It's clearest in the conclusion.

I still don’t see it.

I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too.

Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.

I came to this thread hoping to read an interesting discussion of a topic I don’t understand well; instead it’s this

I have opened a wager r.e. detecting LLM/AI use in blogs: https://dkdc.dev/posts/llm-ai-blog-challenge/

I feel like it’s on every other article now. The “this is ai” comments detract way more from the conversation than whatever supposed ai content is actually in the article.

These ai hunters are like the transvestigators who are certain they can always tell who’s trans.

No. These articles are annoying to read, the same dumb patterns and structures over and over again in every one. It's a waste of time; the content gives off a generic tone and it's not interesting.

Are we reading the same article?

Also, you do realize that writing is taught in an incredibly formulaic way? I can't speak to English as second language authors, but I imagine it doesn't make it easier.

say that! that’s independent of whether AI/LLM tools were used to write it and more valuable (“this was boring and repetitive” vs “I don’t like the tool I suspect you may have used to write this”)

So is the vast majority of comments on HN (and in any comment section of any website) well before LLMs came into being, yet we give them a benefit of doubt. Users on forums tend to behave in a starkly bot-like way, often having a very limited set of responses pertaining to their particular hobby horses, so much so that others could easily predict how the most prolific users would react to any topic and in what precise words.

Now, apparently, we have a generation of "this is AI slop!" "bots".

> I will make a bet for $1,000,000!

> I won't actually make this bet!

> But if I did make this bet, I would win!

???

if two parties put up $1,000,000 each and I get a large cut I’ll do the work! one commenter already wagered $1,000, which I’d easily win, but I suspect this would take me idk at least a few days of work (not worth the time). and, again, for a million dollars I’d make sure I win

see other comment though, the point is that assessing quality of content on whether AI was used is stupid (and getting really annoying)

I don't have a million dollars but I'll take you up on it for like a grand. I'm serious, email me.

This is so childish and pathetic it doesn't deserve a response.

why? LLM/AI use doesn’t denote anything about style or quality of a blog, that’s the point — and why this type of commentary all of HackerNews and elsewhere is so annoying.

obviously if a million dollars are on the line I’m going to do what I can to win. I’m just pointing out how that can be taken to the extreme, but again I can use the tools more in the spirit of the challenge and (very easily) end up with the same results

People object to using AI to write their articles (poorly). Your answer to them saying it's obvious when it's AI written is to.. write it yourself, then pretend copy-pasting that article via an AI counts as AI-written?

That's a laughable response.

I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI.

If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.

I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to make a much narrower claim, however: each particular set of models, when not heavily prompted to do otherwise, has a "house style" that's pretty easily identifiable by humans in long-form writing samples, and content written with that house style has a very high chance of being generated by AI. When text is written in this house style, it is often a sign that not only were LLMs used in its generation, but the person doing the generation did not bother to do much editing or use a more sophisticated prompt that wouldn't result in such obvious tells, which is why the style is commonly associated with "slop."

I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational, or that you think the difficulty of reliably detecting AI generated text at scale is evidence that humans can't do pretty well at this much more limited task. Do you also find claims that AIs are frequently sycophantic in ways that humans are not, or that they will use phrases like "you're absolutely right!" far more than a human would unless prompted otherwise (which are the exact same type of narrow claim) similarly conspirational? i.e., is your assertion that people would have difficulty differentiating between a real human's response to a prompt and Claude's response to a prompt when there was no specific pre-prompt trying to control the writing style of the response?

On the other fork where I responded to your claims with a direct and detailed response, you insisted that my comment “isn't really that interesting” and just disengaged. I’m not going to write another detailed explanation of why your “slop === AI” premise is flawed. Go reread the other fork if you’ve decided you’re interested.

> I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational

I don’t believe it’s wildly conspiratorial. I believe it’s foolishly conspiratorial. There’s some weird hubris in believing that you (and whatever group you identify as “us”) are able to deterministically identify AI text when experts can’t do it. If you could actually do it you’d probably sell it as a product.

> believing that you (and whatever group you identify as “us”) are able to deterministically identify AI text

I think you will find the OP said no such thing. They instead said they identified a mixture of writing styles consistent with a human author and an LLM. The OP says nothing about deterministically identifying LLMs, only that the style of specific sections is consistent with LLMs leading to the conclusion.

I think you find OP absolutely did say that.

