“Not fancy security tools. Not expensive antivirus software. Just asking my coding assistant…”
I actually feel like AI articles are becoming easier to spot. Maybe we’re all just collectively noticing the patterns.
I've recently had to say "My CV has been cleaned up with AI, but there are no hallucinations/misrepresentations within it"
I agree that if asked directly, it makes sense to talk about candidly. Hopefully an employer would be happy about someone who understands their weak spots and knows how to correctly use the tools as an aid.
That's because, from what I've seen to date, it'd take away my voice. And my voice -- the style in which I write -- is my value. It's the same as with art... Yes, AI tools can produce passable art, but it feels soulless and generic and bland. It lacks a voice.
I then edit it for tone, get rid of some of the obvious AI tells. Make some edits for voice, etc.
Then I throw it into another season of ChatGPT and ask it does it sound “AI written”. It will usually call out some things and give me “advice”. I take the edits that sound like me.
Then I put the text through Grok, Gemini and ask it the same thing. I make more edits and keep going around until I am happy with it. By the time I’m done, it sounds like I something I would write.
You can make AI generated prose have a “voice” with careful prompting and I give it some of my writing.
Why don’t I just write it myself if I’m going through all that? It helps me get over writers block and helps me clarify my thoughts. My editing skills are better than my writing skills.
As I do it more and give it more writing samples, it is a faster process to go from bland AI to my “voice”
[1] my blog is really not for marketing. I don’t link to it anywhere and I don’t even have my name attached to it. It’s more like a public journal.
As a writer myself, this sounds incredibly depressing to me. The way I get to something sounding like something I would write is to write it, which in turn is what makes me a writer.
What you’re doing sounds very productive for producing a text but it’s not something you’ve actually written.
On the other hand, I’ve had enough conversations with Spanish speakers in Florida like at my barbershop and a local bar in a tourist area who speak limited English and I would much rather have real conversations between my broken Spanish and their broken English than listen to or read AI Slop.
[1] according to this scale, I’m past A1 into A2.1 category now. But I still feel like I’m A1
This flow sounds like what an intern did in pr reviews and it made me want to throw something out a window. Please just use your own words. They are good words and much better words than you may think.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68f0666a-2bf0-8010-9d35-2ac4bdc870...
This article was dated as being written in 2020
https://chatgpt.com/share/68f06775-c570-8010-af7b-29531a22fd...
Original article
https://www.yourmembership.com/blog/tips-effective-board-mee...
I can’t share links from Gemini or Grok. But they both immediately flagged the first one as AI generated and the second most likely human.
I didn’t actually do anything here except told ChatGPT to rewrite it in the form of an article I found from an old PDF “97 Things a software engineer should know” from 2010, then ask Grok did it sound AI generated (it did), ask Grok to rewrite it to remove tell tale signs (it still kept the em dashes) and then I copied it ba k to ChatGPT.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68f06cec-3a20-8010-8178-a69695db16...
With some human editing to make it sound less douchery or better prompting, do you think you could tell?
With some human editing to make it sound less douchery or better prompting, do you think you could tell?
In other words - I did no human editing or even played with the prompt.
For instance, I would have definitely reworded this “a solid meeting isn’t just about not screwing up the logistics. It’s a snapshot of how your team actually operate”
The “it isn’t just $x. It is $y” is something that Ai loves to do.
The larger point is AI is really good at detecting its own slop. Gemini is really good at detecting first pass AI Slop from another LLM and out of curiosity I put a few other articles I knew was written before 2022 to see if it gave false positives.
AI has a voice in writing which youd need to almost completely rewrite every word to remove at which point, why use ai?
Just to be repeat myself, my blog isn’t for marketing, I don’t have any advertising on them, I don’t post a link to it anywhere and I have no idea if anyone besides me has ever read it since I don’t have any analytics. I don’t have my name or contact information on it
Of course I can't speak to the person you mentioned but if you said what you did with respect and courtesy then they probably would've appreciated it. I know I would have. To me, there's no problem speaking about and approaching these issues and even laughing about cultural issues, as long as it's done with respect.
I once had a manager who told me that a certain client finds the way I speak scary. When I asked why, it turns out that they're not expecting the directness in my speech manner. Which is strange to me since we were discussing implementation and requirements and directness and precision are critical and when they're not... well that's how projects fail, in my opinion. On the other hand, there were times when speaking to sales people left me dizzy from all the spin. Several sentences later and I still had no idea if they actually answered the question. I guess that client was expecting more of the latter. Extra strange since that would've made them spend more money than they have to.
Now running my own business, I have clients that thank me for my directness. Those are the ones that have had it with sales people that think doing sales is by agreeing to everything the client says and promising delivery of it all and then just walking away leaving the client with a bigger problem than the one they started with.
I sometimes also ask for justification of why I should change something which I hope, longer term, rubs off and helps me improve on my own.
Sometimes I use incorrect grammar on purpose for rhetorical purposes, but usually I want the obvious mistakes to be cleaned up. I don't listen to it for any of its stylistic changes.
That’s the trade: convenience for originality.
The more you outsource your thoughts, your words, your tone — the easier it becomes to forget how to do it yourself.
AI doesn’t steal your voice.
It just trains you to stop using it.
/a
I feel like when I try writing through Grammarly, it feels mechanical and really homogeneous. It's not "bad" exactly, but it sort of lacks anything interesting about it.
I dunno. I'm hardly some master writer, but I think I'm ok at writing things that interesting to read, and I feel Grammarly takes that away.
I just detest that AI writing style, especially for business writing. It’s the kind of writing that leaves the reader less informed for the effort.
i did not have much time to work on this at all, being in the middle of a product launch at my work, and a bunch of other 'life' stuff.
thanks for understanding.
What OP did was destroy value instead of create it, you can always run it through another LLM with another prompt if you have the input, but you can't go backwards.
From your other comment:
> this went though 11 different versions before reaching this point
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45594554
Seriously, just do things yourself next time. You aren't going to improve unless you always ride with training wheels. Plus, it seems you saved no time with AI at all.
Probably hope it went.
I get the point of the article. Be careful running other people's code on your machine.
After understanding that, there's no point to continue to read when a human barely even touched the article.
Then I had a different thought: perhaps it's a mental defense mechanism at the unease at realizing how plausible it would be for many of us to fall prey to this scam
Anyway. Bizarre.
So really the feeling I get when I run into "obviously AI" writing isn't even, "I wish they had written this manually", but "dang, they couldn't even be bothered to use Claude!"
(I think the actual solution is base text models, which exist before the problem of mode collapse... But that's kind of a separate conversation.)
Claude vs GPT both sound like AI to me. While GPT is cheery Claude is more informative. But both of them have "artifacts" due to them trying to transform language from a limited initial prompt.
The sadder realization is that after enough AI slop around, real people will start talking like AI. This will just become the new standard communication style.
Maybe that’s a good thing? It’s given a whole group of people who otherwise couldn’t write a voice (that of a contract African data labeller). Personally I still think it’s slop, but maybe in fact it is a kind of communication revolution? Same way writing used to only be the province of the elite?
People who cannot write who try to use ChatGPT are not given a voice. They're given the illusion of having written something, but the reader isn't given an understanding of the ChatGPT-wielder's intent.
Chatgpt is hardcoded to not be rude (or German <-- this is a joke).
So when you say, "people will start talking like AI". They are already doing that in professional settings. They are the training data.
As someone who writes with swear words and personality. I think this era is amazing for me. Before, I was seen as rude and unprofessional. Now, I feel like I have a leg up, over all this AI slop.
Authenticity is valued now. Swearing is in vogue.
It's a self-reinforcing cycle. AI sucks up and barfs back up the same bland style and eventually books, articles, news will all look even more bland and sound more AI like. That junk then will be sucked up by the next AI model, and regurgitate into some even more bland uniform format. If that's all the new generation hears and sees, that's how they'll perceive one should "talk" or "write".
> Authenticity is valued now. Swearing is in vogue.
Ha! That's a good point, I like that. Not that swearing is my style (unless I stub my toe), but I agree with the general authenticity point. Maybe until the interns at Google and OpenAI will figure out how to make their LLM sounds more "hip" and "authentic".
