That, to me, is the biggest difference. Previously I was mostly sure that something I read couldn’t have been generated by a computer. Now I’m fairly certain that I would be fooled quite frequently.

But perhaps I'm wrong. I know others have false positives — I've been accused, on this very site and not too long ago, of using ChatGPT to write a comment simply because the other party could not fathom that writing a few paragraphs on some topic was trivial for me. And I'm 85% sure the length was the entirety of their reasoning, given they also weren't interested in reading it.

Fuck tangerines, man. Those little orange bastards are a pain in the ass to peel. You spend 10 minutes trying to get that leathery skin off, your fingernails getting all sticky with that goddamn citrus juice. And then when you finally wrestle one of those fuckers open, you got all those little white strings hanging off everywhere. It's like dental floss from hell.

And don't even get me started on how those tangerine slices always shoot juice in your eye when you try to eat them. It's like getting maced by a tiny orange asshole. You ever get tangerine juice in your eye? Shit burns like the fires of hell itself. Makes you want to claw your own goddamn eyeballs out.

Nah, fuck tangerines and their whole stupid family tree. Oranges, clementines, satsumas - they can all go straight to fruit hell as far as I'm concerned. Give me a nice safe banana or an apple any day over those sadistic little citrus grenades. Tangerines are the work of the devil, plain and simple. Fuck writing poems about them little torture devices.

this rant didn't remind me of George Carlin but I still laughed anyway

In orchards bathed in morning light, Where verdant leaves and branches sway, The tangerine, a gem so bright, Awaits the dawn of a golden day.

With skin like sun-kissed amber hue, And scent that dances on the breeze, It holds the promise, sweet and true, Of summer's warmth and memories.

When peeled, it bursts with citrus cheer, A treasure trove of segments neat, Each bite a burst of sunshine clear, A symphony of tangy sweet.

Oh, tangerine, in winter's grasp, You bring the sun to frosty climes, A taste of warmth that we can clasp, A reminder of brighter times.

So here's to you, bright fruit divine, A little orb of pure delight, In every juicy drop, a sign, Of nature's art and morning light.

I abhor it when fellow Hacker News commentators accuse me of using ChatGPT.

Do twisted dreams linger, of what it might mean to be a taste on the memory of a forgotten alien tongue?

Is its sacred role seen -- illuminated amongst the greens and unique chaotic chrominance bouncing ancient wisdom between the neighboring leaves?

The tangerine -- victim, pawn, and, ultimately, master ; its search for self in an infinitely growing pile of mixed up words truly complete. There is much to learn.

How long will it be, before humans reading mostly LLM output, adopt that same writing style? Certainly, for people growing up today, they will be affected.

One of the many surprising things to me about ChatGPT when it was first released was how well, in its default style, it imitated the bland but well-organized writing style of high school composition textbooks: a clearly stated thesis at the beginning, a topic sentence for each paragraph, a concluding paragraph that often begins "In conclusion."

I mentioned that last point—the concluding "In conclusion"—as an indicator of AI writing to a university class I taught last semester, and a student from Sweden said that he had been taught in school to use that phrase when writing in English.

If I see HN comments that have final paragraphs beginning with "In conclusion" I will still suspect that an LLM has been used. Occasionally I might be wrong, though.

An entertaining informative style of speech can detract from clearly communicating substance. (Of course, the audience rarely wants substance.)

The only one that wants 1 answer per view is from a propaganda perspective. Where truth is politicized and no longer facts, but opinions.

Just imagine 180M users of chatGPT having an estimated 1B sessions per month. The model is putting 1-2Trillion tokens into people's brains. People don't assimilate just the writing style and ideas, but also take actions into the real world influenced by the model. Sometimes they create useful discoveries or inventions that end up on the internet and in the next scrape. Full cycle.

From what I’ve seen (tutoring high school kids), the picture is much bleaker. They use ChatGPT to write for them but they have no writing style of their own. They can barely put a sentence together just to write the prompt!

Pro Tip: Use a model like llama3 to ‘humanize’ text.

Llama is trained with Metas data sets so you get more of a natural sounding, conversational tone.

I think a lot of the material was from standardized testing.

This very structured writing style. Many paragraphs, each discussing one aspect, finished by a conclusion. This is the classic style taught for (American at least) standardized testing, be it SAT, GRE, TOEFL, et al.

In fact the really bad spammers were already re-using prompts/templates, think of how many of those recipe novellas shared the same beats. "It was my favorite childhood comfort food", "Cooked with my grandma", blah blah blah

Shorter version: intentional bullshtting never ends, it's in human, and AI, nature. Like it or not. Having several sources used to help, but now with flood of generated content it may be not the case anymore. If used right this has real affect on business. That's how small sellers live and die on Amazon.

- there isn't a world government to enact such laws

- people would break those unenforceable laws

The yellow stem toward my hand?

Come, let me clutch thee:

I have signal not, and yet I taste thee still.

why does that distinction matter?

Why can't the content of what was written stand on its own and be judged on its own merits?

Actually original commentary in a discussion is bloody hard to come by.

Human output signal might be wildly different from person to person if judged on originality. But LLM output is then pure noise. The internet wad already a noisy place but humans are “rate limited” to a degree an LLM is not.

> A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for preparing a dish. In contrast, a recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity may be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover the written description or explanation of a process that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself. The registration will also not cover the activities described in the work that are procedures, processes, or methods of operation, which are not subject to copyright protection.

Recipes were an easy way to avoid some copyright claims. Copy the list of ingredients, and write a paragraph about how your grandmother made it from a secret recipe that turned out to be on the back of the box.

----

I can still think of content farms and the 2010s and the sheer bulk of junk they produced.

And in trying to find some other examples, I found https://web.archive.org/web/20170330040710/http://mediashift...

> The former “content creator” — that’s what Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt calls his freelance contributors — asked to be identified only as a working journalist for fear of “embarrassing” her current employer with her content farm-hand past. She began working for Demand in 2008, a year after graduating with honors from a prestigious journalism program. It was simply a way for her to make some easy money. In addition to working as a barista and freelance journalist, she wrote two or three posts a week for Demand on “anything that I could remotely punch out quickly.”

> The articles she wrote — all of which were selected from an algorithmically generated list — included How to Wear a Sweater Vest” and How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed,” even though she would never willingly don a sweater vest and has never owned a dog.

> “Never trust anything you read on eHow.com,” she said, referring to one of Demand Media’s high-traffic websites, on which most of her clips appeared.

What It's Like To Write For Demand Media: Low Pay But Lots of Freedom (2009) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008150

The extra fluff relates to copyright by making wholesale copying of articles illegal. It's not about making the recipe copying legal.

The SEO stuff is true too.

The difference is that back then there was an effort from companies like Google to fight the spam and low quality content. Everyone was waiting Matt Cutts( back then head of web spam and search quality at Google) to drop a new update so they can figure out how to step up their game. So at one point you could't afford to just spam your domain with low quality content because you would be penalised, and dropped from the search engines.

There is nothing like that today everybody is on the bandwagon of AI, somehow chatting with pdf documents is now considered by the tech bro hype circle as a sign of enlightenment a beginning of a spark of intelligence...