81–90 of 533 posts
All the toil of word-smithing to receive such an ugly reward, convincing new readers that you are lazy. What a world we live in.
For sure he describes an education in English that seems misguided and showy. And I get the context - if you don't show off in your English, you'll never aspire to the status of an Englishman. But doggedly sticking to anyone's "rules of good writing" never results in good writing. And I don't think that's what the author is doing, if only because he is writing about the limitations of what he was taught!
So idk maybe he does write like ChatGPT in other contexts? But not on this evidence.
I have seen people use "you're using AI" as a lazy dismissal of someone else's writing, for whatever reasons. That usually tells you more about the person saying it than the writing though.
False accusations of AI writing are becoming absurd and infuriating. The other day I saw and argued with this accusation by a HN commenter against a professional writer, based on the most tenuous shred of evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255049
I can't wait until we reach the point of AI adoption where genuine content is suspicious. Wanna submit a proof in a criminal case? Better be ready to debunk whether this was made with AI. AI is going to fuck everything up for absolutely no reason other than profit and greed and I can't fucking wait
I'm not sure I've read any of Marcus' previous writing, but there's no way that essay could have been written by an AI. It's personal and has a structure that follows human thought rather than a prompt. For sure he describes an education in English that seems misguided and showy. And I get the context - if you don't show off in your English, you'll never aspire to the status of an Englishman. But doggedly sticking to…
It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI. I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.
ChatGPT writes a particular dialect of good writing. Always insisting on cliffhangers towards the summary, or "strong enumerations", like "the candidate turned out to be a bot. Using ChatGPT. Every. Single. Time." And so on.
On that regard, I have an anecdote not from me, but from a student of mine.
One of the hats I wear is that of a seminary professor. I had a student who is now a young pastor, a very bright dude who is well read and is an articulate writer.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged" (with apologies to Jane Austen) that theological polemics can sometimes be ugly. Well, I don't have time for that, but my student had the impetus (and naiveté) of youth, and he stepped into several ones during these years. He made Facebook posts which were authentic essays, well argued, with balanced prose which got better as the years passed by, and treating opponents graciously while firmly standing his own ground. He did so while he was a seminary student, and also after graduation. He would argue a point very well.
Fast forward to 2025. The guy still has time for some Internet theological flamewars. In the latest one, he made (as usual) a well argued, long-form Facebook post, defending his viewpoint on some theological issue against people who have opposite beliefs on that particular question. One of those opponents, a particularly nasty fellow, retorted him with something like "you are cheating, you're just pasting some ChatGPT answer!", and pasted a screenshot of some AI detection tool that said that my student's writing was something like "70% AI Positive". Some other people pointed out that the opponent's writing also seemed like AI, and this opponent admitted that he used AI to "enrich" some of his writing.
And this is infuriating. If that particular opponent had bothered himself to check my student's profile, he would have seen that same kind of "AI writing" going on back to at least 2018, when ChatGPT and the likes were just a speck in Sam Altman's eye. That's just the way my student writes, and he does in this way because the guy actually reads books, he's a bonafide theology nerd. Any resemblance of his writing to a LLM output is coincidence.
In my particular case, this resonated with me because as I said, I also tend to write in a way that would resemble LLM output, with certain ways to structure paragraphs, liberal use of ordered and unordered lists, etc. Again, this is infuriating. First because people tend to assume one is unable to write at a certain level without cheating with AI; and second, because now everybody and their cousin can mimic something that took many of us years to master and believe they no longer need to do the hard work of learning to express themselves on an even remotely articulate way. Oh well, welcome to this brave new world...
Ironically, mistakes and idiosyncrasies are becoming a sign of authenticity and trustworthiness, while polish and quality signal the opposite. Earlier today I stumbled upon a blog post that started with a sentence that was obviously written by someone with a slavic background (most writers from other language families create certain grammatical patterns when writing in another language, e.g. German is also quite typi…
It's an age-old cycle in media. There have been innumerable waves of more gritty aesthetic trends when things became too polished or inane: jazz, rock, punk, rap, hippies, goths, hipsters, 70s cinema, HBO golden-age, YouTube, blogging, early social media, even MAGA... Authenticity, wether it is sincere or not, can become an incredibly powerful force now and then. Regardless of AI, the communication style in tech, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed that it's AI written I will never understand why some people apparently think asking a chat bot whether text was written by a chat bot is a reasonable approach to determining whether text was written by a chat bot.
I know someone who was camping in a tent next to a river during a storm, took a pic of the stream and asked chatgpt if it was risky to sleep there given that it "rained a lot" ... People are unplugging their brains and are not even aware that their questions cannot be answered by llms, I witnessed that with smart and educated people, I can't imagine how bad it's going to be during formative years
Funny how sci-fi always envisioned AI to speak in a rigid, hyper-rational terseness, whereas reality gave us AI which inherited the worst linguistic vices of "human" voices.
You call writing in a structured fashion with formal words the "worst linguistic vices"
> Your kernel is actually being very polite here. It sees the USB reader, shakes its hand, reads its name tag… and then nothing further happens. That tells us something important. Let’s walk this like a methodical gremlin.
It's so sickly sweet. I hate it.
Some other quotes:
> Let’s sketch a plan that treats your precious network bandwidth like a fragile desert flower and leans on ZFS to become your staging area.
> But before that, a quick philosophical aside: ZFS is a magnificent beast, but it is also picky.
> Ending thought: the database itself is probably tiny compared to your ebooks, and yet the logging machinery went full dragon-hoard. Once you tame binlogs, Booklore should stop trying to cosplay as a backup solution.
> Nice, progress! Login working is half the battle; now we just have to convince the CSS goblins to show up.
> Hyprland on Manjaro is a bit like running a spaceship engine in a treehouse: entirely possible, but the defaults are not tailored for you, so you have to wire a few things yourself.
> The universe has gifted you one of those delightfully cryptic systemd messages: “Failed to enable… already exists.” Despite the ominous tone, this is usually systemd’s way of saying: “Friend, the thing you’re trying to enable is already enabled.”