logoalt Hacker News

asdffyesterday at 7:55 AM2 repliesview on HN

Don't want to sound like an llm? Don't read llm content. Remove yourself from places where you might be liable to read it.


Replies

raincoleyesterday at 10:04 AM

If you strictly read printed books only and am never exposed to online content, you'd think em-dash is a signal for human writing.

show 1 reply
Arainachyesterday at 8:19 AM

It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.

For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.

If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.

I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1133/

show 3 replies