Comment by whimsicalism
2 days ago
Your style of commenting is pretty full of LLM tells fyi. Normally don’t comment on it but this is the second such comment of yours I have read in a few minutes.
e: I would be curious of the thoughts of those downvoting as personally I don’t think mostly LLM written comments are a direction we want to move towards on HN.
Rather than downvoting you, I will speak up to say I don't see what you're seeing. Spaces around hyphens, yeah, sure, but LLMs prefer em dashes, and even that is unreliable, because it's borrowed from habits that real humans have had for many years.
For me, the more important indicator is the content. I see reports of personal experience, and thoughts that are not completely explained (because the reader is expected to draw the rest of the owl). I don't see smugly over-the-top piles of adjectives filling in for an inability to make critiques of any substance. I don't see wacky asides amounting to argumentum ad lapidem, accomplishing nothing beyond insulting readers who disagree with a baseless assertion.
I think it's likely you have drawn a false positive.
It saddens me a bit that this can't be distinguished by people on here. I encourage you to take a look at their profile and see if you are still as skeptical. Noticing em-dashes is facile and as you mention, common among human written text - but there are more subtle stylistic cues (although now that you mention it, this writer likely went out of their way to replace emdashes with hyphens).
I was raised in a family of professional writer-editors (but now am the tech-y black sheep) which might make the cues a bit more obvious to me. The degree to which this style of writing was common prior to 2022 is vastly overstated, the tells were actually not really that common.
A) you cannot tell B) you have said nothing productive toward discussion, you’ve just accused someone of using a tool (that you don’t know if they used)
I’d prefer actual criticism of the content. (I cannot downvote and would not if I could)
I am certain that they used a tool. As I said, I normally do not complain and typically engage on the merits -- but these have been among the top comments on every front page article I've read today and it gets tiresome! To me, if you cannot invest enough effort to remove the pretty obvious cues, why am I investing the effort in reading the comment?
After seeing your reply, I looked at their comment history which makes it even more obvious imo.
that is fair —- you’re claiming this person has a pattern of lazy, low-effort comments. I didn’t check and if you’re right, I appreciate you calling it out
just as you’re annoyed by low-effort LLM posts/comments, I’m annoyed by low-effort “this sounds like it was written by ChatGPT” comments (hence my response and at least a possible explanation of downvotes)
edit: I also scrolled through, you’re absolutely right! it does look like a low-effort bot