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

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

#51

Post by andy99 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

auggierose wrote: post #36

andy99 wrote: post #15

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.

[flagged]

Nothing personal, if someone told me they’d generated a 15 page paper based on a two week LLM discussion I wouldn’t want to read it at all. My prior is that it would be the result of some sycophantic echo chamber that the LLM had reinforced.

Edit: missed your insult in the first read, I wouldn’t have replied if I’d realized the first comment was in bad faith but will leave the above for posterity.

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

#52

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

altcognito wrote: post #22

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…

I guarantee you that people are using AI to write posts here. I do think that there is a gate against poorly written comments.

This is probably true in the sense that it's also probably true that people are, at the margins, successfully manipulating votes, but it's part of the premise of the site that the moderators are working to counter that. And, like vote rigging, it's a cat-and-mouse game, so you're never going to get a wholly satisfying explanation of how they've decisively resolved the problem. Like a lot of problems in security and antiabuse, the practical solutions are essentially economic in nature: defenders do enough work to make attacks too expensive to be worth it.

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

#53

Post by zkmon » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

To extend the argument, even if someone types every single word using their keyboard, they are not quite "writing". They are dictating each letter by pressing at different places on a keyboard. The computer does the writing of each letter using a predefined shape (font). And even someone is writing using a pen, they are only dictating the strokes by moving the pen in different directions, while the pen, ink and paper are bringing the letters into existence.

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

#54

Post by falsaberN1 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:59 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…

That's...not proving a point, that's vandalism.

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

#55

Post by danwitt » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:59 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.

I think the real contract being violated is a bit narrower than that. More precisely, the pre-LLM assumption was that producing a piece of content took more effort than consuming it, so the content existing at all signaled that someone cared enough to put some time into it.

AI can definitely be used as a tool in a workflow that's mostly driven by human effort. But as a reader, it's hard to tell whether a particular piece of AI-assisted writing came out of that kind of workflow without investing the effort yourself, and the prior of AI Writing == AI Slop is pretty strong. Attribution seems like a partial solution, since someone putting their name behind it will suffer reputational harm if they're producing nothing but slop.

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

#56

Post by oasisbob » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

Setting up the strawman of writing "by hand" only to attack it as being ableist is facile and asinine. Nobody is arguing that Hawking, or anyone else who uses dictation or other assistive technologies to capture writing, aren't writing.

Plagiarism will always be plagiarism.

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

#57

Post by pastel8739 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

auggierose wrote: post #36

andy99 wrote: post #15

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.

[flagged]

If you’re working on it for 2 weeks, why not just write it yourself (perhaps chatting with an AI on the side to develop your thoughts)?

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

#58

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

If you've really thought this through and still believe it, then you should preface your writing with all the prompts you used to generate it. They're what capture your thinking, and they allow readers to interrogate those thoughts directly in their own LLM sessions (or over glasses of port wine in their debating parlors).

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

#59

Post by doug_durham » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

johngossman wrote: post #45

Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines between human and machine labor: chess computers are banned from human tournaments; race cars and bicycles are not allowed in footraces. And while I am very sympathetic to the advantag…

How can there be tons of evidence for a 3 year old technology? Everyone seems to think that all writers using AI are one shotting their content. A writer can carefully edit and revise their content using AI tools just as well as manual writing. That's what I do when I use AI to write. I also never use AI to write interpersonal content. Just like I won't type a Valentines letter to my wife, I'll handwrite. I only use AI to write technical documents.

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

#60

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

falsaberN1 wrote: post #54

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…

That's...not proving a point, that's vandalism.

Right, just like every time someone posts an AI comment on HN.