Comment by runako
1 month ago
These things are always so misguided, and this was no exception. The only way to have a piece of writing not flagged as AI is to write poorly. Ignore grammar, misspell words, etc. Don't follow basic guidance on composition. Generally write in such a way that you would merit no better than a C on a high school writing task.
I'll give some examples. Some will be from this list of "AI writing tropes" and some will be from prominent human-written (prior to 2020) sources. Guess which is which (answer at the bottom).
- "Let's explore this idea further."
- "workload creep"
- "Navigating the complex landscape of "
- "Let's delve into the details"
And I'm not going to get into how silly this is as a so-called LLM trope: "Every bullet point or list item starts with a bolded phrase or sentence." I remember reading paperbacks published before the first PC that used this style.
Fractal summaries is literally how composition is taught to students. Avoiding that style will make the writing more likely to sound less like a person wrote it.
I would suggest the author upgrade this to a modern version of Strunk & White and go on a mission to sell that. Call it Anti-Corpspeak or whatever. But don't pretend that these formulations only arrived in bulk in the last 2-3 years.
ANSWER KEY: these are all obviously prominent in text published before LLMs hit, as well as in the tropes doc. They are no more signs of LLM-generated text than is the practice of using nouns, verbs, and adjectives to convey ideas.
Exactly this! Many times I read an article that someone says is "obviously AI" and lists several tell tale signs, but these are patterns I also follow in my own writing. I guess that makes me an LLM? These are patterns I was taught for years in school, both in high school and in college level technical writing classes. They may be tropes - or rather patterns - but that's because they were taught en masse to students across North America. Like you said, to really sound like an average person, the answer would be to write in an inconsistent, meandering way full of logical fallacies.
> write in an inconsistent, meandering way full of logical fallacies
I see what you did there.
No there's an alternative to countersignalling LLMs by pretending to be dumb. Since LLMs reproduce all of the worst of English modernity, overrelying on the PMC mush register, the business casual of English, with all the agreed upon casualisms that have rotted out the language like "there's" before plurals and “because noun”, there's an easy way to ensure no one mistakes your writing for an LLM's: use the constructions of the formal register or early modern English.
Roll thine eyes all thou wish’t but this I promise thee, if thou art lucky there will come a day on which thou shalt speak the single most important sentence in thy life, and that sentence will contain the word “thee”: “With this ring I thee wed”.
Feed that into a slop detector.
Or just don't sound like LinkedIn or freshman papers.