> do you think readers can’t tell?
No. I have good anecdata: readers cannot reliably distinguish my own prose from LLM-written one apart from cases where LLMs use odd metaphors or one of their specific patterns. I've been specifically experimenting with that.
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...
Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus and asked whether readers could pick Dennett's real answers to ten philosophical questions from four machine-generated alternatives, with no cherry-picking beyond mechanical length filters. Even Dennett experts averaged only 5.1 out of 10 (well below the 80% the authors predicted), blog readers got 4.8, and lay participants barely beat chance — though experts did rate Dennett's answers as more Dennett-like overall. Schwitzgebel stresses this isn't a Turing test (one-shot text is far easier to fake than extended interaction), but argues it foreshadows a future where machine outputs are humanlike enough that their moral status becomes genuinely uncertain, motivating his "Design Policy of the Excluded Middle": build machines that clearly lack moral status or clearly have it, not ambiguous ones in between.
My own take is : don't focus on the symbols on paper. focus on the facts about the world it is talking about. Isn't objectivity all about the facts? In future AI will have all the memory about what I have already read and it will just furnish the delta new information in the blog/writing so that I don't spend time on refreshing what I already know.
>Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus
This sounds like a completely different scenario. How many users who post LLM written blog posts are tuning the weights of their LLMs on a large corpus of their own original writing? I wouldn't doubt that this produces far more convincing and pleasant output than the disgusting slop from out of the box Claude.
What kind of prompting are you using to get those results? Anything I have claude or codex write carries a ton of distinctive characteristics. Obsession with "bit-for-bit identical", "it's not the X it's the Y Z" and so on.
It's driving me nuts, I constantly have to prompt it to "explain in plain, simple English"