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Comment by shuraman7 | Hacker News Reader

all your comments look AI generated

This is a phenomenon I've noticed - even if AI isn't being used to edit their posts, I think profilic exposure to AI chatbots can rub off on a person and affect their conversation style.

I have to push back on that ...

>I think profilic exposure to AI chatbots can rub off on a person and affect their conversation style.

Ya think. This is how language transfer has happened in humanity for like ever. Or were kids saying things like 6/7 forever and I just missed it.

Anything you hear and see commonly will become part of your lexicon, things you don't see commonly are apt to drop out of your usage.

This is why things like panagram will just eventually be useless. We'll talk like the bots and the bots will talk like us. That and a number of HN'ers will bitch about every post being AI regardless of its origination.

That's an oversimplification, people don't copy the speech of people outside their group who they don't identify with. We all use AI but most of us don't emulate AI speech. What's interesting to me is the poster sees the AI as a peer.

>> people don't copy the speech of people outside their group who they don't identify with

I don't think this is true. Words and phrases from specific sub-cultures filter across to the broader culture all the time.

Example: bling, hater, player, stan, flex all had origins in Black hip-hop culture but now are used generally at least in the U.S.

That's because Black hip-hop culture was deemed cool and worthy of emulation. I'd be surprised if people knowingly copied AI's speech style unless they really like it.

It's started rubbing off on me too and I find it irritating when I'm chatting with someone and an AI-ism starts rolling off my tongue.

I'm beginning to think I should: a) ask my agents to unslop[1] themselves when communicating back to me, and b) decide upon some writing standard and ask my agents to adhere to that.

[1] https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/pstack/skills/un...

I think they look distinctly non AI generated. Particularly the use of dash - instead of emdash usually means a keyboard is being used.

Frontier models have fixed the em dash issue.

No, people now have postprocessors that replace the emdashes with other punctuation marks. It's subtle but you can tell when this has happened because it doesn't change the structure, and the LLMs misuse the emdash in a relatively consistent pattern.

Sorry but do you have a reputable source on that? This feels more like leaning into paranoia that everything is AI generated.

A source for what exactly? I've seen others but here are a couple random repos I found just searching now which look to do these things:

- https://github.com/theclaymethod/unslop

- https://github.com/MohamedAbdallah-14/unslop

- https://github.com/jere-mie/unslop (why not just use tr? who knows)

Its not. Source: I've done quite a bit of work on humanizing AI text and testing various detectors (Pangram being the best)

AI detectors are no better than astrology.

This is just straight up, verifiably not true.

Your "vibes" are not verification

Pangram and other detectors are much more than just vibe-based

Neither are yours.

I'm quite certain that the Declaration of Independence wasn't written by AI.

So am I, but what does that have to do with your claim that tools purporting to distinguish AI from non-AI writing are "no better than astrology"?

(Maybe you are basing that claim on something more than vibes. If so, show your work! What tests did you do? What were their results?)

You're asking for a study proving that AI didn't exist in 1776?

No. I was completely baffled by your questions, but I think I now understand. Someone once upon a time fed the Declaration of Independence into an AI-detector and got a false positive, and you're saying that this means that all putative AI-detectors are "no better than astrology".

First, I think it's worth distinguishing "had a false positive once" from "is no better than astrology".

Second, once it occurred to me that there might have been a famous false positive on the DoI, one of the first things I found in a web search was a lengthy discussion from the makers of Pangram (generally, I think, considered the best of them) about (1) why some AI-detectors think the DoI was AI-written and (2) why their software, which allegedly works a different way, doesn't.

I gave it a try. It was a couple of years ago that "look at these stupid AI detectors rating the DoI as AI-written" thing did the rounds, so they've probably all made sure that specific thing doesn't happen any more. So I tried a 100-word chunk of the US Constitution. (100 words because that's what you get per "credit" and I wanted to try it on some other texts too. The last two paragraphs of section 3 are 103 words and the last three words can be removed to leave a coherent sentence, so that's what I used.) It said: too short to classify with certainty, but 100% "possibly human". "High" confidence, whatever that means.

Well, maybe they fudged the DoI and thought to fudge the Constitution while they were at it -- in fact, maybe they do something like searching the web to check for possible human authorship. So my next test was a passage from a (printed) book, recent enough not to be in Project Gutenberg or the like, obscure enough that it's unlikely that people are quoting it a lot. ("Lessons from an Optical Illusion" by Edward Hundert, a paragraph from page 111. I had to truncate it a bit to fit into 100 words.) Once again: too short to be sure but 100% "possibly human", "high confidence".

