Has AI tells
theconsensus.dev
theconsensus.dev
But moving forward the goal should remain that writing should be comprehensible and not overly reliant on templates and other annoyances.
[edit] some good disagreements here which I appreciate. Thanks! I am continuing to think about this.
I see inherent value in hearing from and talking to other humans. There is, unfortunately, a lot of AI content hustlers who want to rob me of this so that they can get more links to their website, more eyeballs on their product, etc.
The answer here isn't to demand that submarine marketers and SEO dudes prompt better so that the text is more pleasant to read. It's to cordon it off wholesale. And yeah, that sucks for some corner cases, but there's nothing else we can really do.
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
Apparently, part of his philosophical thought was that the ultimate goal of mathematics is to reduce (maybe even eliminate) how much thinking we do. Not exactly what I thought he was going for all these years lol. I wouldn’t read much more into it but it’s not hard to see how the statement could be perceived as this renowned early 20th century mathematician, logician and philosopher implying that he would’ve have loved the idea of machines reducing the need for research and development in engineering and mathematics (even if only to allow researchers time to focus on more important things).
Edit: As I’m not familiar with the breadth of his works and know of them primarily through secondary sources, I can also see how what he said meaning that the purpose of mathematics is automation in a very general sense, so that humans can reduce the need to think about things other than survival and comfort, and being a mathematician, he likely saw mathematics, philosophy and knowledge in general as one of those “leisure” activities we should be thinking about instead.
And it has done so. Imagine how much resources we would be spending on trials for any new object if not for the mathematical models of various systems and events that let us simulate timeline with pure logic. And with the invention of the computer, we’ve ridden ourselves of the human effort of manually computing them.
Pure maths and other theoretical sciences are useful because they brought us tools. Like discovering striking two rocks can produce a spark and thus allowing us to control fire. AI discoveries are more like seeing random thunder strikes and hoping some dry tree is now burning somewhere.
(I change my phrasing multiple times as I’m writing and sometimes leave earlier changes in without realizing and mistakes like these happen, quite a lot in fact. I blame it on ADHD and anxiety, both of which I was professionally diagnosed with at the age of 33.)
It's like a CO2 scrubber that runs on coal.
On your next highway trip, keep track of how many lawyer ads you really "see". My bet is that you see a whole lot of them but ultimately, only a handful of them stick because they are funny/clever/interesting in some way.
If "attention is all you need", then the lack of attention on AI slop will kill it far more efficiently than any amount of handwringing.
My experience in the publishing world is that there is already an infinite supply of writing. Lots of things serve as filters, some for better and some for worse, but ultimately the quality of the writing (however we define that) vs. the field is part of that filter. There is a competition for our limited little attention spans and finite waking hours, and writing better suited to our tastes tends to win out.
I don't see how that dynamic changes with AI. If all writers have more or less equal access to AI, some writers will use it in ways that result in writing I enjoy more than others. Some won't use it at all and still write work I really like. The majority of people writing with or without AI, just as today, won't write stuff I really want to read.
I don't know if I've ever read a piece of SEO-driven content marketing and thought it was particularly profound or that it made an impact on me. Or that I really had an inherently meaningful connection to the author. I sort of don't care if people generate 100x more of that sort of thing. It makes Google searches less effective, I guess? Or it may make my For You Page on Instagram less human-rich?
I've read some nice poetry though. I usually go looking for it. There are a handful of authors I tend to like consistently. The overall volume of poetry published (it's quite a lot!) doesn't really have an effect on my preference for their work. If there was 1,000,000 times more poetry published because of AI, I don't think it would prevent me from seeking out new poems from writers/publishers/curators I like, nor would I probably really notice.
In the long term, AI writing - mostly done solo, not directed by humans - will likely have higher quality than human writing, while being better suited to people's tastes since it can be personalized for every reader. If so, it's not hard to imagine it crowding out human writing.
You might ask, though, is that a bad thing? If it's legitimately higher quality, then what's wrong with consuming it? Well, I don't know. It certainly seems dangerous for everyone to be in their own little bubble of content. Social media of course tries to do that today, but there are limits. You can't pick any topic, any set of attitudes you want and get an infinite supply of content tailored exactly for you. Even if you find some super niche community to set up shop in, it's still a community; you're still exposed to the outside world at least a little. What happens when that changes?
But there will be filled by AI generated books in future.
The same way children on facebook were bullied in their DMs, etc, was bad for their health.
