> To those who read broadly, the hand of the LLM is so clear it’s as if the writer’s intellectual fly is open
I dunno, man, according to Hardcover, I've read 76 fiction books this year, and I can't tell. All the "AI tells" fail the vibe check. I'm a writer and I get flagged by many of them.
And according to PhD linguists with expertise in the field, most AI tells are just the equivalent of old wives' tales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA
I vaguely recall that researchers were able to train people to tell, but only for a minority language that AIs likely aren't particularly good at mimicking, and after training.
This whole thing reminds me of how "you can recognize a vegan because they'll tell you." There, you have a ton of false negatives (i.e., since you aren't polling people to find out if they're vegan, you're only flagging the obvious vegans and missing all the regular people who happen to be vegan).
Except here, it's a bunch of false positives and negatives I bet. You don't really have a way of knowing, so you're accusing some people (without complete accuracy) and missing some people (without complete accuracy). But you have no way of knowing, so you're just like "hell yeah, my vibes tell me I'm right."
Research and experts disagree.
I think anyone claiming 100% accuracy is wrong, but the recent Claude models, for example, have a writing style that is sufficiently distinct that claiming people can't recognize it is like claiming you can't recognize the styles of particular famous authors. Yes, particular elements of their writing are going to be used by others, and it's possible to disguise their style or emulate it deliberately, but it's pretty hard to accidentally write like them.