The funny thing is, for years I've had this SEO-farm bullshit content-farm filter and the AI impact for me has been, an increasing mistrust of anything written by humans or not. I don't even care if this was AI written, if it's good, great! However, the... 'genuine-ness' of it or lack of it, is an issue. It doesn't connect with me anymore and I feel/connect to any of it.
Weird times.
P.S.: I'm sure many people are falsely accused of using AI writing because they really do write similarly to AI, either coincidentally or not. While I'm sure it's incredibly disheartening, I think in case of writing it's not even necessarily about the use of AI. The style of writing just doesn't feel very tasteful, the fact that it might've been mostly spat out by a computer without disclosure is just the icing on the cake. I hate to be too brutal, but these observations are really not meant to be a personal attack. Sometimes you just gotta be brutally honest. (And I'm speaking rather generally, as I don't actually feel like this article is that bad, though I can't lie and say it doesn't feel like it has some of those clichés.)
But seriously, anyone can just drive by and cast aspersions that something's AI. Who knows how throughly they read the piece before lobbing an accusation into a thread? Some people just do a simple regexp match for specific punctuation, eg /—/ (which gives them 100% confidence this comment was written by AI without having to read it!) Others just look at length, and simply anything think is long must be generated, because if they're too lazy to write that much, everyone else is as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45594554
There's no need to be contrarian. The accusation wasn't baseless.
Regardless, you're reading a lot of things into my comment that aren't actually there, but even if they are, I certainly didn't mean them that way. My comment wasn't about comments where someone sat down and thought about it and took the time to give reasons for their beliefs, it was about comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45596745 that do nothing for the discussion, so that receiving one like that can be dismissed without a second thought.
Well, first of all, I said that being accused of using AI assistance must be "incredibly disheartening". If you read my post and really came away with the opinion that I think being accused of using AI assistance is not a big deal, well, dunno what to say, I pretty much said the exact opposite.
But second of all, I wasn't expressing my offense at the joke you made, and despite what I just said, I basically don't personally care about being accused of using AI assistance to write. I already write weird: I use semicolons pretty frequently in long paragraphs, and sometimes I even use em dashes—though unlike what I've seen from ChatGPT output, I don't tend to add spaces around it. I think I write weird enough that nobody would seriously mistake my text for being AI-generated, especially because to be honest, it's not particularly good. I don't have insecurity about the humanity of the text I write; I've written an inordinate amount of comments on this site, many prior to GPT-2 existing, and they're all probably pretty stylistically consistent, so I think I'm somewhat grandfathered in.
What I was expressing was disappointment that you came around to scold people for making baseless accusations when, in my opinion, the accusations were in fact not baseless. You questioned how "thoroughly" they read the piece. Well, I mean, I read the entire piece, it wasn't that long, and I came away agreeing with the comment I ultimately replied to. I'm definitely more offended by the idea of being accused of having made a baseless accusation than the idea that my text was actually written by ChatGPT or Gemini or something.
> (Also https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-looks-shopped)
Yes, I know. It's an old meme by Internet standards, but not one I would forget easily.
> My comment wasn't about comments where someone sat down and thought about it and took the time to give reasons for their beliefs, it was about comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45596745 that do nothing for the discussion, so that receiving one like that can be dismissed without a second thought.
Look, when someone replies bluntly to me, I tend to reply bluntly back. I get that you added some memes and an xkcd reference, but I still took your comment to be rather blunt due to what it was insinuating about me and the person I was replying to. I'm not foaming at the mouth or anything, it's totally fine. (You know, "please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.") With that having been said: you really have to acknowledge the fact that it's not fair to get mad at me for reading your comment in the context of the comment you actually replied to (mine) rather than the comment someone else made in a different part of the thread that you didn't. I know that replying higher up the comment stack is kind of important if you want your comment to actually be read by anyone on HN, but if that results in your comment being in the completely wrong place, you can't get too mad at people for being baffled by it.
