I was getting strong AI vibes before this but that was the clencher. I do believe it was heavily edited by a human, or maybe "humanized" by Astra.
https://www.pangram.com/history/c150e3e0-7173-4cbb-9b38-41dc...
That being said, does it really matter? It comes off as bad writing. The mixed metaphors are hard to follow and detract from the point.
(ai or not, hn is supposed to be about curiosity and engaging conversation. reading a hundred of the exact same comment every day is not curiosity-piquing, nor does it facilitate good conversation)
I can't tell you how many times I've written "it's not X, it's Y", or "it's like X, but Y", or used em dashes over the years before AI. Probably thousands.
I'm trying to counter this by trying to read more fiction, but for every page that I read, I'm probably reading 50 pages or so of LLM output. So I think this is a battle I'm going to lose out on in the long term. And I can probably only delay the inevitable.
But yeah, I don't like beginning to lose or doubt my own writing voice one bit.
The whole dashes debacle never made any sense, because many people are aware if you press and hold the hyphen "button" on your mobile touchscreen, it presents you options with different lengths you can choose from. That it was ever used as a signifier of LLM-written text meant that it can only show a false positive. For the last 20 or so years, a lot of web designers and content creators were "trained" on Elements of Style and other "best practices" cookbooks. People knew when to use what type of dash through these sources, as it gave a bit more of an elegant look to the presentation.
how are you measuring length?
because tailwind is not mentioned until the very last paragraph, 1900 words into a 2000 word article. and it is talked about for 3 whole sentences.
Yeah that's your problem. I like my em dashes. You don't need to be ashamed of your style just because it got mainstream. Doesn't matter whether it's AI or a fashion fad. It's like liking a music band before it gets popular on tiktok.
You'll be judged for riding in your old Tesla car, because people may think you're a fan of modern Elon.
It may sound like a stretch, but I feel it's virtually the same thing — style.
It's not about shame, it's about your work being dismissed because it's an indicator that you didn't put any effort into it.
Although by the end, the article veers somewhat, and reads more like "I put a lot of effort into my writing, and just because I use AI also doesn't mean that I want to be lumped in with the people churning out AI slop". Which, okay, but that's not quite as noble a position as they seemed to start off with.
Inbred stems from less variety.
If you hang out with the same person, you degrade in personal quality.
If you learn at the same spot, same places, same people all the time, your learning degrades.
Same for the AI, they inbreed and they degrade.
---
I purposefully hangout with people (not all the time still) outside of my circle for that exact reason.
It now occurs to me, non-humorously, that’s what this person and many others are going through with AI: it’s a multi-year fuzz test of their sense of self, their methods for ideation and expression, and their ethical principles on attribution and intellectual property.
Hopefully one of the only ways I'm in a top-10-HackerNews-user list is #7 user of em-dashes before ChatGPT was relased: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
I guess one irony is that while there's many people here bemoaning LLMs as "nondeterministic", for prose in general it would be much better if they acted like such complainers meant rather than the non-determinism being in such a narrow band as to be an instant cliché.
Humans fail at good style more radically than LLMs do, and LLMs are on average better writers than people. But good style requires particularity and history in a way that a model could never achieve with just a filter.
The closest I’ve gotten to getting an LLM to write well was when I gave it an intellectual biography along with its writing assignment. But even that fails over longer context, because attention makes it very hard to build up narrative (even just conceptual narrative) in a compelling way that extends past the length of a short blogpost. Past a certain point you always end up back in the uncanny valley with that weird lack of cohesion and the unjustified contrastives, tricolons, and empty cliches.
In Korea, people call the AI writing style "쇠맛 the taste of metal.(or metallic taste)" They say it tastes like a machine.
When Koreans generally define the metal taste, they usually put it something like this: "The plot is terrible, but the sentences are really excellent and refined."
Generally, unless you're using a fine-tuned local model, sentences with that metal taste are considered refined. So there's this irony where people say writing not done by AI lacks refinement.
In fact, even very famous Korean authors have been caught using AI, but people didn't really notice—they just felt the prose had become very elegant.
Anyway, I'm rambling, but the thing is, AI sentences were basically "learned and erudite" by default. When I entered grad school in Korea, I was taught where to use hyphens, told these were "things you need to learn when writing papers," and learned language techniques while being taught how to write papers—and AI uses those techniques really well. So it's ironic.
It's just a shame that in order to avoid writing with that metal taste, you have to avoid the very vocabulary that used to be recommended.
People who made something their professional life goal to become good at something have their work marked as AI, and even worse, like effortless or slop. Just because a tool has been trained to match that good style or type of output. A good system (tailwind) is not used directly anymore because the LLMs take all the wind of their sails by embedding the knowledge in the model.
This happens all without any form of attribution or compensation.
It’s not nice. But I don’t know what to do about it.