Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Spot AI Writing

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#61

Post by keiferski »

RhysU wrote: post #59
keiferski wrote: post #48

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…

Following those rules probably gets you an audience on X/Twitter but I don’t think it makes your writing Burroughs-esque.

I’m still pretty skeptical that big co. AI companies are gonna let you generate offensive slang.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#62

Post by smitty1e »

> That does not mean that LLMs are great writers: their prose lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic.

AI is regression to the mean. That is, being the next great writer in the starboard tail of the distribution will not be the output.

If that's OK, then fine.

What's more telling is that this external machine is not the internal growth needed to become that great writer.

"There is no royal road to geometry", and Euclid yourself if you think that AI is that road.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#63

Post by kranner »

lordmoma wrote: post #56

an unpopular opinion: AI writes better than most human writers.

Unpopular because the difference between FSD and writing is obvious to more people than not, especially people who read for pleasure. Being a person with an actual POV matters more than having perfect grammar or a studied flair.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#64

Post by rdedev »

kranner wrote: 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.

Opus 5 really loves explaining concepts using a lot of jargon as well. Often ive had to ask Claude to explain its explanation

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#66

Post by altmanaltman »

quantummagic wrote: post #53
altmanaltman wrote: post #13

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 researc…

> 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.

Yes, assuming they trained on all written works and all his movies, yes. But again, I found several times where AI is just plain wrong about actual facts and it'll reconsider if you provide actual proof that it's wrong. So just because things are in its training cannot be reliable proof that it actually is retrieving them accurately.

As I said, in theory, we don't have to wait for the trick to be useful. I could very easily dump all my research materials and sources as context, provide it a writing guide to generate text exactly as I want, and it'll do it. In fact, it might generate an article exactly equal to what I wrote, but I don't see how it gets to this point independently, especially given the hallucination problem above.

I'm also not claiming it's not useful; it's useful for brainstorming, checking for awkward phrasing, outlining your thoughts, etc. But it is not really good at creative writing. Can it get better in the future? Sure, I'll wait.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#67

Post by altmanaltman »

riskable wrote: post #55
altmanaltman wrote: post #13

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…

> MC: "You call that a knife?"

First of all, I found this pretty funny.

And yes, you may use AI to update your work in a "collaborative" style. And yes, if "they never know the difference", then sure. But as I mentioned in my comment, the issue is that I think you're seeing this from a pretty specific lens - authors as a group that hate AI and anything to do with it, but audiences can't tell the difference, etc. Those are pretty strong assumptions.

If, hypothetically, the audience cannot tell a text is generated by AI and is indistinguishable from human-written content, how does it matter what traditionalist authors agree on? Why will you have to answer "is that written by AI" if your readers can never tell it is? If they ask that question, that means they can tell, which would imply there is something in your content that does not sit right with them; given this, I feel it's really a large leap to assume the average reader can't tell the difference.

I do agree with you on the substance part. And I have my nuanced take on the use of AI in writing, but I don't encourage it for the actual putting words on paper part. I am not part of any traditionalist author group that hates AI in general etc, just to be clear.

Re: How to Spot AI Writing

#69

Post by mcphage »

quirino wrote: post #14
stavros wrote: post #6

Stock Claude writing is extremely obvious to me, it always uses the same sentence structure, it loves to verb nouns, every sentence has MAX IMPACT, etc. I find it really offputting nowadays, just because it's so overused.

Sometimes I wonder, if I read a piece of Claude writing back in 2020, would I feel how alien it is? Would I be off-put?

It would come off as bland writing, but I don’t think you’d jump to assuming it was written by a computer. If you got exposed to just how much AI writing was out there, you’d definitely feel like there was something really strange going on. You’d wonder why so much text was written in the same insipid voice.
Post reply on HN