If what you wanted to do was reply to a comment you thought was not constructive, then you should've picked one, or perhaps simply flagged it. I realize there's little to no satisfaction in flagging a comment, but if you really think it isn't productive, it's the best way to vote for that.
It’s sort of the personal equivalent of tacky content marketing. Usually you’d never see an empty marketing post on the front page, even before AI when a marketer wrote them. Now the same sort of spammy language is accessible to everyone, it shouldn’t be a reason for such posts to be better tolerated
Rather, do we want to ban posts with specific format? I don’t know how that will end. So far, marketing hasn’t been a problem because people notice them, and don’t interact with them, and then they are not in front page.
A bunch of these have been showing up on HN recently. I can't help but feel that we're being used as guinea pigs.
He is a freelance full stack dev that “dabbles”, but his own profile on his blog leaves the tech stack entry empty?
Another blog post is about how he accidentally rewired his mind with movies?
Also, I get that I’m now primed because of the context, but nothing about that linkedin profile of that AI image of the woman would have made me apply for that position.
Lately, has everyone actually seen that image of the woman standing in front of the house??? I sure have not and it’s unlikely anyone has in post-AI world. Sounds more like AI appeal to inside knowledge go build report.
After I read this article, I thought this whole incident is fabricated and created as a way to go viral on tech sites. One immediate red flag was: why would someone go to these lengths to hack a freelancer who's clearly not rich and doesn't have millions in his cryptowallet. And how did they know he used Windows? Many devs don't.
Ah, you might say, maybe he is just one of the 100 victims. Maybe but we'd hear from them by now. There's no one else on X claiming to have been contacted by them.
Anyway, I'm highly skeptical of this whole incident. I could be wrong though :)
It's been a thing for a while. I saw the title, was like "Hmm, Hacker News is actually late to the party for once".
I think I first heard about it on Coffeezilla video or something.
Like… yes running a process is going to have whatever privileges your user has by default. But I’ve never once heard someone say “full server privileges” or “full nodejs privileges”…. It’s just random that is not necessarily wrong but not really right either.
* Not X. Not Y. Just Z.
* The X? A Y. ("The scary part? This attack vector is perfect for developers.", "The attack vector? A fake coding interview from")
* The X was Y. Z. (one-word adjectives here).
* Here's the kicker.
* Bullet points with a bold phrase starting each line.
The weird thing is that before LLMs no one wrote like this. Where did they all get it from?
But also, over the last three years people have been using AI to output their own slop, and that slop has made its way back into the training data for later iterations of the technology.
And then there's the recent revelation (https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison , which I got from HN) that it might not actually take a whole lot of examples in the data for an LLM to latch onto some pattern hard.
If we had really good AI writing, I wouldn't mind if poor authors used that to improve how they communicate. But today's crop of AI are not that good writers.
- The class of threat is interesting and worth taking seriously. I don't regret spending a few minutes thinking about it.
- The idea of specifically targeting people looking for Crypto jobs from sketchy companies for your crypto theft malware seems clever.
- The text is written by AI. The whole story is a bit weird, so it's plausible this is a made up story written by someone paid to market Cursor.
- The core claim, that using LLMs protect you from this class of threat seems flat wrong. For one thing, in the story, the person had to specifically ask the LLM about this specific risk. For another, a well-done attack of this form would (1) be tested against popular LLMs, (2) perhaps work by tricking Cursor and similar tools into installing the malware, without the user running anything themselves, or (3) Hide the shellcode in an `npm` dependency, so that the attack isn't even in the code available to the LLM until it's been installed, the payload delivered, and presumably the tracks of the attack hidden.
My sense is that the attack isn't nearly as sophisticated as it looks, and the attackers out there aren't really thinking about things on this level — yet.
> Hide the shellcode in an `npm` dependency
It would have to be hidden specifically in a post-install script or similar. Which presumably isn't any harder, but.
Maybe that shouldn’t bother me? Like, maybe the author would never have had time to write this otherwise. And the anecdote is something I’m glad they’re sharing.
But, is it so much to ask that they just sit down and write it so I don’t get that AI feel? Maybe it is, I mean I shouldn’t ask other people to work for free… but if it was me I would want to write it myself…