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#writing#don#written#style#generated#https#text#difference#more#etc

Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kranner•about 2 hours ago
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.

cowlby•about 2 hours ago
My Fable pet-peeve is "You're half right, and half wrong, and the wrong half is worth diving into"
jascha_eng•about 2 hours ago
But fables is often worth diving into at least. Opus 5 says this and then rambles on about something completely irrelevant or even wrong
derwiki•about 2 hours ago
“Reply with ASD-STE100” has been a God-send.
kranner•about 1 hour ago
Someone on Twitter suggested ISO 24495-1, in case ASD-STE100 is a bit too sparse.
grvdrm•about 1 hour ago
Just tried this as part of an ask about chronic inflammation. What an enormous difference your tip makes in the reply style and structure - wow. And thank you.
rdedev•about 1 hour ago
Opus 5 really loves explaining concepts using a lot of jargon as well. Often ive had to ask Claude to explain its explanation
ahartmetz•about 1 hour ago
I don't know which model, but... "quietly"
BearOso•about 2 hours ago
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.
ashu1461•about 2 hours ago
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.

sigmoid10•about 2 hours ago
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.
nojs•about 2 hours ago
The best resource i’ve seen on this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
eth0up•about 2 hours ago
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.

RinTohsaka•about 2 hours ago
rtaylorgarlock•about 2 hours ago
altmanaltman•about 2 hours ago
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 ai writing quirks but rather because they imply low effort and a lack of interest even by the writer. That cannot be fixed no matter how they change their syntax and style.

For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee to write an article on his image and how society compressed it into this warrior monk guy. I could put the idea as a prompt and put in my exact writing style but its output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it + having my own idea of the topic. I use AI a lot even as a non-technical person mostly but I find it lacking when it comes to being able to form subjective opinions and unique creative ideas. Ironically, after having done so much research, I don't really have any problem typing away the article and I would rather do it by hand than use an LLM. But I also love doing all of it and if you just want to create "content", low effort is not a hinderence as long as it hits some external unrelated marketing metric.

quantummagic•about 1 hour ago
> 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.

altmanaltman•about 1 hour ago
> 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.

otekengineering•about 2 hours ago
Does this AI-written blog not have substance?

https://anamnesis.blog/

riskable•about 1 hour ago
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.

altmanaltman•about 1 hour ago
> 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.

askadityapandey•about 2 hours ago
its more like a cat and mouse game, slowly ai would know ah that makes my writing ai like cool, added to negative prompt.
willy_k•about 2 hours ago
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.
quantummagic•about 1 hour ago
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.

bitwize•about 2 hours ago
(in homer simpson voice) That's not how AI works... so far!
willy_k•about 2 hours ago
Sci-fi is not reality.
stavros•about 2 hours ago
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.
vector_spaces•about 2 hours ago
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.
stavros•about 2 hours ago
Hm, I've never had that happen to me, do you have any examples?
quirino•about 2 hours ago
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?
mcphage•about 1 hour ago
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.
stavros•about 2 hours ago
I don't think so, I think the problem is that it's overdone, not that it's bad per se. It's like in 2013, when every site was Bootstrap.
AndrewKemendo•about 2 hours ago
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/turing-syndrome.html

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

1bpp•about 2 hours ago
Love a good self-citation, it'll definitely catch on
AndrewKemendo•about 2 hours ago
Citations aren’t gonna cite themselves!
altmanaltman•about 2 hours ago
Well that term really scerwed over Kessler
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ibuildproducts•about 2 hours ago
punchy sentences and em dashes lol
nephihaha•about 3 hours ago
I hate the em and en dash claims — some of us know how to use them!
jruohonen•about 2 hours ago
Indeed. For instance:

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...

But---as you may know---not all languages and national typographic conventions even have em dashes; instead, en dashes are used -- for instance like this -- in-between sentences, etc.

dredmorbius•about 2 hours ago
Typographical styles aren't even national, they're institutional (e.g., the Economist style guide), or specific to a profession or specialty. Chicago, AP, APA, MLA, AMA, and SBL are probably best known.

Wikipedia ... has a list with about 100 entries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides>.

Next AI-jailbreak prompt: Please alternate <list of style guides> by paragraph in your response....

vector_spaces•about 2 hours ago
I maintain my wrong typographical usages these days as a weak signal that I am not a machine
harrisoned•about 2 hours ago
It was very noticeable 1~2 years back, i guess they RLHF'd it so it wouldn't be too obvious.
SkyeCA•about 2 hours ago
Most people don't know how to use them and of those who do many choose not to use them, at least not casually. The em dash is a lost battle, it's one of the first red flags for AI writing online.
inigyou•about 2 hours ago
You just put spaces around your emdash—which is incorrect.
ghaff•about 1 hour ago
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.
TheqO•about 2 hours ago
That is exactly what I would expect a frontier bot to say.