alt Hacker NewsHas AI tells
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I think we should start to shift away from pure concern that a text is written by AI and toward strictly rewarding better writing. I realize that only some of this involves literal pattern matching against annoying AI ticks that grate like fingernails on a chalkboard.
But moving forward the goal should remain that writing should be comprehensible and not overly reliant on templates and other annoyances.
It's a game of cat and mouse, as every AI tell machine detector will have an equivalent of a reverse engineering algo back to human writing, the same with cryptographic watermarking.
Essentially another layer and commodity that users will pay more for, as humans value speed and volume over authenticity.
Same reason almost no one writes with pens or typewriters any longer, as they are niche artifacts.
> They are not eligible for the sparkle icon on the feed page
This is the opposite of how most places use the sparkle icon!
It was relaxing to see some minor typos and stylistic awkwardness in this article, I have to be honest.
AI labs should really focus now on making AI that can write like humans.
Ironically, AI Tells in job descriptions means the company actually pays more. I just pulled these numbers the other day: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zmohiuddin_the-more-a-job-pos...
Isn't this the same as Simon Willison's LLM cliche highlighter?
Is there a link I'm missing to the tool this article is discussing?
Supposedly, SlopShape https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15369 can ID not just human vs bot but which bot via structural patterns in the writing.
Next we need a "Verbose useless content" detector and we'll be set up to GAN the whole internet into https://xkcd.com/810/ "Mission Accomplished".
For those wanting something to play with, https://adamdunkels.github.io/is-it-slop/ from May 2026, comes to mind.
> But Cynthia Dunlop's survey on tech reader preferences has shown that people overwhelming dislike AI-written articles, preferring even "bad" human writing to "good" AI writing.
I would absolutely ignore surveys on this, and pay attention to studies on this (or run your own if you have a mix of slop and human-written articles on your site.) People don't know their preferences.
It's fine to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how they might vote; it's dumb to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how the economy is doing.
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> running Pangram against every article that enters The Consensus feed is financially impossible.
Surely reading every article in the feed is even more costly than running Pangram on it? If there are so many articles that Pangram is too expensive, that would also suggest that there are too many articles for them to be meaningfully curated, which seems like a bigger issue.