Comment by meowface
1 month ago
This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)
1 month ago
This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)
Which, given the section below from the article, ends up kind of ironic:
> There is a deeper cost still, and it concerns the thing LLMs do most impressively: writing. [...] Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it.
I think the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is, which would explain both how they could put that part into the article, and how they seemingly believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.
> the author might not know what "impressive writing" or even "good writing" is
Well the author in this case is Claude, and AIs write like that because the assistant persona really thinks that's what good writing sounds like. They're wrong, but they're just doing what they were taught. There's a reason LLM raters consistently score LLM writing highly.
Well perhaps the LLM put that bit in for them.
Interestingly that's the one point of the article I have a disagreement with. Yeah, good thinking comes when reformulating your ideas. Also, reformulating ideas is part of the traditional writing process. However it's does not necessarily focus writers/thinkers on the reformulating ideas in their most value adding form.
I've watched some YouTube videos narrated by AI that were created by those who's native language I assume to be Chinese but the value of the content is higher and more concentrated than those from the native speakers.
While I've watched many for whom English is not their first language struggle in technical talks and lose most of the meat if their discussion to their struggle with the language conversion.
While the example of language barriers being skipped over and providing value in that circumstance is obvious I suspect more is possible by avoiding unnecessarily focus on prose or technical aspects of communication and focusing on the ideas themselves.
Imagine if the cost of not assuming a background in technical/textbook writing were zero. Freeing up authors to explain more thoroughly. Perhaps, more effort can be spent on thinking up analogies, metaphor or examples to help communicate an idea.
> believed this post was good and valuable enough to be posted publicly.
I mean, it made it to the front page of HN didn't it? Probably served its purpose just fine. Not all writing is supposed to be impressive or good. Some of it is to just get attention and stir discussion, and this Claude output did exactly that.
I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct.
I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.
Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name to believe things as obvious as "a long form news article cramming every AI trope it can fit from start to finish" being AI written.
At this point I'm surprised when a news article isn't largely AI written, let alone one using the default tone! I don't even mind it as much as others seem to, it's just turning into more and more of a rarity for a news article to not be these last few years and so is now what sticks out.
> Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name
I kind of assumed it is, given how it suddenly seemed to start getting namedropped in multiple comment threads. And it's often in response to someone saying content is obviously LLM (with examples) and the shill wedges pangram into the conversation "omg you're right, I didn't believe you but I checked this new product and wow it agreed with you" as though that adds anything to the discussion at all.
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You have to name pangram because the other ai detectors are quite bad
Em-dashes would be a loss, they can be a better flowing version of a parenthetical. “It’s not X it’s Y” is not a loss. This phrase is a symptom of a situation where the author wants to subvert expectations but doesn’t have the space, ability, or faith in their audience to organically set up X as the thing to be contrasted against.
I suspect it became an LLM tell because it is over-represented in text that’s easily available to the models but that most people don’t actually want to consume: marketing text, LinkedIn posts, that sort of thing.
That’s not common and effective, it’s buzz feed style articles.
Have you also scanned earlier work of the author with pangram to establish a baseline? Pangram is not without problems.
It is actually pretty much without problems. It doesn't catch everything, but if it detects something it's very rarely a false positive.
Can you give some examples of verifiable pangram false positives?
Why trust pangram? What are their accuracy scores in the wild? Ai detection is notoriously difficult.
AI detection in long-form content is a problem well-suited to training a classifier model. We have tons of verifiably-not-AI text from before 2022, and you can create tons of verifiably-AI text. As language drifts over the next few decades, it may get more difficult. But right now it is quite a manageable problem for languages with large pre-2022 text corpora available online.
The reason why AI detection tools other than Pangram are awful is because they are not really trying to solve the problem -- they just want to appear good enough to convince people to use them.
All these "is this AI" checkers should be banned, as they never can reach 100% accuracy.
This is a truely bizarre claim. Imagine if one said:
"Weather forecasts should be banned because they can never reach 100% accuracy"
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They are overrepresented in HN discussions for sure as there is an over-reliance on them that just aims to shut down discussions.
Which is ironic since they are a tool folks are trusting blindly supposedly used to argue against tool use with blind trust.
Fwiw, I only did the first 300 words (signed into pangram) and it seemingly correctly noted that there were 2 (mostly) human-authored sentences in there
What's wild to me is that:
1. People are responding to this article like it's hitting a nerve
2. In most Ubers you already don't talk to the driver (yellow cabs are higher variance in NYC). Doesn't seem like anything's being lost in that case.
3. There are enormous safety benefits to waymo, mobility benefits for youth (and elderly) that are afforded by this technology. It's not clear why people argue "Uber" is better than waymo. A few years ago there were arguments against Uber! (A technology which, again, provides a huge benefit, especially if you live in an area where people were previously expected to go out for drinks and then drive home)
I think it's fair to point out real issues at these companies. But we should be clear-eyed about which technologies we want to accelerate vs slow down
Have you actually read the article? They point out multiple times that they like the Waymo ride and would use one again and loved it. It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research.