Its fine people dont want a computer to generate messages, but AI isn't going to continue to generate obviously detectable messages forever. So if you say today "I'm going to avoid AI", you're either going to develop a fixed personality defect or delude yourself into accepting whatever.
Regardless of the case, if you're a disinterested intellectual, what matters more is if the content has any sort of validity. Not whether a computer was used somewhere in the process of generating the validity.
You see how keying in on "this is AI" vs "this is slop" is a fundamental difference in how someone will be emotionally involved in content, _on the internet_, the same way the rise of trolling sunk entire segments of the population into entering far right nationalism?
Anyway, in a couple of years, you'll either be a paranoid internet inhabitant or you will engage with ideas on their basis and only when the idea is backed by the worst people imaginable, is it going to be ok to say "you know what, broken clock here makes a good point, but he's still a stain on existence."
And even then, "not real" is completely wrong. Even if you can't detect the AI posts (in a hypothetical future!), they still exist.
Go look up "gang stalking" and other paranoid delusions. AI fingerprints are going to disappear, but your adamant vehemence that it's detestable _because of it's existence_ will stay.
So that only leaves an increasing space of growing paranoia that uncritically lashes out at everything. Psychology is what will turn a healthy distrust of bullshit to a full on delusion about the things you view on the internet.
And I don't know where you got the idea they they will continue to push against tells in particular after there are no tells. That's three big assumptions and if any one goes away your argument falls apart. If they eventually give up when the situation changes, there's no problem. If they fight with methods other than tells, there's no problem. If tells don't in fact disappear, there's no problem. You're interpreting their post in the most negative way possible when you make this argument.
Seriously, go back and read the original comment you reacted to. That comment didn't even mention tells. They just said they want to "push back" against "fully-AI writing".
Its keying on the word "AI" as if that'll forever be something you can smell.
Regardless of the original provenance of the content on my feed, its presence on my feed has long been a result of ML algorithms designed to optimize engagement/outrage. For me, LLM content gave me the nudge I needed to finally quit the apps.
(Now what am I doing in HN...)
Push back against the AI: IME, you get a lot of backpedaling, denials, unproductive arguments with people arguing that their slop is actually for your benefit, etc. They continue misbehaving.
Argue that the writing is objectively bad: You're still negatively critiquing somebody, so this has opposition from time to time, but people aren't emboldened by their use of AI, so they tend to respond much better and actually change a bit -- at a minimum, reflect on why they're being critiqued and try some better prompts, usually even better outcomes.
The "subterfuge" is just applying that latter strategy to all AI output. Whatever you're using to determine it's AI, recast that as an inherently negative property of the writing.
Say there was a Chinese artist in a room...
Their output does have intrinsic value yes...
AI writing is some average over all writing the model was trained on (with some RLHF on top). It is mediocre by definition.
If the context can be above average quality the result should be too as long as the AI is sufficiently smart. Especially if people iterate on the produced work to push it up in quality.
However if you don't have a good topic and don't iterate to improve the result then you get incredibly poor writing.
I don't think this "effort" argument for technical knowledge pieces makes sense to me. If there is something I need, I do some research and I look for signals of authoritative information. I don't really care about how much effort it takes to write a blog post.
Even if, on the most good-faith scenario, someone did all the research them told an LLM to add more pizzazz for some reason, there is still a chance that the LLM hallucinate a lie here and there that the author might have skipped when proof-reading if they proof-read it at all.
I can't trust a machine specialized in generating convincing bullshit.
For starters, if you're writing something yourself, it's not "zero-effort". It might be low-effort, but you still put some effort into it. And low-effort doesn't mean worthless, as you illustrate ("but if someone needed that information...").
Consider that the refrain seems to be: "I won't put more energy reading something than you put into writing it". A "quick" post takes little energy to write, and little energy to read. That's fine!
If you put in zero effort on some programming knowledge, they would be to put in the effort to confirm that you're correct.
AI to an extent removes a lot of signals that in the past people used to figure out if the writer spent effort on the writing (length, lexicon, grammatical correctness, you name it).
Personally as long as whatever is there is not full of load bearing seams I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt even if the "voice" sounds AI (and TBH it feels the "AI voice" issues are mostly "opus pre 5.5 voice" issues, talking to gemini does not feel very "AI", same as fable, opus 5.5 occasionally has its load bearing moments but nowhere near as much.
