News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by monooso on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @07:36AM (#47673595)
That's just writing. I frequently write like that.

This insistence that certain stylistics patterns are "tell-tale" signs that an article was written by AI makes no sense, particularly when you consider that whatever stylistic ticks an LLM may possess are a result of it being trained on human writing.

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by oscaracso on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @08:19AM (#47674110)
I am reminded of the Simpsons episode in which Principal Skinner tries to pass off the hamburgers from a near-by fast food restaurant for an old family recipe, 'steamed hams,' and his guest's probing into the kitchen mishaps is met with increasingly incredible explanations.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by croemer on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @07:45AM (#47673697)
These are just some of the good examples I found.

My hunch that this is substantially LLM-generated is based on more than that.

In my head it's like a Bayesian classifier, you look at all the sentences and judge whether each is more or less likely to be LLM vs human generated. Then you add prior information like that the author did the research using Claude - which increases the likelihood that they also use Claude for writing.

Maybe your detector just isn't so sensitive (yet) or maybe I'm wrong but I have pretty high confidence at least 10% of sentences were LLM-generated.

Yes, the stylistic patterns exist in human speech but RLHF has increased their frequency. Also, LLM writing has a certain monotonicity that human writing often lacks. Which is not surprising: the machine generates more or less the most likely text in an algorithmic manner. Humans don't. They wrote a few sentences, then get a coffee, sleep, write a few more. That creates more variety than an LLM can.

Fun exercise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AI_or_not_quiz

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by monooso on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @07:57AM (#47673831)
Here's an alternative way of thinking about this...

Someone probably expended a lot of time and effort planning, thinking about, and writing an interesting article, and then you stroll by and casually accuse them of being a bone idle cheat, with no supporting evidence other than your "sensitive detector" and a bunch of hand-wavy nonsense that adds up to naught.

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by kenjackson on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @08:59AM (#47674632)
While I agree with the sentiment, using AI to write the final draft of the article isn’t cheating. People may not like it, but it’s more a stylistic preference.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by TylerE on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @03:32PM (#47680240)
Using AI and a human byline is 100% cheating.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by josephg on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @11:00PM (#47684480)
Yeah I agree. Don't tell me you authored something when claude did the majority of the writing. Use claude if you want, but don't pretend you wrote the content when you didn't.

I also hate this style of plastic, pre-digested prose. Its soulless and uninteresting. Maybe I've just read too much AI slop. I associate this writing style with low quality, uninteresting junk.

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by bookofjoe on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:06AM (#47674746)
Yet another way the mere possibility of AI/LLM being involved diminishes the value of ALL text.

If there is constant vigilance on the part of the reader as to how it was created, meaning and value become secondary, a sure path to the death of reading as a joy.

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by xmcqdpt2 on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:18AM (#47674939)
To start, this is more or less an advertising piece for their product. It's pretty clear that they want to sell you Allium. And that's fine! They are allowed! But even if that was written by a human, they were compensated for it. They didn't expend lots of effort and thinking, it's their job.

More importantly, it's an article about using Claude from a company about using Claude. I think on the balance it's very likely that they would use Claude to write their technical blog posts.

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by monooso on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:22AM (#47675011)
> They didn't expend lots of effort and thinking, it's their job.

Your job doesn't require you to think or expend effort?

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by NetMageSCW on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:55AM (#47675445)
Those aren’t good examples - that’s just LLMs living for free in your head.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by gcr on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @07:37AM (#47673606)
See also: “I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me” by Marcus Olang', https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

For what it’s worth, Pangram reports that Marcus’ article is 100% LLM-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/640288b9-e16b-4f76-a730-8000...

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by croemer on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @07:50AM (#47673750)
In theory, wouldn't be too hard be to settle the question if whether he used ChatGPT to write it: get Olang to write a few paragraphs by hand, then have people judge (blindly) if it's the same style as the article. Which one sounds more like ChatGPT.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by embedding-shape on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @08:23AM (#47674158)
The times I've written articles, and those have gone through multiple rounds of reviews (by humans) with countless edits each time, before it ends up being published, I wonder if I'd pass that test in those cases. Initial drafts with my scattered thoughts usually are very different from the published end results, even without involving multiple reviewers and editors.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by jmalicki on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @11:26AM (#47676843)
When people judge blindly, the are more likely to think the human is the AI and the AI is the human.

