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bjackmanyesterday at 9:18 PM1 replyview on HN

I came to these comments coz I was curious about the AI usage here, and FWIW I also thought it smelled AI written, but I didn't think it was slop. (IMO not all AI output is slop and not all slop comes from AI).

My main question was "did Claude do the investigation by itself or just write up the article from someone's notes?"

Also though, I'm quite willing to believe this is human written and the human just happens to have a Claudey style. The actual prose isn't that Claudey it's just the structure of how it presents ideas. But, Claude had to get that structure from somewhere. It's not that surprising to see people with that style of communication.


Replies

meliz242yesterday at 9:47 PM

Nope, I'm one of those lucky folks who was privileged enough to be accused of writing in a weird and probably too mature for my high school English paper-way before the advent of gpt, lol. I've had to all but remove the em-dash from my vernacular, thanks to the ~ plague of inauthenticity ~ as I call it.

I did all the digging, researching, writing, etc myself. The reason the screenshots are from mobile is because I wrote a lot of it literally in my notes app, on my phone before I started putting together more dots. I eventually asked gpt if I was correct in my understanding about refrigeration controllers doing XYZ and if it was plausible for them to be hacked in this way, when looking for some docs I asked if it would be standard to have XYZ part of a contract public and XYZ private, and other singular questions like that. I also use a browser extension for spellcheck that (I think) uses AI to suggest phrasing improvements, which I used pretty nominally.

Is there any type of sidebar/footnote that you, as a reader, would like to see to denote AI usage during the writing and/or research process? Would you expect none? I don't plan to do many investigations such as this (literally started because I was personally impacted) but I do have a few potential article seeds about defense procurement tech I've asked a few definition/research questions to AI about and would like to make sure I'm keeping tabs on it since this is something I want to be perhaps hyper aware of moving forward. Keeping in mind this is my personal substack and I would like to maintain integrity, but also, not doing really any groundbreaking work here. Intended to be an outlet for my thoughts, not news.