alt Hacker NewsDamn, everyone is using AI for copyediting now aren't they? Once you notice the patterns you see it everywhere.
* "This isn't X. It's Y"
* "Some sentence emphasizing something. Describing the same thing with different framing. Describing it a third time but punchier.
* The em-dash of course
* A hard to describe sense of "cheesiness"
I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future.
Replies
I recently destroyed the screen on a Google Pixel during a repair following a shoddily-written set of iFixIt instructions. I wish I had checked the comments, where many people complained that the instruction was wrong.
It was about a very fragile part of the process, and so it seemed like an error of omission that seemed atypical for iFixIt. It made me suspect the instructions might not have been wholly human written. I feel a bit vindicated for that suspicion.
The most generous interpretation I can have for this type of article is that it's a second-order phenomenon. If it was written by a human, it was written by one who consumes a lot of AI generated content and whose standards for what they produce have slipped.
>A hard to describe sense of "cheesiness"
This is the "Reddit" factor. I picked up on it being LLM written with this sentence:
"This is the treacherous, final-boss stage where repairability usually dies,"
> I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future.
Why would you hope to be more easily fooled?
> everyone is using AI for copyediting now aren't they?
If the studies that say that humans prefer AI writers are to be believed then you'd be a fool not to
What annoys me the most is that the information has become much less dense. There's a lot of unnecessary repetition. I feel like I need to feed every article through an LLM just to get a summary of it.
* "This isn't X. It's Y"
I find that Gemini uses that phrase way too much.
Ugh I have actually started hating Gemini for this specifically.
Em dashes aren’t an actual tell IMO. Many people use them.
I don’t mind the AI generated aspect. I mind the lack of carrying that it looks like AI slop.
It indicates a baseline competency of the AI user or whomever they are trusting to use it and it will hurt brand trust and trusting humans even more.
I'm glad I haven't let AI write much for me, its better for it to help me develop my ideas and writing and do the work to learn, explore and end up with something where my brain is in the gym. . Passive generation might not always map well to passive consumption
Once you see it you can't unsee it. Although maybe this how corporate blogslop has always been, and we're just now noticing now that it's infected everything.
> "These are not complaints, merely observations."
> "There are repairable laptops, and then there are ThinkPads."
> "iFixit approached the relationship as collaborators, not critics."
> "[...] they didn’t declare victory and go home. They kept pushing."
> "Designing for repairability doesn’t mean compromising innovation or premium experiences; when done well, it actually drives smarter innovation, better modularity, and more resilient platforms."
> "It would be one thing to make a highly repairable but low-volume niche device or concept. Instead, Lenovo just threw down a gauntlet by notching a 10/10 repairability score on their mainstream-iest business laptop."
> "This is [...] how repair goes from being an enthusiast’s “nice-to-have” to being baked into procurement checklists and fleet-management decisions."