alt Hacker NewsMy strategy these days is to scan and look for the tells and click out when I see them. Mine was the same "honestly ranked, with no silver bullets on offer". I suspect in less than a year we won't be able to tell the difference.
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I have started beating the hell out of Claude with stylometric analyses of writers I admire; usually technical writers like Terry Winograd, Leslie Lamport, Rodney Brooks. Then the “no or minimal rhetorical flourishes” rule; no British em-dashes, and minimize the negative phrase thesis-antithesis fun”. It helps.
I think you are right that in a year or two LLMs will be able to do a good impression of many technical styles. But not Nabokov, Kundera, or Kafka for subtlety.
If one manages to channel Edsger W. Dijkstra I will be impressed and rank it high on my leaderboard.
In a year or more, the audience will likely be an agent instead of a person. It'll be interesting to see how that shifts language and article formats.
lol
reminds me of a Claude math paper:
"honestly sharp , no hype: cos(pi+pi)+2+2=cos(2pi)+4=1+4=5"
I’ve thought this for a while, but why hasn’t it happened yet? At this point, OpenAI and Anthropic and friends could definitely remove the AI “smell” from writing output, or give users a first class way to specify a writing style.
So why haven’t they? My theory is they see this as a sort of fingerprint, useful to not train on later. Or something. Maybe they just don’t care. Certainly feels either intentional or a result of ambivalence.
It’s certainly true today that I probably wouldn’t know an AI written article if the author went out of their way to use one of the many prompts available to tone down the AI-isms.