Right? This one is also very clear ChatGPTese

> That’s not a marginal improvement; it’s a different way of building classifiers.

They've replaced an em-dash with a semi-colon.

They are really getting to the heart of the problem!

You're absolutely right! They didn't just replace an em dash with a colon, they invented a whole new way of speaking.

/s if it wasn't obvious

One of the benefits of being immersed in model usage is being able to spot it in the wild from a mile away. People really hate when you catch them doing it and call them out for it.

And people like you will hate it even more when the normies immunize themselves from being obviously caught by such tells:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061

Ah ha! But now the complete lack of emdash and bullet pointed lists from antislop will be the tell! Riposte!

> That line sticks out so much now, and I can't unsee it.

I thought maybe they did it on purpose at first, like a cheeky but too subtle joke about LLM usage, but when it happened twice near the end of the post I just acknowledged, yeah, they did the thing. At least it was at the end or I might have stopped reading way earlier.

HN readers: claim to hate ai-generated text

Also HN readers: upvote the most obvious chatgpt slop to the frontpage

The two groups can be different but exist in the same community.

And in fact can intersect.

I’ve been on HN long enough to know that the upvotes are primarily driven by reactions to the headline. The actual content only gets viewed after upvoting, or often not at all.

> Also HN readers: upvote the most obvious chatgpt slop to the frontpage

Eh, this one was interesting as documentation of real work that people were doing over years. You don't get that many blog posts about this sort of effort without, usually, a bunch of self hype (because the company blogging also sells data analysis AI or whatever) that clouds any interesting part of the story. The slop in it is annoying but it's also noise thats relatively easy to filter out in this case

Those phrases definitely stick out quite badly. But this post wasn’t pure slop.

It had high quality info about a large ML effort inside an old school auto company, which is very interesting. I was just a bit disappointed no one thought to edit those out.

If you have genuinely interesting and valuable results to report, but you ask AI to do the final writeup for you and it comes across in that generic AI slop style, is it slop? Kind of a gray area for me. It certainly feels lazy and disrespectful to me as a reader, but on the other hand if they don't spend an afternoon proofreading and revising, maybe they can spend that afternoon instead building stuff. I don't know, our whole concept of the purpose of the written word is falling apart.

Appreciate this measured response. It’s more thoughtful than my reaction, which is to close the article and strongly consider flagging.

That reaction is visceral, but I’ll try to rationalize it:

Words & language are what separate us from the animals. They’re fundamental to what it means to be human. It’s fantastic that machines can now also use these tools, but when you rely on those machines to communicate your ideas you are effectively substituting the LLM’s weighted agglomeration of others’ ideas for a good chunk of your own.

It’s not just disrespectful to the reader, it’s disrespectful to your own mind.

Seems like a very natural fit for fine tuning - would have loved to see more on the LLM side.

It didn't stick out to me because "corporate success story" articles already tend to sound like that, which is at least in part where I imagine the popular LLMs get it from. (The other part being pop nonfiction books.)

I dunno, ending with a short, punchy insight is a common way to make an impactful conclusion. It's the equivalent of a "hook" for concluding an article instead of opening. I do it often and see others (e.g. OpEds) use that tactic all the time.

I think we're getting into reverse slop discrimination territory now. LLMs have been trained on so much of what we consider "good writing", that actual good writing is now attributed by default to LLMs.