alt Hacker NewsThe piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
It loves to describe things “hum” that don’t usually hum, like the author wrote in the beginning. Plenty more descriptions match the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript.
I feel like there’s a meta discussion the author was prompting here about consciousness.
Reading the writing of a real human feels more intimate. Reading the auto-tune version of writing makes me feel noticeably less connected to the reader. I know the author still input something to get this output. But there’s something blocking a deeper connection when I just “know” I’m not reading the author’s words.
Edit: llamas > llms
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Yeah the “No _____. No _____. Just the ______.” is such a dead ringer for AI writing these days that I just ignore any writing that features it.
If you don’t care about your craft as a writer to the extent that you can’t even realize how straight-out-of-a-LLM your writing sounds, I’m not going to care about it either.
> The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
> I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
Is it possible you are experiencing confirmation bias[0]?
In other words, by your own admission, you have been "trying to see how well llms can help" as it pertains to writing. With that degree of LLM intimacy, is it possible "the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript" is a pattern you are predisposed to identify in other works?
I wonder how it would affect those us with english as their second language. I initially learned mine through movies and tv shows from the west. Later hanging around in various forums.
That era is definitely over.
When I got to the third hum, I got suspicious, which is sad for this kind of beautiful experience.
Is it really OpenAI/ChatGPT, or just the kind of writing ChatGPT was trained to replicate?
Yup, it's the short sentence cadence.
"And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window."
The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call attention to themselves and are rewarded by human RLHF participants. I don't know if incentives including spending time on essays like this but if they don't and the rater is trying to do a speed-read, these stand out.
Have written about other markers here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6...
One along those lines: "Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something."
TBH I've struggled to get through long-form writing - and this isn't even that long - for years, mostly because they're so full of filler. A compelling headline, but every time it starts to get close to an answer to the compelling headline, it diverts into telling the backstory of one of the people in it. Loads of filler. AI just seems to make it cheaper or faster to generate filler.
> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately
This made me slightly nauseous. What's ahead is going to suck so, so bad. We shouldn't have left the ocean...
You're being fooled by the humans. They're not writing intimately any more than TFA is. They've learned and practiced to write in a way that conveys whatever emotion they choose to show, whether they really feel it or not. LLMs just bring a professional writer's abilities to normal people.
Just like with music, random amatures may have just the same or deeper feelings than superstars, but they don't have the technical skills to put that into their music. We still prefer to listen to the technically competent music to get feelings from it despite it being less personal.
I don't know if the tide has shifted on this site, but I was scolded by dang some months ago for pointing out something was obviously GPT-written. I guess that's against the rules.
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I felt the exact same, I can't believe nobody else has commented on it. It feels so disrespectful to such a powerful story to tell it in this way. I mean there's a really interesting core but I just wish I could read the first draft before LLMs overwrote it to death.
"Survivor’s euphoria.” A clinical term, woefully inadequate. It wasn’t just euphoria. It was revelation."