73% judged GPT 4o to be the human.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

Not only are people bad at judging this, but are directionally wrong.

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by nothinkjustai on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @12:52PM (#47678170)
There is research showing the contrary that is far more convincing:

> Our experiments show that annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks excel at detecting AI-generated text, even without any specialized training or feedback. In fact, the majority vote among five such “expert” annotators misclassifies only 1 of 300 articles, significantly outperforming most commercial and open-source detectors we evaluated even in the presence of evasion tactics like paraphrasing and humanization.

https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v2

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by croemer on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @01:03PM (#47678292)
Great find, I've submitted this preprint as a standalone item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678270
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by 360MustangScope on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @07:45AM (#47673696)
I hate that I can’t write em dashes freely anymore without people accusing the writing of being AI generated.

Even though they are perfect for usage in writing down thoughts and notes.

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by croemer on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @07:48AM (#47673725)
I have nothing against em dashes. As long as your writing is human, experienced readers will be able to tell it's human. Only less experienced ones will use all or nothing rules. Em dashes just increase the likelihood that the text was LLM generated. They aren't proof.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by brookst on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:08AM (#47674778)
That nuance is lost on the majority of anti-AI folks who’ve learned they get positive social reactions by declaring essentially everything to be AI written and condemnable.

“An em dash… they’re a witch!”… “it’s not just X, it’s Y… they’re a witch!”

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by andersonpico on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:43AM (#47675281)
> anti-AI folks who’ve learned they get positive social reactions by declaring essentially everything to be AI written and condemnable.

that's a strawman alright; all the comments complaining how they can't use their writing style without being ganged up on are positive karma from my angle, so I'm not sure the "positive social reactions" are really aligned with your imagination. Or does it only count when it aligns with your persecution complex?

Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by NetMageSCW on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:58AM (#47675492)
You have the same problem apparently. You think it’s okay to go witch hunting and accuse people with no real evidence.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by NetMageSCW on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:57AM (#47675467)
Evidently there are no experienced readers who post AI accusations.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by gopher_space on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @12:40PM (#47677991)
Same weight as "there are no experienced men who'll ask a woman if she's pregnant."
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by d1sxeyes on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:24AM (#47675033)
One thing you can try⸺admittedly it's not quite correct⸺is replacing them with a two-em dash. I've never seen an AI use one, and it looks pretty funky.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by Majromax on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @10:46AM (#47676265)
Since the advantage of standards is that there are so many to choose from, one lesser-used but still regionally acceptable approach (e.g. https://www.alberta.ca/web-writing-style-guide-punctuation#j...) is to use en-dashes offset with spaces.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by NetMageSCW on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:56AM (#47675462)
Why do you care what others accuse you of?
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by brookst on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @09:04AM (#47674715)
I’m so glad the witch hunt has moved on to phrasing so I get less grief for my em dashes.
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by nothinkjustai on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @12:50PM (#47678134)
No, it’s pretty obviously AI written. Not sure why you’re running so much interference for them…are you affiliated with this company?
Re:We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance co... by aionwikipedia on Saturday April 11, 2026 @02:36PM (#47732913)
This is a myth. At least one study (Juzek/Ward) has shown that these stylistic patterns do not appear nearly as often either in well-known datasets of English language -- including datasets restricted to specific dialects of English. They don't even appear as often in text generated by raw language models. When they start showing up is after the model has undergone RLHF. Think of the Fermi paradox: if there are all these people who write like AI, then where are they?

AI writing also tends to show these indicators over and over, consistently, over passages of text. It is very hard for humans, even if they are really familiar with AI writing, to be that consistent, and almost impossible for them to be that consistent for more than a sentence or two. Writing a long blog post by hand that is believably "AI-written" takes the amount of purposeful skill you'd need to forge an entire painting or ancient document.

The problem is that people either look for the wrong things, look for obsolete things ("delve" is dead and modern LLMs have killed it), or extrapolate things from indicators that are extremely narrow and specific.