> Parts of it were 100% LLM written. Like it or not, people can recognize LLM-generated text pretty easily

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45868782

Thanks for adding the quote, that is a different part of the post than I was focusing on.

I still think that's a far cry from deterministically recognizing LLM-generated text. At least the way I would understand that would be an algorithmic test with very low rates of both false positives and false negatives. Instead I understood the OP to be saying that people have an intuitive sense of LLM generated text with a relatively low false negative rate.

I am certain that the skill varies widely between individuals, but in principle there is no reason to suspect that with training humans could not become quite good at recognizing low effort (no attempt at altering style) LLM generated content from the major models. In principle it is no different than authorship analysis used in digital forensics, a field that shows fairly high accuracy under similar conditions.

I am pretty much certain that parts of it were LLM-written, yes. This doesn't imply that the entire blog post is LLM-generated. If you're a good Bayesian and object to my use of "100%" feel free to pretend that I said something like "95%" instead. I cannot rule out possibilities like, for example, a human deliberately writing in the style of an LLM to trick people, or a human who uses LLMs so frequently that their writing style has become very close to LLM writing (something I mentioned as a possibility in an earlier reply; for various reasons, including the uneven distribution of the LLM-isms, I think that's unlikely here).

Human experts can reliably detect some kinds of long-form, AI-generated text using exactly the same sorts of cues I've outlined: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1. You may take issue with the quality of the paper, but there have been very few studies like this and this one found an extremely strong effect.

I am making an even more limited claim than the article, which is only that it's possible for "experts" (i.e. people who frequently interact with LLMs as part of their day jobs) to identify AI generated text in long-form passages in a way that has very few false positives, not classify it perfectly. I've also introduced the caveat that this only applies to AI generated text that has received minimal or no prompting to "humanize" the writing style, not AI generated text in general.

If you would like to perform a higher-quality study with more recent models, feel free (it's only fair that I ask you to do an unreasonable amount of work here given that your argument appears to be that if I don't quit my lucrative programming job and go manually classify text for pennies on the dollar, it proves that it can't be done).

The reason this isn't offered as a service is because it makes no economic sense to do so using humans, not because it's impossible as you claim. This kind of "human" detection mechanism does not scale the way generation does. The cues that I rely on are also pretty easy to eliminate if you know someone is looking for them. This means that heuristics do not work reliably against someone actively trying to avoid human detection, or a human deliberately trying to sound like an LLM (I feel the need to reiterate this as many of the counterarguments to what I'm saying are to claims of this form).

> I’m not going to write another detailed explanation of why your “slop === AI” premise is flawed.

This isn't a claim that I made. I believe that text written with LLM assistance is not necessarily slop, and that slop is not necessarily AI generated. The only assertion I made regarding slop is that being written with LLM assistance with minimal prompting or editing is a strong predictor of slop, and that the heuristics I'm using (if present in large quantities) are a strong predictor of an article being written with LLM assistance with minimal prompting or editing. i.e. I, I am asserting that these kinds of heuristics work pretty well on articles generated by people who don't realize (or care) that there are LLM "tells" all over their work. The fact that many of the articles posted to HN are being accused of being LLM generated could certainly indicate that this is all just a massive witch hunt, but given the acknowledged popularity of ChatGPT among the general population and the fact that experts can pretty easily identify non-humanized articles, I think "a lot of people are using LLMs in the process of generating their blog posts, and some sizable fraction of those people didn't edit the output very much" is an equally compelling hypothesis.

That’s a really interesting study. Thanks for sharing that.

This seems like the kind of thing to share when making a bold claim about being able to detect AI with high confidence. This is a lot more weighty than not so subtly asserting that I’m too dumb to recognize AI.

> a human deliberately trying to sound like an LLM (I feel the need to reiterate this as many of the counterarguments to what I'm saying are to claims of this form).

I assume this is a reference to me. To be clear, I was never referring to humans specifically attempting to sound like AI. I was saying that a lot of formulaic stuff people attribute to AI is simply following the same patterns humans started, and while it might be slop, it’s not necessarily AI slop. Hence the AITA rage bait example.

Thanks for engaging thoughtfully! FWIW I actually looked this article up because I was interested in your claim that even experts couldn't perform these tasks, something I hadn't heard before--I'm not actually ignoring what you're saying. It's actually very nice to have a productive conversation on HN :)

Parts of it were 100% LLM written. Like it or not, people can recognize LLM-generated text pretty easily, and if they see it they are going to make the assumption that the rest of the article is slop too.

