EDIT: Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.
I do not think the author genuinely used an LLM to write the post.
> Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.
Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning was up to the reader to decided.
> Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning was up to the reader to decided.
"Not long ago"? Not everyone in the past ascribed to death of the author, and not everyone in the present rejects it. But even so, evaluation of meaning is different from evaluation of merit. If an author only wants praise for their work, they would be advised not to post it publicly.
Art and its meaning are in the eyes of the reader, yes, but when you live in a version of the Library of Babel where every book is properly spelled and punctuated, seeking meaning in what you read is a great way to waste your life.
Soon there's only going to be one way to prove you're human online: Write with an eloquent combination of hate speech, racial slurs, and offensive language.
There is a little something self important about the type of person that performs the role of defending forums and sub reddits from unknowingly reading something written by an AI, and so concerned that some other person will mistakenly do the same to their own Unicode-shaped gems, and therefore obsess so much more over the surface style than any other detail.
lowercase, maybe, but not em dashes.
I also like Will's "em-dash disclosure" on his about page:
> I like em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and hyphens (-), and I know how to type them. I also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I didn’t know how to type one… until now. I believe that footnotes and sidenotes are superior to endnotes, appreciate the occasional fleuron, and at one point in my life, I knew what a colophon was.
> All of this is to say: the words, punctuation marks, misspellings, and opinions on this site are my own.
Discerning readers do not stop at the em dash. At least, I don't.
Neurodiverse people have been running this gauntlet forever. Your pacing is too flat or too intense. Your vocabulary is too formal or too casual. You don't make eye contact correctly. You're either masking so hard you're invisible, or you're visibly yourself, and people assume something is broken.
The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human is to pass your writing through an LLM. That maps onto something a lot of us already live. The only way to seem normal is to perform a version of yourself that isn't quite you.
One should ask oneself: How many insults to the intelligence and creativity of an unexpectedly excelling student (that hasn't used AI) is it worth catching the shortcut-taking, LLM-using student? Is it 1/10? 1/1000? How much "demotivation of an unexpectedly excelling student" is the "rightful punishment of the cheating LLM using student" worth? And what is the exact cost of a false negative (letting the LLM using student off the hook)?
In other words, where on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve do you want to sit, as a teacher? I imagine it's quite the dilemma.
They indicated that while they worked closely together while learning the material, they weren’t stealing from each other. I believed them then, and still believe them now, but I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with today’s AI world.
And the everyday troll, seeing a less than perfect word choice or awkward turn of phrase will drop a comment like:
L0l d0 J00 3V3N 41So, the plot twist was somewhat refreshing. Who/what wrote the post seems besides the point.
What does it tell you about you whether it does or does not matter?
It’s art to me. But is it Art capital A?
What have we created?
For better or worse, my first version of any post tends to contain quite a few typos. It usually takes a few train rides of re-reading the post and making notes of the typos, then fixing them and pushing the changes once I get home, before most of them get weeded out. So there is at least one rather low grade indicator that the writing is coming from an imperfect human brain. I also double-space between sentences which can be another low grade indicator for people who care to 'view source'.
But even so, I find myself increasingly wary that something I wrote might be mistaken for LLM output. It is a nagging worry that has slightly dampened the joy of writing. I very well understand why people have become more suspicious about LLM-generated writing. But I do hope that once things settle down perhaps in a few years, the current hair trigger suspicion will ease and that people who still handcraft their blogs will not feel a persistent sense of suspicion lingering over their work.
I am actually trying to build ways to prove you are human properly. I wrote about it on my blog: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
Play it completely straight and earnest, which is itself the joke:
"I found it moving. The em dash section in particular."
Lean into the irony of Claude analyzing a piece about resisting Claude:
"Structurally sound. The constraints section especially resonated. I suggested a few edits but was told no."
Claude as the unreliable narrator who missed the point:
"Great post! Very relatable. Here are five ways to make your writing more accessible to a general audience."
Claude performing the exact AI-voice from the italicized ending:
"Here's my response written in a stylized way that will appeal to highly technical readers. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
This last one is probably the sharpest — it mirrors the piece's own punchline back at itself, which means you're not explaining the joke, you're extending it. The writer would recognize it immediately, and HN readers who read the post would too. Anyone who didn't read it gets a weird non-sequitur, which is also fine.
The risk with any of these is length — the opener ("I asked Claude how it felt about this:") is doing a lot, so the payoff should be short. One or two sentences maximum.
confession time. i read the post once. then twice. the em dashes whispered secrets to people clearly smarter than me. somewhere between complement and compliment i accepted defeat. a quiet tab switch. a small prompt. a large language model clearing its throat.
it explained things patiently. suspiciously patiently. step by step, like a machine that has explained the same thing to ten thousand confused readers before breakfast.
so yes. irony noted. to understand a text about hiding machine fingerprints, i borrowed a machine.
the explanation made sense though. unsettlingly structured. bullet-point neat, internally consistent, statistically likely to be correct. you know the type.
anyway—great post. very human. extremely human.
is there anything else i can help you with?
it's a nearly useless shadow alphabet
and we can dispense with much other punctuation
if we simply structure text semantically
"Here's my response written in a stylized way that will appeal to highly technical readers. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Interesting piece though.