Comment by Someone1234

7 days ago

I've started do this on social media. I got "called out" after using big words or using a - in a sentence. So now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt.

As soon as someone yells "witch" you cannot disprove you're not one, and I've even had people put my handwritten comments through "AI detector" websites that "proved" they were AI (they weren't). It literally just highlighted two popular English phases.

LLMs were trained on sites like HN and Reddit, so now if you write like a HN or Reddit commentator, you sound like AI...

Here's one vote for just be the witch if that's what people need from you.

Just make it be what you want to say and how you want to say it. And when they come after you, shame them to the best of your ability or treat them like they are not there.

  • That strategy didn't work out well for the witches of the past...

    • So what? There's all kinds of things that didn't work in the past that at some point began to work.

      It wasn't someone who was primarily motivated by fear of the past that made it work the first time.

  • A good general rule in life is that people get one chance to show why they're not worth communicating with, and that's it.

AI only uses big words to engage in elegant variation, not to compress information.

If someone calls an article like this a "jeremiad" I know they're a human.

  • Oh, well chosen. I keep forgetting that word, and lamenting that "diatribe" (or, er, "lament") doesn't quite fit in some situation.

I put a piece of text in one and the only line it flagged is the one line I actually wrote.

I don’t think this is a good long term solution. LLMs can do easy language substitutions and you can even force them to add errors. So relying on that alone won’t work as people intentionally make things look more “human.”

  • Right, but the problem here are other humans yelling "witch," not LLMs. You're combating people's terrible witch-detector, not anything factual or real.

I have never really gotten the impression that HN or Reddit commentators write in any particular way overall.

LinkedIn, OTOH....

> now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt.

I've begun downvoting each and every entry that questions the authenticity of a comment or article.

I don't even bother if the claim is true or not. A text can be AI-generated and interesting, or human-written and dumb.