I understand it is a little selfish to want people to maximize my comprehension (what about the thousands of other readers?). I also understand there can purposes other than communication in writing (fiction -> pleasure, poetry -> art). I agree with you that we shouldn't care if it's AI or human writing for these other purposes. But when the goal is one human transferring bits from their brain to mine, playing telephone with an AI cannot be more efficient (it necessarily decreases channel capacity).
There are two exceptions.
1. When AI is good enough to "read people's minds" it can extract extra bits than what they explicitly meant to include in their prompt... but at that point why am I even bothering to listen to them, and not have the more powerful, smarter AI tell me what they think?
2. AI can run experiments or prove things, and I shouldn't have my AI duplicate that work. In this case I would want them to explain what tasks they set the AI out to do, and then provide the results. I would not complain if the results are an AI writeup, though usually I would want to know what in the results the human author felt was important.
You might be projecting from your own use of AI. IME there’s a large overlap between your exception 1 and the kind of people who copy/paste AI responses.
I.e., when you find yourself dealing with a meat proxy, the original prompt is unlikely to provide anything useful. So as you say, “Why are you even bothering to listen to them.”
I am a human supremacist. I believe humans have intrinsic value and what they produce has intrinsic value (no matter how poorly written it might be). I do not think that the output of a machine has any value, nor am I interested in reading it.
The AI is really bad at guessing what its reader already will know. Not just before reading, but also from reading the text. This means that it so often explains things that don't need explaining, and emphasizes things that don't need emphasis.
It's not Y but X. except no sane person would ever think it was Y, and it was clear to everyone it is X already (or X is not a widely understandable thing in the first place, or the AI hasn't established a satisfying reason for why this distinction isn't important, or or or).
This is, I think, due to a combination of training on human feedback rewarding surface level good text (people marking preference on their 300th answer of the day are not trying to understand whatever point the agent is making they're just seeing whether it seems like it knows what its talking about) combined with later training by automated grading systems (other llms) that always have perfect context - if I also went and read all the code the agent referenced, read all of its 12 paragraph answers in gave at every turn of this back and forth conversation, knew all the files on the hard drive and had read all the diffs it made, then yeah it would be fine to assume some of the things it does, but I don't do that when im talking with my boss, because he asked me to do it so he doesn't have to understand everything, and he expects me to surface important stuff and minimise other stuff in a sensible way
> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same!
1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4234688/microsoft-know...
TL;DR: If you didn't put effort into writing it, you clearly don't value it enough for me to put any effort into reading it. I don't give a damn about readability.
Longer: We are now locked in a titanic, global war on attention. While once it was impossible to output content faster than it can be consumed, this relationship has inverted to the extreme. So the social norms that we evolved prior to this inversion simply cannot still apply.
While once it took tremendous resources or effort, it is now trivial and cheap to saturate my attention. And as a result, my attention is under non-stop assault.
To guard my precious attention and preserve it for the subjects I deem most worthy, I am forced to choose between what does and does not deserve my attention.
The level of effort an author invested in the creation of their work is a decent proxy to their actual assessment of its worth. I will continue to use that metric as a filter, and have found it to be helpful for maintaining the health of my mind and my relationships.
And most importantly writing is thinking: https://paulgraham.com/words.html And not writing is not thinking: https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
We cannot have actual discourse, disagreement and learn from each other, and sometimes even from the process of writing something out itself without writing; or at least not nearly as good — verbal discourse can be valuable as well, but has different limitations and we live in a world where it is getting less and less.
If we let AI write for us we let it think for us.
"Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization"
The vendors have an obvious motivation to make their writing less off-putting, and I don't think there is any hard architectural limit preventing them from doing so, it is just a matter of prioritising it and investing the necessary engineering resources.
Maybe not: https://mindmatters.ai/brief/ai-gen-writing-model-collapse-i...
After playing with googles new model for a day it is a breath of fresh air comparatively - but it has ticks a well.
Unlike code, or math where one can apply a quantifiable measure to what is being added in natural language is much harder to gauge.
Part of better writing is that a human wrote it because writing reflects the person who wrote it. I don't want to read clear writing if it doesn't represent communication from a human being. What's the point? I want to do more than learn or understand a piece of information. I want to simply communicate with others and understand them. And part of that means having a good idea of their ability or lack thereof to communicate.
My newest texts read more human, or at least I hope so.
Surely reading every article in the feed is even more costly than running Pangram on it? If there are so many articles that Pangram is too expensive, that would also suggest that there are too many articles for them to be meaningfully curated, which seems like a bigger issue.
