If you turn on HN's "Show Dead" setting, there are tons of LLM-generated comments on stories related to AI. You can see the human(s) behind the LLM trying to fiddle with the style of comment by making them skip proper grammar, capitalization, use or avoid certain phrases, and so on. The biggest tell for LLM content, though, is just the content as a whole: it sounds fake and ungenuine, like it passed through a committee of hostage negotiators to remove the speaker's own attachment/expectations.
They can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.
My big gripe with LLMs is the “high verbosity but low signal” style of their writing. Even the new 4.8 Opus writes like that, it’ll spit out a paragraph of verbiage for what could’ve been one sentence. I’m guessing… because we pay by output tokens? $-)
The uncanny valley of text. It looks and sounds like a human, but lacks the "soul" / humanity that our intuition somehow perceives.
It's really strange... I see some text with obvious tropes and sometimes I read something and there's no obvious AI trope... but it's just not human?
> The uncanny valley of text.
Exactly, that's a great way to describe it.
And yet, while on HN we're critical readers and can still see through it, there's many places on the internet where it just wouldn't stand out. I try to avoid them, but they would just blend in to e.g. youtube comments.
Unless the YT comments I've read have been bots since forever.
i mean, i definitely agree and am somehow allergic to seeing llm written text from other humans (you typed a prompt! why not just post it directly? i'd rather have bad spelling and grammar than llm slop). but... while i feel i can detect it pretty reliably in forums like HN, i can't help but think that this is the toupée fallacy[0] at work. of course, all the text that _i_ think is fake is clearly fake after all
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy