alt Hacker News[[citation needed]]
I am a professional writer and have been for over 30 years. (I do not use any form of LLM ever.) This means I read a lot. This also means that I have 30+ years of experience of readers not understanding what I wrote, or not getting further than the title, or not getting the main message, or inverting it in their heads, or inserting their own message and then complaining when I diverge, and an endless list of Ways People Do Not Get It.
I am also a trained TESOL teacher. Ability to capture gist is a skill we test for and measure, and many, maybe the majority, of native speakers don't have it and don't know.
In recent years I constantly see people going "this is written by AI" and I have yet to see a single of of them able to coherently prove their point. It's all just feelings and hunches.
So I am calling you on this:
How do you know? Show your working. Demonstrate your case.
Replies
I want Scrabble rules for HN AI challenges. If someone finds an AI-generated comment, the commenter has violated HN guidelines and the comment should be deleted. But if the accusation is wrong, there should be a penalty for the often massive disruption the accuser has caused to the discussion.
(As of now, that four-word low-effort comment has generated over a thousand words in response, none of which improve this article's discussion.)
You need to start using LLMs a lot and then you will know how we know.
Edit: You know how you can recognise someone just from their gait while they walk towards you? I would struggle to describe that for an individual person but it doesn't mean I can't identify them from that alone.
I’m not sure if it is written by an LLM, but anything being called “load-bearing” (formatted that way and all) sets off my alarm bells
I don’t think TFA is written by AI.
But AI written pieces do have a certain feeling. A sort of saccatto in the succession of ideas that does not feel natural. They emphasize certain points, and you as a reader, you just wonder why is that. There is the “This thing, not just that thing”. There are also the three successive propositions (mostly in one sentences) to accentuate an idea and “Negation. Strong positive idea in the same direction”.
In general try reading one (vocally) to yourself and it will feel really weird.
Claude's writing style is at least as distinctive as any human's personal style. It has a long list of favorite words, verbal tics and common structures. On top of that, LLM writing is often bad in a very particular way: it's weak on actual things to say, but with an overheated style.
Some days, I spend over 4 hours a day reading walls of text written by Claude. If I couldn't recognize Claude's default "voice" by now, something would be wrong. It would be like a Hemingway fan not being able to recognize Hemingway. Except more so, because Claude's writing style is getting worse from version to version, descending into self parody.
On the statistical side, Pangram's model identifies AI-authored text with a 1-in-5,000 false positive rate, measured against hold-out texts from before 2022. My "ear" also agrees closely with Pangram. If I think something sounds AI written, Pangram virtually always comes back with "AI, confidence: high."