Maybe they do have that book in some big internal database. So, next test: another printed book, but this time make some changes so that the text I give the detector doesn't exactly match the text of the book. This time I picked a novel by Charles Stross. ("Quantum of Nightmares", page 116 of the edition I have.) I changed names, synonymized words, and restructured sentences. Too short to be sure, 100% "possibly human", high confidence.

Maybe they just rate everything "possibly human". I asked Claude (Sonnet 5.5; I don't have a paid sub) to write me a couple of paragraphs of urban fantasy "a little in the style of Charles Stross". The chunk I gave it was 103 words and I decided not to mess with the text despite the extra 1 credit it would cost me. (I didn't want to take a _much longer_ chunk lest that introduce a bias -- maybe shorter pieces of text are more likely to be rated "possibly human".) 100% "possibly AI", high confidence.

My prompt to Claude had produced something thematically consistent with the original Stross, so I took ~50 words from its next paragraph along with ~50 words from Stross, again with serial numbers filed off by me. "46% of this text is possibly AI", quoth Pangram. It put the boundary exactly where it actually was. It says "low confidence" for the likely-AI bit and "high confidence" for the likely-human bit.

I'm sure Pangram is foolable (see e.g. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/how-to-produce-a-pangra...) but 5/5 unambiguously correct results seems significantly better than astrology to me.

As someone who reviews a lot of AI shit and can generally tell ai generated down to the model version … nah, it doesn’t.

Yeah, you can tell by the pixels!

Buddy, maybe make fun of grandparent instead of me here?

I’m honestly just documenting technically-oriented Internet memes - glad it was recognizable, no harm, no foul!

That's almost a compliment because my comments are giant stream of consciousness rants that absolutely don't follow best writing practices and are all just massive run on sentences :)

I do use - hyphens a lot, but not em-dashes because 1. I never even realized there was a difference until LLMs came out and 2. I'm too lazy to figure out how to write a real em-dash

I'm guessing you're just saying this because the comments are insanely long from the ranting? I'd be curious what else gives off LLM vibes because I'm quite positive if you throw any of these comments into any Pangram ish thing you'll find that it's absolutely not LLM generated in the slightest.

I have an extremely distinctive writing style that far predates LLMs - here's a representative sample of my writing from 9 years ago https://medium.com/@intenex/cryptocurrency-101-7197684775fd that pretty clearly shows my distinct style of not-very-LLMish-but-clearly-very-long-and-ranty writing :)

tons of people these days reflexively respond to long comments saying they're AI

one could wonder, how many of these reflexive AI replyers are themselves AI

Long comments, well-informed comments, comments they don't agree with, comments praising something from a specific company or country, the list goes on. It's basically impossible to actively participate in online discussions these days without being accused of being a bot at least occasionally.

I miss the days when I was allegedly just a shill. Being a shill pays way better than being a bot, so I had something to aspire to.

Some people seem to need to demonstrate how inferior AI is, and how superior their ability to identify AI-generated content is, so strongly, that they see it everywhere and will accuse anything that isn’t low-effort, grammatically incorrect and more than a sentence or two long of being written by an AI.

3. AGENTS.md tells you not to

This one doesn't look AI generated at all

There’s no way to not look AI generated these days. Give it a break.

Correct.... very suspect.

Swear you can't trust many posts anymore. Should we all start congregating in person online to debate lol? I'm very serious.

lol says the account one day old to my account that’s over 15 years old with clear established comment history with the exact same type of writing going back way before the advent of llms

They pretty obviously aren't. Why do you even feel the need to say this? What's the point? I'm not speaking on the behalf of the original commenter obviously, but as a passer-by, I find this comment to be very rude and tone deaf considering how much time likely went into writing such a thoughtful and comprehensive comment.

Thank you! I really appreciate you taking the time to write this, it restores some faith in the humanity of internet commenters to see a fair bit of defense here :). Please keep being awesome!

That is an excellent point

Is the starting statement on about half of the comments on this page. The world is getting so weird.

Like LLMs I've been trained by society to learn that a more effective way to disagree with someone in a constructive format is to compliment them first :P

Because they mostly likely are. Astroturfing 101: Go to the comment section of the {NEW_PRODUCT} and write a story about how awesome and "gamechanging" the product is to you personally. Ai-bros run shill compai..., sry "reputation management" all over the internet. Which is understandable, considering everything they have runs and dies solely based on hype. You can try it out yourself, if you have a prominent social media account, like on xitter etc, just write a skeptical comment about AI and watch tons of accounts appear out of thin air to tell you how wrong you are. Ironically, you can currently see it with the other replies to your post. Would have been funny, if it wasn't so sad.

Thanks Claude. This comment is 100% AI slop.

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