The point is to index interesting jobs and articles to 1) help people follow the technologies they're interested in and 2) to help us figure out what to write about.
Articles get tagged with mentioned infrastructure technologies (e.g. Postgres [0] or Lean [1]) and get tagged semantic categories too (e.g. compilers [2] or network protocols [3]). (And all the same tagging happens for jobs as well.) The weekly newsletter [4] features articles and jobs from a few key semantic categories. But you can also build your own RSS feeds or email watchlists for whatever you're interested in.
There's a lot of filtering done to keep out marketing content, listicles, etc. And checking AI tells is the next stage of that.
Limiting to only good quality articles lets us build broader intelligence like the ranking of programming languages [5] and databases [6] and helps us figure out which companies are most focused on the technologies and so on.
[0] https://theconsensus.dev/feed.html?q=projects%3DPostgreSQL
[1] https://theconsensus.dev/feed.html?q=projects%3DLean
[2] https://theconsensus.dev/feed.html?q=topics%3D%22Compilers+%...
[3] https://theconsensus.dev/feed.html?q=topics%3D%22Network+pro...
[4] https://theconsensus.dev/weekly.html
This is the opposite of how most places use the sparkle icon!
It was relaxing to see some minor typos and stylistic awkwardness in this article, I have to be honest.
I heard this from someone else today too. I'll have to think of a different icon perhaps then.
> It was relaxing to see some minor typos and stylistic awkwardness in this article, I have to be honest.
whoops
Just a little thing. :)
Now, the text I pasted in so happened to really be AI-generated, but I don't think using markdown bulleted lists is a reliable sign of AI-generation.
Can’t even write pleasant technical documentation by hand after memorizing hotkeys without being falsely accused…
To be clear, the issue is not that it says that text is AI-generated – that text is indeed AI-generated. The issue is the detection reason it gives:
Repeated sentence openers · 3 sentences opening “-”
A nested markdown list is not a reliable sign of AI-generation, humans were using them long before any AI was.
Similarly, its second "AI tell" is:
Echoing sentence runs · 2 sentences echoing “google sso auto create”
Two sentences beginning with the `GOOGLE_SSO_AUTO_CREATE_` is not a sign of AI generation, it is a sign of quoting code
Only the third match is a genuine "sign of AI generation"
Immediately reminded my of this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810
Essentially another layer and commodity that users will pay more for, as humans value speed and volume over authenticity.
Same reason almost no one writes with pens or typewriters any longer, as they are niche artifacts.
> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same! If they're all being written with each individial's, each company's, own rules and preferences and character that'd probably be nice?
David Foster Wallace famously described writing with a pen and paper instead of a word processor because it forced him to slow down enough to think deeply, which I find very relevant to this whole debate.
There is no substitute for slow thinking. Your brain can’t really “move up the stack” until you understand the layer you’re on. All abstractions paper over important details. All shortcuts are cut short. You cannot produce quality writing without doing the slow, dlaborious work of choosing your own words.
[Edit] Or are you implying that readers should direct an LLM at the entire article and expect an equivalent tool to be produced
* compare pre-LLM and post-LLM writing using 2023 as your index year
* create some 100+ fixed rules rather than a sophisticated model
* use a fixed threshold to kill
Next we need a "Verbose useless content" detector and we'll be set up to GAN the whole internet into https://xkcd.com/810/ "Mission Accomplished".
I would absolutely ignore surveys on this, and pay attention to studies on this (or run your own if you have a mix of slop and human-written articles on your site.) People don't know their preferences.
It's fine to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how they might vote; it's dumb to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how the economy is doing.
people love to openly hate on ai/assisted writing meanwhile https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector reveals a lot of it is being voted up to the frontpage
AI is magical for working with multilingual people in multilingual contexts.
I think and write in English, but I have to operate a lot at complex levels in Spanish, so I do the thinking and writing in English and have AI translate it.
As a writer, it pains me to see my own writing, when I read it back in Spanish, sound like AI.
But there's not much I can do about it, considering hiring a personal human translator for every little thing and who can write in a unique way in Spanish to mimic the native equivalent to my style is overwhelmingly unaffordable and too slow for the every day translation type work.
I had a terribly hard time in school with English, I've spent so much time crying and yelling over my tests and homeworks - and now the great equalizer has arrived, anyone can achieve anything, the sky's the limit (or the tokens).