Ask HN: How can I avoid the "It's not just X, it's Y" writing
Every single blog post now. Half of news articles. All tweets over 140 characters. This sentence structure is everywhere and it's driving me absolutely bananas. It's so obvious to me when something is written by ChatGPT and I find it shocking that people are putting this work out there and thinking it's okay.
3 comments
It's not just LLMs, it's people doing that too— LLMs are trained on real writing in papers published in science, academia, and technology journals, as well as web pages and social media posts.
I've met real hard-working people who have had to change writing styles, because their style is too heavily mimicked by LLMs, so it now takes extra effort to not be accused of cheating.
You can use tools to detect the likelihood of text being written by an LLM, but as mentioned it will have lots of false positives in fields that significantly contributed to training data.
Your best option is to keep track of writers and journalists, who's styles you've appreciated, and follow them on whatever platforms they write for. Journalists often publish to more than one media outlet, and self-hosting platforms like Substack are growing quickly.
I've met real hard-working people who have had to change writing styles, because their style is too heavily mimicked by LLMs, so it now takes extra effort to not be accused of cheating.
You can use tools to detect the likelihood of text being written by an LLM, but as mentioned it will have lots of false positives in fields that significantly contributed to training data.
Your best option is to keep track of writers and journalists, who's styles you've appreciated, and follow them on whatever platforms they write for. Journalists often publish to more than one media outlet, and self-hosting platforms like Substack are growing quickly.
This drives me nuts. Now that people have figured out the em dash, this is the number one way I spot AI text. Not even opposed to writing with AI, but sometimes it feels like they want us to spend more time reading it than they did writing it.
I agree completely and I don't think you can.
Even people recording short form video are doing it. They're reading out their chat-gpt-psychosis induced fever dreams using scripts written by chatGPT.
The 7-part tweets that build to a slop crescendo are doing my head in.
The solution might be some combination of:
1. leave the social media sites where the slop is irredeemable. 2. unfollow everyone, reset your algorithm. 3. be aggressive about who you add back in. Make sure they're humans having high quality discussions. 4. be aggressive about who you block. Lower the bar on blocking - one and done. No chances, no wait-and-see. 5. move to smaller communities of real humans.
None of this has worked for me yet. I'm still swimming in a vast sea of slopity slop slop. Dead internet theory appears to be playing out in front of us.
edit: On threads I've been trying to use their `dear algo` feature pretty aggressively but it doesn't work very well. I've asked it to remove some types of comments and it seems to just add more of them.
Even people recording short form video are doing it. They're reading out their chat-gpt-psychosis induced fever dreams using scripts written by chatGPT.
The 7-part tweets that build to a slop crescendo are doing my head in.
The solution might be some combination of:
1. leave the social media sites where the slop is irredeemable. 2. unfollow everyone, reset your algorithm. 3. be aggressive about who you add back in. Make sure they're humans having high quality discussions. 4. be aggressive about who you block. Lower the bar on blocking - one and done. No chances, no wait-and-see. 5. move to smaller communities of real humans.
None of this has worked for me yet. I'm still swimming in a vast sea of slopity slop slop. Dead internet theory appears to be playing out in front of us.
edit: On threads I've been trying to use their `dear algo` feature pretty aggressively but it doesn't work very well. I've asked it to remove some types of comments and it seems to just add more of them.