Comment by bonsai_spool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonsai_spool | Hacker News Reader

It seems that TechCrunch, not a strong source of news since around 2014/15, is now just sending out AI text:

First the title: "Medicare's new payment model is built for AI. Most of the tech world has no idea", classic AI tell. The by-line is by the editor-in-chief.

Em-dashes everywhere, including in this quote, somewhat unusually: “The best solution wins, which, in regulated industries like healthcare — that’s not been the case.”

Oddly-short paragraphs: "That payment structure is the real news."

Rule of threes: "Pair Team launched in 2019 with a specific kind of patient in mind: people managing chronic conditions who were also dealing with unstable housing, too little food, or lack of transportation"

This whole paragraph: "There are real risks. Participants are feeding extraordinarily sensitive patient data — intimate conversations about housing and diseases and mental illness — into a federal infrastructure with a documented history of breaches, including exposed Social Security numbers. For the vulnerable populations ACCESS is designed to serve, that's not an impractical concern."

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I haven't opened a TC article in years and I think I'll return to that practice.

I think there's an ongoing conversation about whether we should accept all LLM-generated text without commentary.

I write this comment because I have some sympathy for a Show HN with AI-assisted writing, but I will not spend time enriching TechCrunch's use of machine-generated text anymore than I would scroll through an ad block at the end of any other article.

(Just for the sake of comparison, here's something by the same writer from a few years ago - https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/16/boompop-gains-traction-by-...

You can see more examples here, too https://techcrunch.com/author/connie-loizos/page/16/ )

These are also the markers of human journalists who write daily. Journalism is the reason AI acquired these habits. Gemini says this article is probably not generated by AI, particularly because it has original quotes.

https://gemini.google.com/share/ba48849a15a9

Personally I wouldn't cite Gemini for this because I have no idea if it has any kind of track record of accurately distinguishing human from AI writing.

That said, Pangram agrees and its track record is pretty good.

> particularly because it has original quotes.

I'm not saying the quotes are fake, that would be horrific. I'm saying the rest of the article appears to have had minimal human intervention.

At some point, however distasteful to the naturalists, do we accept that writing with AI is still writing? There will be an arms race the way there was moving from banner ads -> whatever hellscape we have today ...

It's the same as copying and pasting the wikipedia article and calling that your article. We all can generate our own slop if we want. If all you are peddling is slop, you are peddling nothing I can't get myself.

Then why did you point to the em-dash in the quote as evidence of AI authorship?

LLMs did not invent clickbaity headlines. Kinda odd that people think it did

Isn't the first em dash taken from an interview that the writer did with the subject over Zoom? I think using an em dash to punctuate a broken or partial sentence like that is pretty standard journalistic practice when you don't want to modify the original quotation (e.g, denote a paraphrase with brackets), and definitely not an AI tell.

The other uses are honestly pretty standard rhetorical patterns; they do not seem especially AI-flavored to me.

I got an LLM to analyse all of my messages and e-mails from the launch of gmail to work out my writing style, it says I heavily favour em-dash's. I used to work in the industry of type settings and press and publishing. I even use — in HTML when I have to write it nowadays. em-dash is not a LLM thing. It's just most people don't know how to use it. It also said I'm wry. Go figure.

Language is leaky, it gets just about everywhere. Some LLM goes and spills a bunch of emdashes and subordinate clauses all over a billion folks’ browsers and a bunch of them— especially those that may come into contact with a lot of language for a living— writers, for example— and they soak up a bit of it themselves and smear it all around.

Put another way, search out the great vowel shift. That happened over more time but then again the contact with different speakers wasn’t as constant as every day on the internet. It’s just what happens, how things spread. No different and maybe to a further degree than typical memes.

My suspicion is that the causation mostly goes the other way—LLMs write like that for the same reason that many humans do, namely, that it's a cheap trick for sounding smart with limited effort and cognitive capacity. (My guess would be that em-dash usage among human writers is down in the LLM era because people don't want to be accused of being LLMs, though I don't have any data on this.)

Coincidentally I just read a blog post today that explained this in a way I always struggled to: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-ju...

Very obviously LLM written to anyone who's spent any time using them.

Also "X is the real Y" is another tell. Surprised it didn't double down with "X—that's the real Y."

Pangram considers this text human written.

Do you consider it human written? We can't let machines take over our thought.

And if we're using machines to assess this, the appropriate action is to look at the author's writing from before the time of LLMs and compare it to now.

On the contrary, when a machine has been shown to outperform human judgment at a specific task, you should trust it over your own gut feeling, especially if you have no particular training or track record at the task.

There've been third-party evaluations of Pangram, e.g., https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2.... I personally do not think I could achieve that rate of accuracy, if you made me read a bunch of text samples and guess whether humans or AIs wrote them. Do you think you could?

One needs to be careful of citing papers - Pangram was not tested on the most recent models; the most recent one in that report is Claude Opus 4. Notably, Pangram does worse on news reports than on other types of textual detection tasks, and its failure depends on the model used in a way that suggests Pangram detection is very sensitive to whatever sources it was used for training.

> Do you think you could?

Not the right question. I am saying that this particular article based on its tendencies and the historical writings of this author are LLM-assisted if not wholly generated.

You're asking me to actually read the article instead of responding to the comment section? Oh the humanity! ;)

The author's name in the article is linked to a list of articles attributed to her, and it's easy to advance through the list by editing the URL, like so: [0]. As other commenters point out she's the editor-in-chief so maybe she could put her name on an AI article. But I'm assuming she would not put her name on another human's work.

This lead me to [1], an article from 2018. And when comparing the old article to the OP ... I'm stumped.

They both rely on quotes from a company founder. This is a bit intentional, I wanted to pick similar articles.

They are both somewhat .. dry? They have a sincere tone, devoid of hyperactive meme-speak or jokes (presumably the hyperactivity is reserved for the advertising). The older article has one oddly casual line: "What has changed since then is, well, not much, argues Sims." The newer article has an extremely short paragraph that sticks out visually: "That payment structure is the real news." But otherwise I don't see any super-obvious difference.

They both used em-dashes.

To be honest, I could be convinced that the OP is written by the same human who wrote [1], some humans just write like LLMs after all. My intuition isn't really helping me out here, if I wanted to go further "manually" I'd have to break out Wikipedia's list of AI tells or something like that.

(EDIT: and just to be clear, Pangram also thinks the old article is human-written, which I guess is our control case).

(EDIT: in your earlier comment, you mentioned the rule of three as a sign of AI writing, but it's a pretty common pattern in human writing as well and appears in the older article: "A second offering is Codecademy Pro Intensive, which is designed to immerse learners from six to 10 weeks (depending on the coursework) in either website development, programming or data science.").

[0] https://techcrunch.com/author/connie-loizos/page/45/

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/04/as-some-pricey-coding-camp...

Pangram is fraudulent lol

I only started using it a couple of days ago, so I have no loyalty to it.

Do you have any suggestions for identifying AI writing, other than relying on intuition or going through the points of Wikipedia's list [0]?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

No, it's a fool's errand. The only way to trust anything from here on out is to trust the source.

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