Hi! I work at IEEE Spectrum and there's no way an LLM wrote this. We have a pretty strict Generative AI use policy (bottom of this page https://spectrum.ieee.org/about). I'm guessing this is from writers using actual writing techniques that Gen AI stole from...
I took my introductory college writing classes at a college I can’t name-drop without sounding like a jerk, which also did a bunch of LLM research over the years. We used a TON of em dashes in our writing. It’s no mystery, to me, where that stylistically prevalent quirk comes from. I’ve definitely been accused of being an LLM bot.
I was speaking with my 14 year old nephew via messaging last month. It was about a deep topic, synthetic consciousness. He wrote such an intelligent reply that I asked him: hey, was this from an LLM? He was insulted. I did research with his parents and found out that 90% no, he's just a very smart kid.
Is there a name for this this mode of confusion yet?
He was insulted on two counts. Firstly doubting his intelligence. Secondly the insinuation of deception: "You aren't that smart, surely you cheated."
The insulting didn't end there. You asked his parents! Even then you only landed at 90%, yet another insult because why can't he earn 100%? Ethical dilemmas on all sides!
Indeed. Along the same lines, the recent "humans parading as agents" on moltbook story made me think... what is the inverse of the goal of captcha? That's impossible practically, right?
Yes, suspected LLM is mimicry passing under the turning test,encheapened by poor editing, further encheapened by even poorer training. It is going to get both worse,and better at the same time. (I grew up with ELIZA.BAS, and used to easily spot fakes, and it is getting both easier and harder. ) I detest the words of LLM, but not the M. It's a statistical model. It is a very large language statistical model - that is constantly fooling slower hoomins.
That policy doesn't explicitly disallow writers from using LLMs as part of their process, nor does it mention reviewing submissions for content that could be LLM-generated.
I like some of the ideas in the article but there are some very "it wasn't just A, it was B" sentences in there. IEEE has a higher standard.
It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.
Probably similar to what I do with my papers and resumes, I write them myself then throw them through LLMs for suggestions and corrections, manually reviewing the output.
LLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.
I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
Ironic because IEEE Spectrum has an anti-LLM policy. So your complex about LLM writing styles has indirectly caused you to stop supporting genuine prose.
Seriously there's no LLM stuff in here. Only emdashed which were used in journalism decades before AI was even a thing.
I feel for you, because moving forward more and more interesting and substantious articles will be written with llm-isms, either because LLM was used directly in writing or because the authors absorbed the style.
The way this article was written, is the standard way these kind of US pop science articles have always been written. It's LLM that absorbed that, not the opposite.
