Comment by joenot443
4 hours ago
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
> You can change a password. You cannot change your face.
> This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win
These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice.
It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.
I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write. I use the "it's not X it's Y" framing a lot of the time because it's a quick way to get my point across. It's probably the sign of a bad writer because I can't come up with a different/better way to say the same thing, but I'm not AI.
If anyone uses a couple of these red flags to dismiss the entire article and the underlying idea, that says a lot more about them than the author.
Although these are indicators, real people also use these sometimes.
These are normal patterns in US English. The zeal to accuse limits the scope of possible responses. There are all sorts of things humans do when writing that LLMs mimic — em-dashes for instance — that are entirely legitimate ways to communicate but get shouted down for… reasons?
Surely you’re aware that LLMs were trained on the ways humans write specifically to mimic them? Yes? So what’s the gripe? Someone cranked out a “thought piece” with no effort or actual thinking on their own?
But thats the promise of AI.
So are you advocating doing away with AI tools and research? Maybe we start asking “should we” not “can we”? Now that is a position I might get behind.
But really how the hell am I supposed to write at all when nearly ANYTHING I write could be interpreted as AI-generated and then shouted down in some quasi-ad-hominem attack on me while not engaging with any points made?
It is the utter end of written discussion.
My brain skims the entire blog before reading it and if I see two short sentences with dots and negation or even one single em dash, I ctrl+w out