I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text. And there are a number of other tells as well.

The reason I don't usually bother to bring these specific things up is that I already know the response, which is just going to be you arguing that a human could have written this way, too. Which is true. The point is that if you read the collective whole of the article, it is very clear that it was composed with the aid of AI, regardless of whether any single part of it could be defensibly written by a human. I'd add that sometimes, the writing of people who interact heavily with LLMs all day starts to resemble LLM writing (a phenomenon I don't think people talk enough about), but usually not to this extent.

This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible to use "this was written with the help of an LLM, and the person posting it did not even bother to edit the article to make that less obvious" as a heuristic to not bother wasting more time on an article.

> this parallel construction

“not A, not B, not C” and “not A, not B, but C” are extremely common constructions in general. So common in fact that you did it in this exact reply.

“This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensible”

> The style is list-heavy, including lists used for conditionals, and full of random bolding, both characteristic of AI-generated text

This is just blogspam-style writing. Short snippets that are easy to digest with lists to break it up and bold keywords to grab attention. This style was around for years before ChatGPT showed up. LLMs probably do this so much specifically because they were trained on so much blog content. Hell I’ve given feedback to multiple humans to cut out the distracting bold stuff in their communications because it becomes a distraction.

Blog spam doesn’t intersperse the drivel with literary narrative beats and subsection titles that sound like sci-fi novels. The greasy mixture of superficially polished but substantively vacuous is much more pronounced in LLM output than even the most egregious human-generated content marketing, in part because the cognitive entity in the latter case is either too smart, or too stupid, to leave such a starkly evident gap.

Is… is this from an LLM? Because this is the first time I’ve felt confident identifying text as no-human-writes-this-way.

Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us. People like you immediately claim that human writing is like this all the time, which it's not. Suffice it to say that if a large number of people are immediately flagging something as AI, it is probably for a reason.

My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.

> Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us.

The thing is, your premise is that you can identify certain patterns as being indicative of AI. However, those exact same patterns are commonly used by humans. So what you’re actually claiming is some additional insight that you can’t share. Because your premise does not hold up on its own. What you were actually claiming is “I know it when I see it”.

Let me give you a related example. If you go to any of the “am I the asshole” subreddits, you will encounter the exact same story format over and over: “Other person engages in obviously unacceptable behavior. I do something reasonable to stop the unacceptable behavior. People who should support me support other person instead. Am I the asshole?” The comments will be filled with people either enraged on behalf of the author or who call it AI.

The problem with claiming that it’s AI is that the sub was full of the exact same garbage before AI showed up. The stores have always been the same bullshit rage bait. So it’s not technically wrong to say it looks like AI, because it certainly could be. But it could also be human generated rage bait because it’s indistinguishable. My guess is that some of the sub is totally AI. And a chunk of it is from human humans engaged in shitty creative writing.

When you look at generic click-bait/blogspam patterns that humans have been using for decades now and call it AI, all you’re doing is calling annoying blog writing AI. Which it could be, but it could also not be. Humans absolutely write blogs like this and have for longer than LLMs have been widely available.

> My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.

It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.

Your “you couldn’t understand” and “obvious to us” stuff is leaning into conspiracy theory type territory. When you believe you have some special knowledge, but you don’t know how to share it with others, you should question whether that knowledge is actually real.

> It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.

LLMs simply don't generate the syntactic pattern I used consistently, but they do generate the pattern in the article. I'm not really sure what else to tell you.

The rest of your post isn't really that interesting to me. You asked why nobody was giving specific examples of why it was generated. I told you some of the specific reasons we believe this article was generated with the assistance of an LLM (not all--there are many other sentences that are more borderline which only slightly increase the probability of LLM generation in isolation, which aren't worth cataloguing except in a context where people genuinely want to know why humans think a post reads as AI-generated and are not just using this as an excuse to deliver a pre-prepared rant), mentioned that the reason people don't typically bother to bring it up is that we know people who demand this sort of thing tend to claim without evidence that humans write in the exact same way all the time, and you proceeded to do exactly that. Next time you don't get a response when you ask for evidence, consider that it might be because we don't particularly want to waste time responding to someone who isn't interested in the answer.