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We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

juxt.pro

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Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#11

Post by monooso »

croemer wrote: post #8
embedding-shape wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any specific sections that stick out? Juxt in the past had really great articles, even before LLMs, and know for a fact they don't lack the expertise or knowledge to write for themselves if they wanted and while I haven't completely read this article yet, I'd surprise me if they just let LLMs write articles for them today.

Here's one tell-tale of many: "No alarm, no program light." Another one: "Two instructions are missing: [...] Four bytes." One more: "The defensive coding hid the problem, but it didn’t eliminate it."

That's just writing. I frequently write like that.

This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#12

Post by gcr »

monooso wrote: post #11
croemer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one tell-tale of many: "No alarm, no program light." Another one: "Two instructions are missing: [...] Four bytes." One more: "The defensive coding hid the problem, but it didn’t eliminate it."

That's just writing. I frequently write like that. This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

See also: “I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me” by Marcus Olang', https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

For what it’s worth, Pangram reports that Marcus’ article is 100% LLM-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/640288b9-e16b-4f76-a730-8000...

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#13

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

gcr wrote: post #10
josephg wrote: post #2

Super interesting. I wish this article wasn’t written by an LLM though. It feels soulless and plastic.

For what it’s worth, Pangram thinks this article is fully human-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/f5f68ce9-70ac-4c2b-b0c3-0ca8...

Then pangram isn't very good, because that article is full of Claude-isms.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#14

Post by ChrisRR »

josephg wrote: post #2

Super interesting. I wish this article wasn’t written by an LLM though. It feels soulless and plastic.

It's not setting off any LLM alarm bells to me. It just reads like any other scientific article, which is very often soulless

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#15

Post by 360MustangScope »

monooso wrote: post #11
croemer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one tell-tale of many: "No alarm, no program light." Another one: "Two instructions are missing: [...] Four bytes." One more: "The defensive coding hid the problem, but it didn’t eliminate it."

That's just writing. I frequently write like that. This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

I hate that I can’t write em dashes freely anymore without people accusing the writing of being AI generated.

Even though they are perfect for usage in writing down thoughts and notes.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#16

Post by croemer »

monooso wrote: post #11
croemer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one tell-tale of many: "No alarm, no program light." Another one: "Two instructions are missing: [...] Four bytes." One more: "The defensive coding hid the problem, but it didn’t eliminate it."

That's just writing. I frequently write like that. This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

These are just some of the good examples I found.

My hunch that this is substantially LLM-generated is based on more than that.

In my head it's like a Bayesian classifier, you look at all the sentences and judge whether each is more or less likely to be LLM vs human generated. Then you add prior information like that the author did the research using Claude - which increases the likelihood that they also use Claude for writing.

Maybe your detector just isn't so sensitive (yet) or maybe I'm wrong but I have pretty high confidence at least 10% of sentences were LLM-generated.

Yes, the stylistic patterns exist in human speech but RLHF has increased their frequency. Also, LLM writing has a certain monotonicity that human writing often lacks. Which is not surprising: the machine generates more or less the most likely text in an algorithmic manner. Humans don't. They wrote a few sentences, then get a coffee, sleep, write a few more. That creates more variety than an LLM can.

Fun exercise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AI_or_not_quiz

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#17

Post by croemer »

360MustangScope wrote: post #15
monooso wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just writing. I frequently write like that. This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

I hate that I can’t write em dashes freely anymore without people accusing the writing of being AI generated. Even though they are perfect for usage in writing down thoughts and notes.

I have nothing against em dashes. As long as your writing is human, experienced readers will be able to tell it's human. Only less experienced ones will use all or nothing rules. Em dashes just increase the likelihood that the text was LLM generated. They aren't proof.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#18

Post by yodon »

This is so insightfully and powerfully written I had literal chills running down my spine by the end.

What a horrible world we live in where the author of great writing like this has to sit and be accused of "being AI slop" simply because they use grammar and rhetoric well.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#19

Post by DiffTheEnder »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #13
gcr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, Pangram thinks this article is fully human-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/f5f68ce9-70ac-4c2b-b0c3-0ca8...

Then pangram isn't very good, because that article is full of Claude-isms.

Is it possible for a tool to know if something is AI written with high confidence at all? LLMs can be tuned/instructed to write in an infinite number of styles.

Don't understand how these tools exist.

Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

#20

Post by croemer »

gcr wrote: post #12
monooso wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just writing. I frequently write like that. This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

See also: “I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me” by Marcus Olang', https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... For what it’s worth, Pangram reports that Marcus’ article is 100% LLM-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/640288b9-e16b-4f76-a730-8000...

In theory, wouldn't be too hard be to settle the question if whether he used ChatGPT to write it: get Olang to write a few paragraphs by hand, then have people judge (blindly) if it's the same style as the article. Which one sounds more like ChatGPT.
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