Another thing to consider is that LLMs have become a premier source of reading for the public. If more of what you read is AI generated, how you write is going to be significantly influenced by that.
One (slightly frightening) possibility is that many people write like LLMs even without assistance from LLMs. AI writing may have just become the norm for some. Maybe that's what's happening here.
LLM style is in many ways "The Atlantic from Temu". Nearly every article in The Atlantic sounds the same - I think we all know the cliches I am talking about. This doesn't mean that every author underwent a lobotomy (I hope). It just means there's a group of editors enforcing a common style.
Joining these editors used to take years of training in order to write like they do. Now we have their wisdom available on the command line.
To put it another way: LLMs write in what was considered pretty good style before their proliferation. There are all these examples of people finding "llm cliches" in well-respected authors' works pre-llm (somewhat obviously, if you think about it).
What made pretty good "taste" pretty good was its novelty. Now that pretty good is common it's no longer stylish.
Magazines’ style is generally good but affected, with some distinct quirks mixed in. These quirks have been also picked up in the training and their automated repetition at scale made it weird and "AI-style"
Yeah if you look back at earlier posts on the same blog, definitely not the same style. I'm guessing the author is either lying to save face or has spent so much time with Claude that they cannot distinguish Claude's voice from their own (we're all vulnerable to this).
Just because LLMs exist does not mean people stopped writing themselves. I mean, some people did, but not everyone. It's a kind of AI psychosis to think or suspect that everything is LLM generated.
I think they're trolling us. Their post-mortem is a very AI-sounding (and Pangram-triggering) claim that they're not using AI:
This post reads off as AI slop. You said it, I see it. I’m sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way. If my word means anything to you, I would like to assure you that this post was not authored by a LLM. Nor was it storyboarded, reviewed, checked, etc. by a LLM. Some readers have pointed out that people do not speak this way. That is correct. I do not speak, nor usually write, like this and this post will go down as my not-the-proudest, however, I take your criticism to heart—although not personally—and strive to improve.
I do write like this sometimes. The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines—all of it. It’s just the way it is. A LLM writes that way too, because it was trained on the same essays I grew up reading, so me doing it badly and a machine doing it look about the same to you on the page. That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it.
So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either. It is just me, writing worse than usual. I will write the next one plainer. Next time, write to me. I too am a person behind this screen.
This is so very paranoid. Consider how hurtful your accusations may be.
The truth is that AI generated text is getting harder to detect, and while AI writing is still very lacking, more writing is getting the unwanted distinction of "plausibly written by AI." This was always going to be the natural course of events but plausible shouldn't mean guilty.
We should give more grace. To prosecute each and every mediocre writer in a witch trial with such weak evidence is entirely unnecessary.
Pangram is a complete scam. There is no durable way to detect whether something was written with AI. I've had folks say they ran pangram on my writing and it was "100% AI". Except I don't use AI to write or edit anything I post publicly.
Can you give some examples of your writing that trigger "100% AI" on pangram? I'm very interested in studying pangram's false positives. Especially if it's something published before ~2024
I agree Pangram's UI is awful and often misleading. Their underlying classifier model is pretty accurate in my experience, though, at least in the sense that it has very few natural false positives. If you disagree, please send me some long-form verifiable false positives that were not explicitly written to trick Pangram. I love to learn.
I just sent you a long article which you could not have read in the time it took you to reply. I would suggest you start there and read that article, which outlines several cases where the author was able to create contrived false positives and negatives.
Contrived false positives and negatives could (and should!) always be possible. That doesn't tell us anything about the natural false positive and negative rates, and a lot of people who have actively tried to use voice instruction to get models to consistently fool the detector without iterating against it directly have failed.
Those people should just try posting a big quote from the article to HN, and then see their comment get instantly flagged due to HN's AI detection (which might as well be Pangram)
It's baffling to me how people are so dismissive of Pangram despite never using it, extrapolating their experience from GPTZero or something else.
Saying "more" seems generous. I don't trust Pangram at all, and I also don't trust the author at all. Both can be trustless charletans simultaneously, and I feel this speaks volumes about the state of digital media today.
So you would trust a known writers word over non deterministic software ? I read New Orleans will soon let AI handle 911 calls, Hope the AI believes the calls are from humans :)
All ML classifiers (and algorithms) have a non-zero false positive rate. Having an error rate is baked into every ML classifier and algorithm. And its always non-zero in practice. In fact, hitting every test in some sort of test suite is likely a sign of a less accurate classifier, not a more accurate one.
Can you give some examples of Pangram false positives? Ideally ones from before 2024, or otherwise ones from notable writers who started writing before 2024.
The author is lying. Pangram is no panacea, but every time I have tested my own prose, it says it is 100% human written. Every single passage I tested from this post was evaluated as 100% AI written. The author should just confess; lying about having written something with AI both reveals the author as a liar and confirms that the author knows that it is wrong to pass off AI slop as one's own work.
