Comment by josephg

Isn't that just a normal way to organize a large document?

That's just writing. I frequently write like that.

This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

This is my exact writing style - I'm screwed.

This is just writing; terse maybe and maybe not grammatically correct, but people write like that.

"Here’s how the bug might have manifested."

> because that article is full of Claude-isms

Not sure how I feel about the whole "LLMs learned from human texts, so now the people who helped write human texts are suddenly accused of plagiarizing LLMs" thing yet, but seems backwards so far and like a low quality criticism.

Is it possible for a tool to know if something is AI written with high confidence at all? LLMs can be tuned/instructed to write in an infinite number of styles.

Don't understand how these tools exist.

It has Claude-isms, but it doesn't feel very Claude-written to me, at least not entirely.

What's making it even more difficult to tell now is people who use AI a lot seem to be actively picking up some of its vocab and writing style quirks.

Pangram has a very low false positive rate, but not the best false negative rate: https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals

You sound like a flat earther and a moon landing denier combined.

This is useful, thanks! TIL

It’s a dismissal with no evidence i.e. it’s a witch hunt. And no one should support that.

The fact that the whole thread has basically devolved into debates over if it is or isn't an LLM written article is proving well enough that it doesn't really matter one way or another

It is a witch hunt with no evidence whatsoever, all based on intuition. It is distraction from the main topic, a topic that enough people find interesting to stay on the top page. What was intellectually interesting has now become a bore fest of repeated back and forth. That’s disrespectful and inconsiderate. Write a new post about why do you think AI writing is dangerous. I don’t mind that. I’d upvote it.

And flagging is appropriate when you think content is not authentic

Twelve year old account and who knows how much lurking before that and I've never noticed this. Good lord.

Optimistically, I guess I can call myself some sort of live-and-let-live person.

> The site guidelines were written pre-AI and stop making sense when you add AI-generated content into the equation.

Note: the guidelines are a living document that contain references to current AI tools.

> Consider that by submitting AI generated content for humans to read, the statement you're making is "I did not consider this worth my time to write, but I believe it's worth your time to read, because your time is worth less than mine". It's an inherently arrogant and unbalanced exchange.

This is something worth saying about a pure slop content. But the "charge" against the current item is that a reader encountered a feeling that an LLM was involved in the production of interesting content.

With enough eyeballs, all prose contains LLM tells.

We don't need to be told every time someone's personal AI detection algorithm flags. It's a cookie-banner comment: no new information for the reader, but a frustratingly predictable obstacle to scroll through.

> you’re reading an AI expansion of someone’s smaller prompt, which contained the original info you’re interested in

This got me thinking: what if LLMs are used to do the opposite? To condense a long prompt into a short article? That takes more work but might make the outcome more enjoyable as it contains more information.

Yes. These HN guidlines already basically cover it:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Yes, because all of them are now irrational about the possibility of LLM writing something they read.

If you’re looking for a place that surfaces only human-written content regardless of whether it’s interesting, rather than interesting content regardless of how it was written, HN is not the place.

There might be a market for your alternative though. Should be easy enough to build with Claude Code.

I know the author personally. He's hardly the type of person to publish AI slop. Read his other articles and watch his talks, this is very much Henry's literary style.

Point to one.

I didn't say they're dispositive. I said they're suspicious. Most people don't write effectively.