Comment by nemo1618
20 hours ago
LLM writing tells are getting more subtle, but they still jump off the page for me, in particular the word "genuine:"
"This is the area where Go genuinely shines, and it’s worth being precise about why"
"the lack of GC pauses is a genuine selling point"
"Humans are genuinely bad at reasoning about memory"
"There are cases where the borrow checker is genuinely too strict"
tbc I don't think the article was fully AI-generated, just AI-assisted. If so, the author did a genuinely good job of it! No one else is commenting on it, so clearly it didn't detract much from the substance. It's just weird that this is becoming increasingly common, and increasingly hard to detect.
I don't know about the author's background, but there is now a generation of non-native programmers who learned to write English by using LLMs for corrections (yeah including this comment).
The irony is that studies show LLM detectors have a much higher false-positive rate for non-native speakers [1]. If most of what you read stems from LLMs, you end up writing like an LLM.
[1]: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...
> but there is now a generation of non-native programmers who learned to write English by using LLMs for corrections (yeah including this comment)
LLM writing has not been overly abundant for more than a couple years. I don't know where you got the idea that an entire generation of people have already learned to write like an LLM.
This is completely off topic now but, "it's worth being precise about ..." is a much stronger AI-ism than the usage of the word genuine.
Perhaps more people are using AI as part of an editorial process that is largely driven by what they wish to convey but where they have stopped fighting the AI on its preferred style. It’s supremely annoying when AI updates your prose with its own formulation despite plenty of instructions otherwise. Too often AIs mangle meaning which can be especially worrisome as it’s not easy to catch subtle word/grammar changes that dramatically shift meaning. Overall though, defects aside, for me, and only very recently, it’s been more helpful than not. I think AIs will continue to improve in this regard and be better editorial partners. For competent writings, it won’t replace human authorship or expert review.
Specifically, I’ve recently used ChatGPT for legal/administrative writing where the AI seems to be trained on a large corpus and seems to know the conventions and vocabulary well; a lawyer who reviewed the work had important corrections. Before AI, I would have sought model filings and have had less success at emulating the genre. So it’s lowered time/cost somewhat but it takes lots of diligence. By default, current AI outputs seems intelligible but are still really far off the mark. I’ve found a structured interview is a good way to start rather than jumping into draft generation.
I have to agree here, but I'm not sure why. I don't have any clue what makes something sound AI generated or not. I got to about here "Go is clearly working for a lot of people," -- before I became suspicious that it was AI-assisted (but also maybe I'm wrong and it's not AI-assisted, I am very bad at telling). It's more about vibes (ironically) than anything else in particular. If something "sounds" AI-assisted then I instantly lose interest even if the article itself is otherwise fine. I wish people were more ok with writing their own thoughts with how it comes to them.
Agreed. In fact, one of the things I now watch for is my mind starting to "slide off" the text, or finding myself re-reading a section multiple times. It's like the brain subconsciously recognizes a lack of substance even if we can't point to a specific tell.
And many others. I felt it too
And it’s a good contrast with ‘just fcking use Go’ article he linked.
Go article is much more human. I love that and would choose a human centered language and human centered culture over LLM-centered everything every time
I guess I am just old
And tables with comparisons! Nobody makes a table by hand if it’s not packed with value. Tables in this article are not
Author here. I use the term 'genuinely' too often, but that's just me. I do that when speaking here as well. Suffice to say that I'm not a native speaker, so that might have something to do with it. I will go over the text and replace some of those. thx.
My own iA Writer flags are great, love, hope, literally, "but,", and genuinely. Sigh. They just sneak out there.
the psychosis has gone off the charts! anything that sounds odd to someone can now be labelled as an LLM text "smell"?
why scoff over someone doing assisted writing? i might age myself but kids back in the day would try to sound better by using synonym feature in ms word (or through web thesaurus) for their assignment essays. this all looks familiar to the same practice, now only made more accessible.
There's nothing in the comment you're replying to that could be described as "scoffing." What are you on about?
I feel the opposite, where AI hype is so extreme that merely someone pointing out an article may have had LLM involvement prompts a response like this. Someone incredulously painting people as ivory tower nose thumbers. If anything, it pushes me away from LLM writing more.
I also don't see how you can compare finding a synonym for a word to having your entire writing voice determined for you.
I also wonder if it's possible that this is just "blog-speak"
The author of this article has what seems like it could be a relatively thriving consulting business, so he probably writes more to advertise his services than anything else. That kind of writing surely lends itself to a particular writing style, which is a non-insignificant chunk of the kind of writing that LLMs were trained on.
While reading the article, I remember feeling that I'm reading an LLM generated sentence a few times, but in general, this specific article look like an example of acceptable LLM usage to me. I wouldn't call it "AI slop".
It is, if I may say that, _genuinely_ hard to use LLM assist and not make the text look like LLM generated. Even when I write an email in gmail and it gives its suggestions to make the text better, each one individually makes perfect sense, but when I click a few of them, the whole email now looks like AI slop, so I would normally undo the changes, going back to my imperfect hand-written non-optimized version.
I think the whole post is AI generated. The author could have given a draft as input and perhaps edited the output in a few places.
Take this paragraph as example:
> Go got generics in 1.18, and they’re useful, but the implementation has constraints (no methods with type parameters, GC shape stenciling, occasional surprising performance characteristics). Rust generics monomorphize, each instantiation produces specialized code with zero runtime cost. Combined with traits, this gives you real zero-cost abstractions.
Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. I would expect that kind of writing from very specialized books or papers, not from a blog post. Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.
> Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. [...] Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.
I actually prefer that style of writing! (When it's not AI-generated ofc.) And I also try to use it in my technical blog posts. I usually re-read my drafts asking myself: "Does the reader actually care about this? Is this sentence adding something or is it just fluff?"
And actually I feel like AI text usually produces more fluff, or anyway I notice it more, but I see how it can make the result "robotic and boring".
His stuff about generics in Go is also wrong. He says that Go's standard library "avoids" them. He forgot that it has `slices.SortFunc()`. He forgot about Go `Seq`. Maybe because he has stopped using Go and is no longer that familiar.
I've noticed LLM writing over the past year has had an unusually high tendency to talk about surfaces and, in particular, substrates. I don't expect LLM generated text to be anything other than rich with clichés. I simply wish we would all demonstrate a better editorial hand so we weren't reading the same voice, over and over.