Comment by malfist
1 month ago
Thats the thing about AI writing though. Those tropes are things humans do too. But like once or twice in an article. Not every single freaking paragraph
1 month ago
Thats the thing about AI writing though. Those tropes are things humans do too. But like once or twice in an article. Not every single freaking paragraph
I also think you can easily get overzealous with it and diagnose increasingly large percentages of ordinary human language as "tropified" due to being part of recognizable cadences. I think most of the things on the list are legit but I think it starts to get to a gray area where it's borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious.
Yes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not.
This is a problem, because you can easily get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. You feel strengthened in your convictions that you're good at ferreting out LLM-speak because you've found so much of it. And you find so much of it because you feel confident you're good at it. Nobody ever corrects you when you're wrong.
Combine that with general overconfidence and you get threads where every other post with correct grammar gets "called out" as AI generated. It's pretty boring.
There's a similar effect with contentious subject. You get reams and reams of posts calling the other side out for being part of a Russian/Israeli/Iranian/Chinese troll network. There's no independent falsification or verification for that, so people just get strengthened in their existing beliefs.
>Yes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not.
Yes. People keep saying, in response to points like this, "oh but you/I can tell pretty easily." But it's not the detection, it's the verification! (see what I did there)
Where I'd push back is the idea that the problem is the boring "call out" discourse that follows each accusation. The problem of verifying human provenance is fundamental to the discussion of trust and argumentation, but the simple "the zone is flooded" problem is also an ecological one. There's terrible air/water/soil quality in the metro area I live in; people have to live with it w/o regard to how invested they are in changing it.
Ever since the sloppification of the internet began, I’ve called out hundreds of LLM slop posts. I’ve gotten about 50 responses back from the author, most of them admitting to LLM usage, with only a single one initially vehemently denying it, but then later admitting it.
I cannot know what this says about my false negative rate, but at the very least I am confident in my false positive rate.
At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. That will change over time with training I would hope. At some point I imagine it will be hard to tell.
I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them.
Not sure if we should be hopefully or fearful that they will improve to be undetectable but I suspect they will.
8 replies →
> borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious
That's how a trope starts. When a minority of writers are using a particular pattern, it's personalized style. When a majority of writers in a genre adopt the same personalized style, it's a trope.
We find AI tropes especially annoying because there are three frontier LLMs producing a sizable chunk of text we read (maybe even a majority of text, for some people) lately. It would also be annoying if a clique of three humans were producing most of the text we read; we'd start to find their personal styles annoying and overdone. Even before LLMs, that was a thing that happened in some "slop" fiction genres where a particularly active author would churn out dozens of novels per year in one style (often via ghostwriters, but still with a single style and repetitive plot pattern).
Perhaps the problem is SEO for persuasive writing, LinkedIn-spiration for “business” writing, and school papers for research. The machines read a lot more of this than you would. So for them human writing would appear overwhelmingly troped. Whatever works, right?
It also gets RHLFed into it by people who think the "better" sentence is the one with more puffery, and crucially it tries to cram the semantic patterns in whether appropriate or not because it's been trained to write in ways which aren't perceived as bland.
Puffery about "rich cultural heritage, a "tapestry" of sights "from the Colosseum to the Pantheon" and how they "serve as potent symbols" probably is better writing than "Rome is a city in the Lazio region of Italy with a population of 4m. It is the capital of Italy". Doesn't work quite so well when its trying to fit the pattern to the two competing diners of Bumfuck, Ohio and how the rich cultural heritage of its municipal library underscores its status as the third largest city in its county.
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