Ironically, this article reeks of AI-generated phrases. Lot's of "It's not X, it's Y". eg:
- "The failure mode isn't malice. It's convenience",
- "You haven't saved time. You've forfeited the experience that the time was supposed to give you."
- "But the real threat isn't either of those things. It's quieter, and more boring, and therefore more dangerous. The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."
And indeed running it through a few AI text detectors, like Pangram (not perfect, by any means, but a useful approximation), returns high probabilities.
It would have felt more honest if the author had included a disclaimer that it was at least part written with AI, especially given its length and subject matter.
But here it is, on the front page of HackerNews. It produced exactly the result he wanted.
Maybe he won't be able to blog himself out of a wet paper bag tomorrow, but people seem to think he's a great thinker today. Isn't that all that matters?
Yes, the overwrought "It's not X it's Y" are signals of LLM involvement. No human uses them like that all the frickin' time. AI loves this construct way too much and cannot really tell whether the contrast is relevant/actually makes sense.
I think I must be an AI. I’ve written those types of phrases a lot long before the advent of LLMs and I love em dashes. LLMs were trained on human text. Where do you think they got these patterns from? Looking at the rest of the text, I don’t see some of the other LLM tells like excessive usage of bullet lists, and repetition of the same ideas over and over using different language.
It’s a well written, engaging article. Why would it need a disclaimer if they used AI on part of it? They’re not arguing against the usage of LLMs.
Those X-Y sentences are like nails on chalkboard to me, but I genuinely wonder why it is so pervasive in LLM arguments. It is like trying very hard to think in binary terms yet failing.
And indeed running it through a few AI text detectors, like Pangram (not perfect, by any means, but a useful approximation), returns high probabilities.
It would have felt more honest if the author had included a disclaimer that it was at least part written with AI, especially given its length and subject matter.