them is hilarious.
I love the upcoming tech arms racing which is just going to be developing new technical solutions to problems cause by technical solutions. It's more convenient because it removes the inconvenience created by the thing that makes your life more convenient?
At what point is it not worth it any more and people just avoid it all and start reading books again? I think something like that is a probable (though hyperbolically illustrated) outcome.
Yes, I immediately noticed that it's likely AI written and I thought that this really discounts an otherwise great story.
What I mean is that if the author does not put in the least effort to make it not AI sounding, how much does the author actually care about his/her content?
My personal verdict is "not AI"
I see lots of passages that scream AI. Some selections:
> Retailing for $40,000 (over $100,000 today), it pushed the boundaries of what CRTs could achieve, offering professional-grade performance.
"Professional-grade" huh? There are professional TV watchers? It's not a studio reference monitor. It's just a regular TV but bigger.
> The urgency was palpable.
Where does one palpate urgency?
> Against the odds, Abebe found the CRT still in place, fully operational, and confirmed that the restaurant owner was looking for a way to get rid of it.
We establish later that it wasn't fully operational at all. And what odds? We didn't establish any. The TV is rare, and we later establish that the original owner knew it.
> What follows is a race against time to coordinate the TV's extraction, involving logistics experts, a moving team, and a mountain of paperwork.
> Abebe, the man who made the rescue possible, turned out to be the director of Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon. His selfless dedication during the final months of the game’s development exemplifies the power of shared passions.
Cool detail, but irrelevant, even if followed by breathless admiration fluff.
> This story isn’t just about a TV; it’s about preserving history and celebrating the people who make it possible.
I don't recall anybody being celebrated. They got a cool TV. Cool.
>I don't recall anybody being celebrated. They got a cool TV. Cool.
The original video gives plenty of appreciation to the people who made moving it possible, the shop owner, and the people who restored it to perfect working condition.
The TV was bought and used by a business, it doesn't get much more "pro" than that (someone should remind Apple's marketing team). But we could argue about semantics all day, humans make vaguely inaccurate statements all the time.
> Where does one palpate urgency?
Most frequently in metaphors. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=urgency+was+pa...
> Where does one palpate urgency?
Ask an urologist!
It does seem strange, but there's a decent chance the author is ESL or just has an unusual writing style
100% AI drivel.
You take the video transcript, ask ChatGPT to write a short blogpost about it, and this is what you get.
it reads fine to me