I fucking hate responses like the one you're responding to. I'm someone who writes long comments, and I've always been that way. The last few years have been awful because it doesn't take long for someone who disagrees with me to just accuse my writing of being an LLM because it's longer than a few sentences and reasonably well written.
I don't ultimately really care if the person they were accusing of using an LLM was actually using an LLM to write it. But people who accuse any comment longer than a paragraph of being LLM content are asses.
> But people who accuse any comment longer than a paragraph of being LLM content are asses.
Many humans write good, lengthy comments on HN. That's not a heuristic. A few of the tells, none of them length:
- Unreasonable confidence (okay, fine, this is not rare on HN, but this is exuding a certain... omniscient vibe... that HN human commenters usually don't)
- Rule of three (sleep, meditation, relationship to thoughts).
- "X - not <...>, but <...>"
- "They still come - they just lose their grip"
- Emdashes are low signal but they contribute
There are many, many long comments on this page that do not trip my AI detection network. Why would you assume it's "anything long is AI" instead of "anything that smells like the shit that is all over Facebook these days is AI"?
Do you think the root comment is _not_ AI? If it is AI, how is it providing any value at all in this conversation? Any of us can get the same info for free from $AI_PROVIDER; I come to HN to see smart _humans_ discuss things.
> omniscient vibe... that HN human commenters usually don't
au contraire!
HN commenters are notoriously overconfident of their (our?) knowledge, especially in areas outside our expertise.
> Do you think the root comment is _not_ AI?
I don't think it is AI, and more importantly I think the random accusation of "you are an AI comment" is a shitty thing to say. It's impossible to prove a negative.
For me it's not really the length, I'm surprised that on HN news of all places you'd think it's that. Outside of the obvious em-dashes (yes I know people have always used em-dashes but one every other sentence does catch the eye right?), it's the common and completely self-assured phrasing like
"which is why you get that "barrage of micro ideas" breaking through during focus."
This for me was the biggest tell. Unless OP gives their credentials who talks like this? The smartest people I know in related fields go out of their way to avoid sounding like they can diagnose your exact subjective experience based on such little information. The absolute lack of reasonable hedging is the giveaway for me.
I agree. Even worse if you actually use an em dash in your day to day. I think we are in a transition period. People are uber sensitive to “oh this is AI slip, I must call it out”. It will course correct.
Yep. I've stopped using them after years of em dash-ing. It just wasn't worth continuing to use them once that became everyone's default "written by LLM" heuristic. I think now I understand the pain the boomers and gen-x went through during the "double space after period means you're an oldster" era.
I fucking hate responses like the one you're responding to. I'm someone who writes long comments, and I've always been that way. The last few years have been awful because it doesn't take long for someone who disagrees with me to just accuse my writing of being an LLM because it's longer than a few sentences and reasonably well written.
I don't ultimately really care if the person they were accusing of using an LLM was actually using an LLM to write it. But people who accuse any comment longer than a paragraph of being LLM content are asses.
> But people who accuse any comment longer than a paragraph of being LLM content are asses.
Many humans write good, lengthy comments on HN. That's not a heuristic. A few of the tells, none of them length:
- Unreasonable confidence (okay, fine, this is not rare on HN, but this is exuding a certain... omniscient vibe... that HN human commenters usually don't)
- Rule of three (sleep, meditation, relationship to thoughts).
- "X - not <...>, but <...>"
- "They still come - they just lose their grip"
- Emdashes are low signal but they contribute
There are many, many long comments on this page that do not trip my AI detection network. Why would you assume it's "anything long is AI" instead of "anything that smells like the shit that is all over Facebook these days is AI"?
FWIW, I scrolled through https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=porkloin and none of your comments strike me as AI, despite being long and well-written.
Do you think the root comment is _not_ AI? If it is AI, how is it providing any value at all in this conversation? Any of us can get the same info for free from $AI_PROVIDER; I come to HN to see smart _humans_ discuss things.
> omniscient vibe... that HN human commenters usually don't
au contraire!
HN commenters are notoriously overconfident of their (our?) knowledge, especially in areas outside our expertise.
> Do you think the root comment is _not_ AI?
I don't think it is AI, and more importantly I think the random accusation of "you are an AI comment" is a shitty thing to say. It's impossible to prove a negative.
For me it's not really the length, I'm surprised that on HN news of all places you'd think it's that. Outside of the obvious em-dashes (yes I know people have always used em-dashes but one every other sentence does catch the eye right?), it's the common and completely self-assured phrasing like
"which is why you get that "barrage of micro ideas" breaking through during focus."
This for me was the biggest tell. Unless OP gives their credentials who talks like this? The smartest people I know in related fields go out of their way to avoid sounding like they can diagnose your exact subjective experience based on such little information. The absolute lack of reasonable hedging is the giveaway for me.
I agree. Even worse if you actually use an em dash in your day to day. I think we are in a transition period. People are uber sensitive to “oh this is AI slip, I must call it out”. It will course correct.
Yep. I've stopped using them after years of em dash-ing. It just wasn't worth continuing to use them once that became everyone's default "written by LLM" heuristic. I think now I understand the pain the boomers and gen-x went through during the "double space after period means you're an oldster" era.