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Comment by speedping | Hacker News Reader

Entire blog post reeks of LLM. If there was an adequately reliable way of detecting LLM text i'd build a browser extension that would just filter it out altogether.

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Thought the same thing and was surprised how high this was ranking. I wonder if we are starting to look past the LLM stank and into the core of the idea (which is solid in this case)? If HN, a highly discerning crowd, is able to look past it then many other audiences are probably okay with it too

Often people don't even read the article, they just see a headline they agree with and upvote it.

I usually read the comments before deciding if the article is worth my time.

HN isn’t that discerning, lots of LLM-written posts seem to zoom up the feed (especially if they have a good headline). I’m not sure if it is a bad things really; often it feels like the posters here ignore the contents of the link, but come up with legitimately interesting discussions kicked off by the headline.

Agree about the mechanics.

It’s a bad thing if you valued the thoughtful, insightful, well-structured technical writing that used to be behind many highly-upvoted hn links.

Multiple barely coherent LLM-authored technical rambles with catchy titles have been hitting the hn front page daily for the better part of a year.

Exactly, and LLMs cannot describe architectures, period. On the surface it looks coherent, but everything is vague and lacks rigor. Instead of defining concepts and giving them a name, LLMs keep referring to them using vague terms such as "address and key is where the memory is true". What the fuck does that mean? Give each concept a name and explain them.

This has no value because noone can separate what was designed by a human from design details that the LLM made up on the spot. That's fine for one-off generated stuff like web pages, but as a proposed standard for everyone to build on? No.

It's always doors and seams in my case. Ups, downs, peers, whatever but actual terminology used in the spec. It also has the writing guide with examples of good and bad, but it always needs a second pass to actually follow it.

Have you tried Pangram? It’s quite reliable for the use case you describe.

People here give AI detection a lot of flack because it’s problematic if your’re using it, for example, to evaluate student essays and make accusations of AI plagiarism.

But if you just need an occasional sanity check while browsing the web? I highly recommend.

I am a human pangram at this point, it's LLM.

> If there was an adequately reliable way of detecting LLM text

Yes it is and it's not a technical one: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-icons-l...

To point out the completely obvious, the approach described in your link requires compliance on the part of the author.

Given that the author could already have just inserted the text “hey I generated this via AI”, I see absolutely no reason why they’d go to the effort of adding an “AI label”.

There is no reliable way. It is like saying that LLMs can only produce output that is tightly constrained and user cannot control it to go outside of these constrains. If that would be true, these companies could not even dream 1 trillion valuations.

If user bothered to control the output enough that it doesn't reek of LLM it's okay to not mark it ass llm vomit.

As an european, this screams classic EU move for me. It adds bureaucracy for the good actors and do nothing to the bad ones.

The question is how do you detect those who do not comply?

That would be great. Or, for the physical world, combining some kind of smart glasses with the new Pangram image detection which seems to work well on rephotographed data. Like the _They Live_ glasses.

At what point we just start hating LLM because it is LLM?

Honestly I do not care if article was written letter by letter by human or written by agent steered by human.

I care about knowledge and quality, it it is there then it doesn't matter how was it written. I too hate LLM slop but I understand that not everything done by LLM have to be slop.

I think many people are just fed up with the specific voice LLM's tend to write in. Doesn't help many of us now live in a world where most of what we do is read LLM prose in claude code and what not

At the moment it's a good proxy for quality and intention. IF it was mostly generated, it's probably mostly meandering bullshit which doesn't quite make sense.

Yes the style is annoying and bombastic, but the objection goes deeper than that; it's annoying to have someone generate text with an LLM from a small outline or prompt, not even edit it for sense, and dump it on readers.

>At what point we just start hating LLM because it is LLM?

At the point where you read enough LLM written text with zero substance narrating wikipedia article or heard that voice on youtube restating the same thesis over and over for 15 minutes.

The rule of thumb: if I can detect it's an LLM without trying to detects it's an LLM and the feeling doesn't go away, it's a slop.

Hey, author here. I wrote the blog post and of course got assistance by AI to rephrase sections, gather data and do comparison, and make graphics - also because I'm no native english speaker and wanted to improve the writing.

The sections, points, ideas are by me :)

I imagine you probably wrote an outline with the help of Claude on this topic, then got it to generate the article including illustrations based on that, gave it a look over then pressed publish? Did you write any substantial parts of this yourself?

No, you didn't. Claude wrote the entire article and the entire website.

As a native English speaker, please believe me that it doesn’t read well. It reads like Claude or another LLM wrote it. Not only is it Claude’s voice, but the outline of ideas is hard to understand. It’s not a good idea to generate text at a level above your mastery of the language because you won’t know what specific feedback to give. (Similar to the problem with vibe coding and then trying to make it production grade.)

Pangram: 97% of this text is AI.

You are lying.

Fair criticism. To be precise: I dictated the outline, specific sections and ideas, then used Claude to draft and rephrase sections and iterated on it with Claude. I didn't think it mattered, as the points are mine - but I can see people care so I should have said so in the post. :)

I will take this into account for future posts.

I would rather have an extension that blocks all the HN comments that complain about a post reeking of LLM. And probably also posts like this that complain about the complaints about the complaints...

Hopefully there's also going to be a browser extension to filter out people complaining about LLMs.

And filter our LLM slop and sock puppet replies. Looking forward to the clean handful of comments left

I'd say it's more annoying to encounter HN comments that only say "this is AI" than the AI content itself. This article addresses a very important pain point and is trying to approach it at the right level. Of course the authorship is LLM-assisted.

If only there were a filter that could detect these kinds of comments and collapse the thread.

This is such a thought terminating cliche at this point. Is it possible for you to comment on the content of the article rather than just informing us you didn't like the format? It's not helpful

Four different ways, five approaches. Three statements and nine topics .... Every ai slop text has this endless useless crap.

Hey, you either write blogs using LLMs or you get steamrolled by people that do. /s

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