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How to Spot AI Writing

economist.com

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#31
post #11

Surprised to find no mention of "load-bearing" and "gated" particularly for Claude. In particular Opus 5 is scaling new heights of incomprehensibility with excessive metaphor-making, especially when it uses an existing word in the prompt or the code comments as a novel metaphor in an unrelated context.

“Reply with ASD-STE100” has been a God-send.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#32
post #29
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That is not how AI works. It’s built by people, contrary to some of the more woo-ey hype. There’s no “agency”, or personal desires, or person to desire anything.

(in homer simpson voice) That's not how AI works... so far!

Sci-fi is not reality.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#34
As a programmer I feel good while using AI to write code, ironically can't say the same when I read any documentation written by AI.

It is one of the biggest turn offs and most of the times I end up giving it again to AI to summarise that into a format which is more readable.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#35
I like how this article pokes fun by not only using the tropes it describes sarcastically, but then adding subtext that AI never would. It also uses alliteration, grouping synonyms that use similar sounds, another playful literary device that LLMs don't get.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#36

Turing Syndrome (1): "The point which the amount of AI generated data on the internet surpasses human generated content, to the extent that it is impossible to distinguish between human and AI generated content.” The term is derived from the Turing test + Kessler syndrome This is distinct from the dead Internet theory (2) where humans can actually distinguish if a response is a bot. (1) https://kemendo.com/blog/turin…

Well that term really scerwed over Kessler

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#37
I have a little script (also visible in my comment history) which (respectfully) scrapes the algolia side of HN, and dumps the entire comment history of mortal users. As noted, it will break on legends, ie Thomas's, certain Books, etc, but successfully dumped my entire history from 2026 - 2016.

And yes, I can see a slight change in my own style, where I am using more "not" statements (negative propositions). While there are some folks with higher integrity and greater immunity to this infection, I am seeing that I am not entirely immune.

However, I have probably generated more dialog with AI over two years than in most of my years altogether. I have well over 7GB of content, of course, much of it the interlocutor -- but similar to how some adopt expressions and accents when imbued in various environments, alas, I have with AI, to whatever extent has bypassed my efforts to resist. The bright side, if it can be viewed such, is that I have developed an involuntary sensitivity to AI writing, often to the point of paranoia and false positives.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#38
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange reading a piece of text, having one's AI-dar flag it, then noticing that it's a piece of writing from 10 years ago, and remembering that AI writes this way in part because these tells have all been popular in human writing in the recent past and beyond.

Hm, I've never had that happen to me, do you have any examples?

[dead]

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#39

At some point, and I think the article hints at it, the real difference will be substance. No matter how it changes its writing style, a lot of problems with it are more about the fact that it usually says nothing. Even if it wrote like your favorite author, if there is no substance, there is no reward as a reader (maybe even as a writer). Overall, i think its kind of useless to think of ai writing as bad because of…

Does this AI-written blog not have substance?

https://anamnesis.blog/

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#40

As a programmer I feel good while using AI to write code, ironically can't say the same when I read any documentation written by AI. It is one of the biggest turn offs and most of the times I end up giving it again to AI to summarise that into a format which is more readable.

Tbh, the amount of time I spend reading documentation has fallen off a cliff. I barely even bother looking for it, much less reading it. Every good agent system with a frontier LLM as the brain and connection to the web can get you this information reliably. By now they can even point out inconsistencies or possible gotchas that would have taken me hours to figure out.
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