Agreed. It's surprising to see this sort of slop on the front page, but perhaps it's still worthwhile as a way to stimulate conversation in the comments here?
Agreed. It's surprising to see this sort of slop on the front page, but perhaps it's still worthwhile as a way to stimulate conversation in the comments here?
I learned quite a few new things from this, I don't really care if OP filtered it through an LLM before publishing it
Same, but, I'm struggling with the idea that even if I learn things I haven't before, at the limit, it'd be annoying if we gave writing like this a free pass continuously - I'd argue filtered might not be the right word - I'd be fine with net reduction. Theres something bad about adding fluff (how many game changers were there?)
An alternative framing I've been thinking about is, there's clearly something bad when you leave in the bits that obviously lower signal to noise ratio for all readers.
Then throw in the account being new, and, well, I hope it's not a harbinger.*
* It is and it's too late.
You can critique the writing without calling into question how it was written. Speculation on the tools used to write it serves no purpose beyond making a, possibly unfounded, value judgement against the writer.
https://hbr.org/2025/08/research-the-hidden-penalty-of-using...
I think this is both valuable, and yet, it is also the key to why the forest will become dark.
I'm not speculating - I have to work with these things so darn much that the tells are blindingly obvious - and the tells are well-known, ex. there's a gent who benchmarks "it's not just x - it's y" shibboleths for different models.
However, in a rigorous sense I am speculating: I cannot possibly know an LLM was used.
Thus, when an LLM is used, I am seeing an increasing fraction of conversation litigating whether is appropriate, whether it matters, if LLMs are good, and since anyone pointing it out could be speculating, now, the reaction hinges on how you initially frame this observation.
Ex. here, I went out of my way to make a neutral-ish comment given an experience I had last week (see other comment by me somewhere down stream)
Lets say I never say LLM, instead, frame it as "Doesn't that just mean it's a convention?" and "How are there so many game-changers?", which is obvious to audience is a consequence of using an LLM, and yet, also looks like you're picking on someone (are either of those bad writing? I only had one teacher who ever would take umbrage at somewhat subtle fluff like this)
Anyways this is all a bunch of belly-aching to an extent, you're right, and its the way to respond. There's a framing where the only real difficulty here is critiquing the writing without looking like you're picking on someone.
EDIT: Well, except for one more thing: what worries me the most when I see someone using the LLM and incapable of noticing tells and incapable of at least noticing the tells are weakening writing is...well, what else did they miss? What else did the LLM write that I have to evaluate for myself? So it's not so much as somewhat-bad writing, 90%+ still, that bothers me: its that idk what's real, and it feels like a waste of time even being offered it to read if I have to check everything.
Critique of the output is fine in my eyes. If you don't enjoy the style, format, choice of words, etc I think that's fair game even if it's superficial/subjective. It often is with art.
Placing a value judgement on someone for how the art was produced is gatekeeping. What if the person is disabled and uses an LLM for accessibility reasons as one does with so many other tools? I dunno, that seems problematic to me but I understand the aversion to the output.
For example maybe it's like criticising Hawking for not changing his monotone voice vs using the talker all together. Perhaps not the best analogy.
The author can still use LLMs to adjust the style according to criticism of the output if they so choose.
No, I think if someone is passing off an LLM's writing as their own they deserve to be shamed mercilessly. Normally I don't comment on a thread after so long (> 24 hours) but your take is just so bad, I couldn't help myself.
I too find it unreadable, I guess that's the downside of working on this stuff every day, you get to really hate seeing it.
It does tell you that if even 95% of HN can't tell, then 99% of the public can't tell. Which is pretty incredible.
Cheers, it's gotta be the "I see this every day for hours" thing - I have a hard time mentioning it because there's a bunch of people who would like to think they have similar experience and yet don't see the same tells. But for real, I've been on these 8+ hours a day for 2 years now.
And it sounds like you have the same surreal experience as me...it's so blindingly. obvious. that the only odd thing is people not mentioning it.
And the tells are so tough, like, I wanted to a bang a drum over and over again 6 weeks ago about the "It's not X-it's Y" thing, I thought it was a GPT-4.1 tell.
Then I found this under-publicized gent doing God's work: ton of benchmarks, one of them being "Not X, but Y" slop and it turned out there was 40+ models ahead of it, including Gemini (expected, crap machine IMHO), and Claude, and I never would have guessed the Claudes. https://x.com/sam_paech/status/1950343925270794323
Can confirm it's "Not just the GPT's - it's all of the frontier models." who are addicted to that one.
IME the only reliable way around it when using an LLM to create blog-like content is to have actual hard lists of slop to rewrite/avoid. This works pretty well if done if correctly. There's actually not that many patterns (not hundreds, more like dozens) so they're pretty enumerable. On the other hand, you and me would still be able to tell if only rewriting those things.
Overall the number one thing is that the writing is "overly slick". I've seen this expressed in tons of ways but I find slickness to be the most apt description. As if it's a pitch, or a TED presentation script, that has been pored over and perfected until every single word is optimized. Very salesy. In a similar vein, in LLM-written text, everything is given similar importance. Everything is crucial, one of the most powerful X, particularly elegant, and so on.
I find Opus to have the lowest slop ratio, which this benchmark kind of confirms [1], but of course its pricing is a barrier.
[1] https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html
I have an increasing feeling of doom re: this.
The forest is darkening, and quickly.
Here, I'd hazard that 15% of front page posts in July couldn't pass a "avoids well-known LLM shibboleths" check.
Yesterday night, about 30% of my TikTok for you page was racist and/or homophobic videos generated by Veo 3.
Last year I thought it'd be beaten back by social convention. (i.e. if you could showed it was LLM output, it'd make people look stupid, so there was a disincentive to do this)
The latest round of releases was smart enough, and has diffused enough, that seemingly we have reached a moment where most people don't know the latest round of "tells" and it passes their Turing test., so there's not enough shame attached to prevent it from becoming a substantial portion of content.
I commented something similar re: slop last week, but made the mistake of including a side thing about Markdown-formatting. Got downvoted through the floor and a mod spanking, because people bumrushed to say that was mean, they're a new user so we should be nicer, also the Markdown syntax on HN is hard, also it seems like English is their second language.
And the second half of the article was composed of entirely 4 item lists.
There's just so many tells in this one though and they aren'tn new ones. Like a dozen+, besides just the entire writing style being one, permeating through every word.
I'm also pretty shocked how HNers don't seem to notice or care, IMO it makes it unreadable.
I'd write an article about this but all it'd do is make people avoid just those tells and I'm not sure if that's an improvement.
i am desperately awaiting the butlerian jihad ;_;