The revolt of the reader • Hacker News Board

Re: The revolt of the reader

#161

Post by cladopa » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 10:32 AM UTC

So you believe that writers are not making the necessary effort and write using LLMs, so you then use an automatic LLM to filter it as a reader(because you don't care as a reader and don't want to make the effort manually).

So this way there will be a lot of false positives like with school assignments.

I think a better solution would be to have a network of people that you trust manually read and label texts instead, so this way no machines are used and you don't need to read a text that 100 of your trusted friend/trusted readers flagged as artifitial.

By the way, this man does not care about AI slop. He cares about AI usage. In the same way there is very good code created with the help of LLMs, albeit a minority like Linus Towards says, there will be very good writing created with the help of LLMs.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#162

Post by kierangill » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 10:49 AM UTC

sltkr wrote: post #78

kierangill wrote: post #65

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…

Orwell's entire essay (Politics and the English Language) is well worth reading if you haven't before: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... (I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.) It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their sourc…

Mine as well. Thanks for the callout. It has been added.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#163

Post by Planktonne » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 10:55 AM UTC

KPGv2 wrote: post #43

Forgeties79 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very handwavy and dismissive. It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. We’ve all seen so many examples of the exact same cadence and verbiage that we’ve learned how to identify it pretty reliably. The ones who are “slipping past us” are…

> It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. This statement does not logically cohere. "We can spot it because so many people make it easy to spot." You don't see how this is just petitio principii in action?

There is no group of people who put enormous amounts of effort into not putting effort in to writing.

To fully disguise LLM prose, you'd have to rewrite it entirely, and if you were going to do that, you wouldn't be the sort of person to use it in the first place.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#164

Post by Ygg2 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:07 AM UTC

ahepp wrote: post #151

bananaflag wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why dont they train LLMs not to speak like that? Is it some tragedy of the commons here?

A bigger question I'm interested in is why do LLMs speak like that in the first place? Is that really what you get if you took the average of the English language? It would be difficult for me to believe that. Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?

Not average of English. Average of all written text. Which probably includes lots of marketing and hypetexts.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#165

Post by classified » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:12 AM UTC

ahepp wrote: post #160

I was so optimistic about using LLMs for "write once, read many" English language documents, but the more I've used the tools, the more pessimistic I get. More and more, I try to ask it for low prose responses because its writing just seems like such a low signal to noise ratio I'm curious about why LLM writing fails. Particularly whether LLM writing is fundamentally flawed, or if it's just distinctive and since it o…

> I'm curious about why LLM writing fails.

Apart from the tasteless manipulations of the providers, it's mostly training data. LLMs output the average of their training data, and the overwhelming majority of humans are bad writers.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#166

Post by OroPla » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:17 AM UTC

masswerk wrote: post #98

kierangill wrote: post #65

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…

In contemporary YouTube-script wording: > The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the w…

I already notice LLM speech patterns in people that use them a whole lot. If you speak more than one language I recommend talking to LLMs in a language that you don't use when speaking to people.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#167

Post by simplegeek » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:22 AM UTC

Good article. As I reflect about it, I genuinely wonder (not in jest) whether pangram software uses AI to generate code? Secondly, what patterns do they look for in the text? Genuinely curious.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#168

Post by GrinningFool » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:23 AM UTC

usernametaken29 wrote: post #75

For me it’s AI videos or music / narration that is beyond off putting. What’s worse now it seems people are writing their YouTube scripts with Claude et al. so at times even if it is a human creator you can clearly and immediately tell the words are not their own. To those creators I have but one message: IT SUCKS. I’d rather have you ramble incoherently in your mic then reading an LLM script and I will remove you fr…

I don't know that we can all tell. The number of times I've seen a blog post or article's writing complimented on this site when it was clearly LLM output has been surprising.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#169

Post by jbeninger » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:35 AM UTC

somat wrote: post #145

masswerk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In contemporary YouTube-script wording: > The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the w…

Very depressing, and I believe it. I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)

That's not a generator tell when used judiciously. It's a genuinely useful construction that's been poisoned by overgeneration.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#170

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 11:36 AM UTC

somat wrote: post #143

kierangill wrote: post #65

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…

My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications. It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob. Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your ow…

But even that is grossly inefficient.

Let's say I'm making an HN comment. I have a one-sentence idea, I get an LLM to expand it into an impressive-looking (or oppressive-looking) wall of text, and then I post that. Well, let's say 10 people see it. And each one of them has to either plow through it on their own, or paste it into LLM to get the summary.

But even with one-to-one communication, it's still terrible, as you say. You can't be bothered to clarify your idea, but you're trying to use an LLM to make up for your lack of thought? So you're going to make me plow through that huge blob of text to try to understand what your thought was, the thought that you couldn't bother to actually really think through. That's far less efficient than you, the sender, actually doing the thinking.

But it lets the sender be lazy. And the sender is the one in control.