And here you have it — I used an LLM-ism. Oh, and now another one! Time to downvote me for supposed LLM use! (Which I obviously didn't, I'm typing this on an ancient smartphone waiting for a train, but that doesn't deter the witch hunters.)
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It's super obviously AI-written. I can smell this shit from a mile away now, after using Claude Code so much.
In the just first few sentences I could tell.
Is it OK to flag articles for being AI-written? I really want to.
Yes, HN is for human discussion. It is fine to flag and remove things that are not human written and cannot facilitate human discussion due to it’s false construction.
No, it is not.
Is "quietly" an LLM tell? It was always certainly a human writer trope commonly seen in journalism. Though I guess it does appear five times in the body of the post, and a human writer would probably not go that far with it.
I think individually and when used sparingly, writing tropes can be fine, but when the article has every second sentence being a writing trope, it becomes pretty obvious that either a LLM wrote it, or the author simply doesn't know how to write, and regardless, it's a waste of time trying to read through it.
The real LLM tell is tortured and inappropriate metaphors and unnecessary adjectives and adverbs[1]. What purpose is "quietly" serving in this headline?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA
In this sort of way, yes, it's a clue. Obviously not dispositive just by itself.
It genuinely is--and that's the honest truth.
You're absolutely right—it's been a load-bearing LLM tell for a while now.
I think that in the end it does not matter, anymore. It is inevitable that most of the text now and in the future is at least reviewed by LLM.
We should criticize whether text is poorly written, inaccurate, wastes words to get to the point and anything like. Saying that it is "written by LLM" just bypasses this and is not useful and misses the point. AI written text can be really good if used correctly. Criticize the content, don't speculate how it was written. If AI helps us to write better text, that is great. But often it is not good.
It is better blame the author for the bad text, so they get consequences and might do better next time, if the text is bad.
By the way, I think this piece of text was quite good.
> saying it is "written by LLM" is not useful and misses the point.
It is useful to me. I see too much slop every day and would like to filter it out from my life. I appreciate the tip, and to me, that is the whole point.
Do you have more evidence than this? I'd honestly like to know.
I don't like AI slop like everybody else, but I'm also growing skeptical of the very fast determinations that sth is supposedly made by LLM just because it uses some phrase that Claude also uses. Models are trained on text written by human writers and if human text resembles it, this goes both ways. I have looked at the authors work from the pre-AI era and it reads similar to me.
So please, if you come with such a claim, please include what you base it on, so we all have a chance to determine how much to trust your verdict.
"every hour spent aligning with a co-author is an hour not spent producing output that is legible to an evaluation system." use of the word 'legible'.
"We defund the corridor and then wonder where the corridor conversations went." this is a claude-ist construction.
"This is an old worry wearing new clothes" this is a very claude-ist construction.
(rather ironically... as @embedding-shaep pointed out earlier): "Outsource the writing and you have not accelerated the thinking; you have skipped it." 'not X but punchy-Y' (not to be confused with 'not X but profound-Y'.
I'm not saying the author shouldn't have used an LLM - once in a while I suppose it gets used to good effect. But I wouldn't kid myself that the writing is certainly all human through-and-through.
[Incidentally, in case anyone's wondering where many of these claude-isms come from, just search within lesswrong.com .]
This rings more and more true every day: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
And I read it by asking an LLM to summarise it
Can you share me the summary? I'd like to read a LLM summary of your summary.
Things are bit tight today.
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", and" is the more obvious tell for Opus/Fable writing.
Plenty of people use Oxford commas though, can't really use it as a reliable signal, too much noise.
It's sad given the topic is interesting and significant.
This comment was perhaps written by an LLM that has learned it can karma farm by pointing out all of the articles that have LLM usage while everyone still thinks that is a novel contribution.
If you check my comment history here, I have not written this before.
I like LLMs and use them daily, but I don't really like when people use them undisclosed for long-form prose writing.
Me neither, but just running around accusing random folks of things is not going to help. To the contrary. If a real author doing real work with a lot of effort risks being accused of things they didn't do and just dismissed, you'll get less of genuine content, not more.
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In the spirit of the "That's what she said" bot, you could train an LLM detector by accusing everything of being authored by an LLM and seeing which ones get voted up.
"Novel" is not a prerequisite for something to be worth pointing out. Lots of bad things happen repeatedly, and don't quickly become not worth caring about or knowing about. People have strong spirits and curious minds and it tends to take a long time to boil that frog out of them - generations, sometimes.
People aren't treating it as a thoughtful contribution. It is more of a flag, like "spam".
HN already has a feature for that. Just flag the article!
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and silently.