alt Hacker NewsScored 100% on a Pangram of the first few paragraphs.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
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i wrote three paragraphs of a management summary today, fully by hand, and got 100% ai back from pangram. ymmv.
The original appears to be written in Russian (there's a toggle in the heading). In Russian, it sounds quite good, I coudn't detect any smell at all. Sure, good writing style these days always raises suspicion. :-)
It seems you have more time on your hands than the author.
The text read to me like it was, first and foremost, a translation from Russian. It wasn't the names that gave it away to me. It was the text itself. Even in English, it had unmistakable Russianness all over it. I switched the blog language to Russian. Didn't feel like an LLM. Felt rather like written by someone who had read a lot of Viktor Pelevin or maybe Leonid Kaganov.
The story itself is decent and competently written, see how it keeps track of the analogies and phrases by different characters (wrapping it all up in the end, tying the "no-man's minute" or how the ex wife told him he was always somewhere else than here). If an un-assisted LLM did this, I'd be surprised. I think there may have been LLM-assistance to polish it up (maybe) but there are some human ideas in here. I'd be interested in the author clarifying this.
100% Human or 100% AI?
> What is the human's job here? Waking up?
Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
> Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: the main character can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for ease of remembering and identification.
> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell
But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.
Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.
Just speaking english as a second language will cause your writing to trigger Pangram detectors, for whatever reason. Its a dumb platform meant to scam universities who think it works.
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This is just good writing. The kind that AI is meant to emulate. Alas we're at an age where writing well is identical to writing like a machine.
I suggest polite rebellion. Write well. Get better than the machines.