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How to Spot AI Writing

economist.com

51–60 of 81 posts

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#51
post #33

I hate the em and en dash claims — some of us know how to use them!

You just put spaces around your emdash—which is incorrect.

I mean, it depends on the house style in general. I don't really love that style but I get that you're just taking up too much space in the separation otherwise. But we also probably shouldn't have both en-dashes and em-dashes.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#52

One way to tell is if the tone is hostile, cynical, or otherwise not full of that giddy optimistic tone associated with what I’ll call “California Business English.” The mainstream AI companies are loathe to output anything too controversial, so if someone is writing like Burroughs (in content, not merely style) they are less likely to be AI. That is possible to bypass with local models, but the vast majority of writ…

The irony here is that William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation writer of notorious style and content, was the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs Corporation, which made some very impressive enterprise-class computing devices for their time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#53

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…

> For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee ... [AI] output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it.

Presumably you researched Bruce Lee by reading and consuming other media related to him, most of which is likely known by the AI models. They just don't have access to any novel idea that you generated, inspired by your research.

Regardless of their current inabilities, which you're correct about, there's no logical reason that in the long term they can't be similarly inspired by considering the same information and making new connections / conjectures just as you did.

We're making the same mistake that the people who dismissed the early airplane made. "That's a neat trick, but it's too limited and not robust enough to be very useful". Not considering how the technology would evolve from the Wright Brother's prototypes.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#54
post #32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sci-fi is not reality.

Present-day reality was only conceptualizable as sci-fi less than a decade ago. If you think it implausible that OpenAI and Anthropic could set their models to scrape the web, perform sentiment analysis on comments (looking for "AI slop", etc.) and auto-finetune themselves to avoid the tells in the commented-on text, I'd like to know why.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#55

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…

The "problem" is that people—the ones that actually care whether or not something was written by AI—don't just want to spot text that was generated by AI (like in your examples). They also want to spot text that was re-written by AI.

Before I explain the great big difference (which you probably already understand, just bear with me), know that the folks who are most up in arms about it are authors. They see their art as sacred. An ancient tradition of storytelling that deserves respect not for its output, but for the act and talent of producing it. To these folks, the very concept of using AI to generate or modify text in any way is against their religion.

Now for a real world example that would violate their principals that wouldn't bother normal people at all: A beginner or someone who's just terrible at storytelling has a story in their head and they do their best to write it down. It might look like this:

MC: "You call that a knife?"

...and so on and so forth, with poorly written descriptions of scenes, run-on sentences, etc. Then they feed that script into AI and go back and forth until they have text that they like.

To traditional authors, this is straight up EVIL. It's against everything they believe in! That person didn't write the story! They just came up with a poorly-written outline and the AI converted it into something more digestible.

Normal people will read such a story and—if it was created with the latest AI models—will never know the difference. It probably won't be a fantastic story or super well written but it will be passable. Even if they find out the process that went into it they won't care. And that pisses off these authors the most.

There's degrees to this, too: If you wrote an OK story, AI can be used to make it better. You can feed it multiple paragraphs and have it analyze the flow and offer simple suggestions for ways you could re-word sentences to improve them. Basically acting as a personal editor.

Is that "written by AI"? I would say, "no" but traditionalist authors would disagree. To them, any use of AI to write your story violates the very nature of storytelling.

...and it pisses them off to no end that you can't just run texts generated in this way though a program to tell whether AI was used in its creation.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#57
post #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.

Someone on Twitter suggested ISO 24495-1, in case ASD-STE100 is a bit too sparse.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#58
post #28

its more like a cat and mouse game, slowly ai would know ah that makes my writing ai like cool, added to negative prompt.

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.

Does it take a human to have agency? Doesn't a cat have agency and desire? What about a worm? Where do you make the cut off, and why? If an AI is programmed with a bias towards creating and following "desires", how is it fundamentally different than what evolution installed in us?

We're way too human focused and dismissive of everything that isn't exactly like us.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#59

One way to tell is if the tone is hostile, cynical, or otherwise not full of that giddy optimistic tone associated with what I’ll call “California Business English.” The mainstream AI companies are loathe to output anything too controversial, so if someone is writing like Burroughs (in content, not merely style) they are less likely to be AI. That is possible to bypass with local models, but the vast majority of writ…

From the book "Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" by Chuck Klosterman

> Certainly, there is a formula to being relentlessly dynamic. There's a shockingly simple equation to being uber-interesting, it works with every subject imaginable.

> The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible – but remarkably specific- "cultural accusation" (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist (this makes you contemporary).

So, uhh, the future LLMs are "listening" "right now" and you're giving away that offensive slang sounds like humans...

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#60
The one that has been killing me lately is "unusually well". I've been getting this all of the time with both Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.

"...this issue is unusually well defined..."

"...this document is unusually well structured..."

"...the reviewers came back and were unusually well aligned..."

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