astro-lizard
an hour ago
Distracted by the LLM-generated style of writing. Not sure whether the author truly writes like that (unlikely) or there was heavy AI assistance in drafting this.
0xWTF
an hour ago
What prompt would you use to generate this? I don't see it.
dang
an hour ago
I have no idea about the current article, and given that the author is the person with the first commit in the Kubernetes repo (https://joe.dev/about/), he obviously has a lot of credibility.
Just generally though: what we're seeing a ton of these days is people writing something and then passing it to an LLM with a request to improve it somehow, e.g. by fixing grammar, tightening the style, etc. In such cases, the answer to your question is that the "prompt" is (1) a first draft, and (2) an instruction to edit it.
It's clear, though, that the LLMs leave far more imprints on the text than most people realize, and that although they may have asked the LLM to restrict its edits to "just" X or Y, the actual changes to the text will often go beyond that.
How this will evolve over time is anyone's guess, of course.
kshacker
an hour ago
I do this so many times. Type in a large amount of text and the only thing final in my mind is para breaks and the idea per paragraph. And then give it to AI saying "sending to director", "sending to friends on WhatsApp group", "sending to colleagues" and it does an awesome job of bringing the "AI polish" and then you edit or negotiate line by line or para by para on what you want to keep.
dang
an hour ago
Yes, this is certainly common, and opinions and tastes differ about the outcomes—as they should, because we are all still in the early stage of sorting through the best way to use these tools. I think it's also already clear that "best way" means something different in different contexts.
Where some people are getting into trouble, at least in the HN context, is underestimating the impact that this has on their text. There's a big perception gap between the author's view ("fixed up the grammar a bit") and the reader's view ("this sounds entirely like an AI wrote it") in many cases. So many, in fact, that I feel I can say something about it. I'm no authority on any of this and don't want to sound like one, but this is such a common pattern at the moment that I feel confident reporting it. How it will change over time, I have no idea.
(I also don't want to sound anti-LLM - we rely on these tools heavily, they're amazing, they've already improved HN, and they show every sign of high potential to improve it further. The bottleneck isn't the LLMs, it's how quickly we can figure out how to use (and test) them. We just don't use them to process any text that we put on HN itself.)
autoexec
an hour ago
"Turn this outline/lose idea for an article/4 paragraphs of text into a blog post similar to these previous blog posts, but make sure that this one has a table of contents and a bunch of references"
zerobees
an hour ago
It reads that way and Pangram says it's AI. And my experience says that if you see an AI-related headline on HN, there's a 50%+ chance that it is AI-generated and meant mostly for clicks.
Barbing
an hour ago
Recent Pangram feedback on HN:
>Have you tried putting known human writing into pangram? I have. I've gotten 100% AI with multiple samples of my own human writing. It has also given me 50% on things I know were 100% AI written (from my prompts).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326698
>Pangram is basically a made-up number. / I've tried it on large docs I've written well before the AI times, and that are nowhere available on the Internet (so it can't be a corpus issue) - and it is happily classifying me as 60%-80% AI.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378226
Two of my own thoughts:
Unfortunate there's an incentive to pay to sign up to protect oneself against false accusations.
An earlier claim in this thread stated 100% from the same tool, but another commenter claims 76%, so apparently the tool is even susceptible to that failure mode.
zerobees
37 minutes ago
Skepticism against AI text detectors on HN is as old as time, and frequently comes from people with some vested interest in filling up the internet with slop when you look at their business ideas / projects / blogs. I've done systematic testing on human and LLM-generated text and I'm confident that the accuracy is higher than 95% (and that <5% is almost exclusively false negatives).
You shouldn't crucify people based on this alone, but if it reads like AI, quacks like AI, and is detected as AI, it's probably AI.
Barbing
17 minutes ago
>Skepticism against AI text detectors on HN is as old as time
Since early 2023 or so, when the detectors were widely reported (off platform) as unreliable?
>and frequently comes from people with some vested interest in filling up the internet with slop
I'm sure sometimes.
At least once, has come from someone who recently philosophized about whether to call out the specifics of AI writing in the first place given the potential for aiding labs in their training missions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326913
>I've done systematic testing
You in the field?
>but if it reads like AI
Actually didn't to me, and I'd like to think my detector's no worse than the average for a commenter here... perhaps as we'd all :)