The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft • Hacker News Board

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#11

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

I dunno man. If you had something worth saying I kinda feel like you would figure out a way to say it with your fingers and a keyboard.

There is SO MUCH STUFF that you could read. You could read all day every day and not keep up with the human-written output in just a single sub-niche of writing within a niche sector. That being the case, you must use some heuristics to determine what should be read. Whether the entity publishing a piece felt it was worth human time to write that piece seems like a fine heuristic.

The privilege argument is so bad! We aren't doing this any more! The tyranny of edge cases is over. It ended some time in 2023. I am not going to feel obligated to read every piece of slop out there because 0.01% of authors have lost the use of their hands. Stephen Hawking somehow managed to write without AI.

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#12

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

firasd wrote: post #3

I think it depends on the context too. Dale Carnegie (in his famous Win Friends.. book) mentioned how it's annoying to receive letters that say Dictated But Not Read. So people don't want to read (for example) a twitter reply or email that's written on their behalf rather than their own thoughts When it comes to something like a LinkedIn post however who cares. Everyone uses AI cause the content itself is mercenary a…

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Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#13

Post by tayo42 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

I think this ignores that we're being spammed with written content.

The craft of writing is part of the interesting part. The words you choose are important,same as brush strokes in a painting. Offloading the act of writing to llms takes away that whole part.

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#14

Post by capyba » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #2

Nah, AI writing is bad because it breaks the implicit trust between the reader and the author. It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it. It's not merely a tool. the writing is worse, and people feel like they are being ripped off when they see it and it's undisclosed.

This is my thought, exactly. Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it: “these are my thoughts, recorded to share with you.” When reading LLM-generated text that purports to be a real person’s that contract is broken. Verification that even just the basic ideas are the author’s is impossible. It feels cheap and deceitful.

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#15

Post by andy99 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

Just send me the prompt if you’re going to write with AI. No point in trying to convince me it’s great, the marginal cost for me to re-run the prompt is zero, just send the prompt - it’s like unzipping a file before you send it to me, it doesn’t help, it just decreases information density.

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#16

Post by skippyfish » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

The fact this is AI-generated aside - I guess that's to be expected - it's a clever position to take if you completely ignore the realities of LLM-produced writing and imagine some fantasy world where AI blogs bring us profound wisdom and are unfairly targeted by pitchfork-wielding mobs.

Although there are some niche uses where LLMs assist or enhance the creative process, the vast majority of machine writing exists specifically because it takes zero effort and allows you to spam human cognition at an unprecedented scale. There is no redeeming quality to 99%+ of AI-generated LinkedIn posts, AI-generated books on Amazon, and so on.

The style-based heuristics we previously had at our disposal to filter zero-effort content no longer work here, so detecting LLM text is the next fallback.

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#17

Post by nvme0n1p1 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #5

Why are comments turned off on the blog posts itself? I was planning to make 200 thoughtful comments with the cheapest AI I could find to prove a point, but the lack of an option to comment shows you already know the point: something has to gate participation in the conversation. Human authorship is a fantastic gate, which keeps me from pulling my stunt here, where that gate is firmly in place. You could achieve almo…

Authors aren't obligated to let strangers publish content on their site, any more than you're obligated to let me exercise my free speech by spraypainting messages on your house. You're not being gatekept from the conversation. You can participate in the conversation by publishing on your own site, just like the author has.

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#18

Post by JSR_FDED » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

Even if I agreed with the author (which I don’t), from a purely selfish perspective why would you want the idea you’ve ostensibly worked hard on communicated in a way that says “low effort”?

Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#19

Post by slopinthebag » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

nvme0n1p1 wrote: post #17

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #5

Why are comments turned off on the blog posts itself? I was planning to make 200 thoughtful comments with the cheapest AI I could find to prove a point, but the lack of an option to comment shows you already know the point: something has to gate participation in the conversation. Human authorship is a fantastic gate, which keeps me from pulling my stunt here, where that gate is firmly in place. You could achieve almo…

Authors aren't obligated to let strangers publish content on their site, any more than you're obligated to let me exercise my free speech by spraypainting messages on your house. You're not being gatekept from the conversation. You can participate in the conversation by publishing on your own site, just like the author has.

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Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft

#20

Post by orbital-decay » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

>I don’t care whether you wrote every word with your bare hands. I care whether the thought is yours, whether you exercised judgment, whether the result deserves my attention and whether you’ll stand behind it once it leaves your screen.

Alright, compare the following degrees of autonomy:

- I wrote it, made sure everything's correct, let the LLM proofread it/translate it to English, and checked it afterwards

- I had brief scattered notes with no coherent idea, then threw it at an LLM to make it an article in whatever way it feels best because I don't care

- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a deep research agent spent ungodly amount of tokens and search and scraping requests, and put up an article (at least some grounding and it can depend on the harness quality)

- I had a three word prompt "Write about X", then a model did it in a single call with no real-life grounding at all

You're looking at my clearly generated article. Can you tell what is mine, what is collected from the web or another source by the agent, and what is sourced from the model's own knowledge? Sourcing is exactly what the generated text obfuscates.