I have considered starting throwing more em-dashes into my writing, simply because I find the whole “this looks like LLM” to be a tiresome comment. Engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen.
I've been pointing out LLM written stuff for months now, and often people ask how I determined it. When they do, I mention all the aesthetic things, and then I usually engage with the content and why the content is bad. In every case the content has been garbage. Usually it's a really bad infodump, in a singular tone, usually oversold, and you can't tell what was important to the original author and what's not. Often the some of the info isn't right. So it's like, infodump with extra labor to read that includes mistakes and masks what the author cared about.
It's just too easy to make garbage content that gets upvoted because it looks good if you skim it and serves as a good jumping-off ground for discussion. Engaging with the content of all the LLM-written garbage is a major waste of time and would make the site not worth it anymore to me.
Like it's already a major drain just to notice the aesthetic tells and then disengage. It's significantly more work to engage, and, AFAICT, around a 0% conversion rate to "oh shit I'm actually glad I read that."
Are you considering making the subject field for your personal emails "FREE VIAGRA" too? People try to filter out LLMs because they're often used like DDoS attacks on their energy.
> ...simply because I find the whole “this looks like LLM” to be a tiresome comment. Engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen.
No. Engagement isn't free, and people need heuristics to figure out what's worth engaging with or not.
If people followed your advice, they'd waste their life conversing with dead-internet bots. And to what end? We're not machines mindlessly consuming and producing text. The our is often produced with a goal that's subverted if the consumer is a bot.
I'd argue this entire HN discussion is proof that whether or not content is LLM generated, people can engage and have a meaningful discussion. I see lots of viewpoints in this discussion.
> And to what end?
The same could be asked of engaging with human commenters on HN :)
I comment on HN because writing is cathartic for me. If the person I'm responding to is a bot, or used a bot to generate it, it doesn't matter. I still stand by what I write. And other commenters can engage with what I wrote, regardless of the provenance of the text of the comment I responded to.
> I'd argue this entire HN discussion is proof that whether or not content is LLM generated, people can engage and have a meaningful discussion. I see lots of viewpoints in this discussion.
People can talk to themselves too. The question is: is that what you want? Talking with a bot has a lot in common with talking with yourself.
> The same could be asked of engaging with human commenters on HN :)
One problem with software engineers is they oversimplify things based on technical factors, missing important characteristics. For instance: oversimplifying a text-based interaction into mere production and consumption of text, then claiming it doesn't matter what produces or consumes that text.
Well it does matter. For instance if you're looking for connection or community with other human beings, a bot is only giving of a false simulacrum of what you want. If you're engaging in politics, trying to convince others with persuasive case for your views, you've just wasted all your time if you were talking to a bot.
> I comment on HN because writing is cathartic for me. If the person I'm responding to is a bot, or used a bot to generate it, it doesn't matter. I still stand by what I write. And other commenters can engage with what I wrote, regardless of the provenance of the text of the comment I responded to.
Have you tried talking to yourself? That seems like it'd give you everything you need.
Well sure. I have a blog that no one reads. That's textbook definition of talking to oneself in public.
> you've just wasted all your time if you were talking to a bot.
Not really. If the person I was responding to was a bot, it doesn't mean that humans can't read the thread and engage similarly. Most of the time when i respond to someone on HN, someone else responds to me with something compelling. I mean this thread is a prime example of that! Your comment I was responding to was a reply to someone else's comment. Let's say that person was a bot and neither you nor I are bots. We're still two humans connecting that wouldn't have otherwise connected if the bot hadn't posted that comment.
>> you've just wasted all your time if you were talking to a bot.
> Not really. If the person I was responding to was a bot, it doesn't mean that humans can't read the thread and engage similarly.
Ok, so you've wasted some of your time, in proportion to how many bots you're interacting with. And the more prolific and capable they come, the more and more time you waste.
You seem to be walking a back your "engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen," statement. If you really stood by it, those humans wouldn't have to have to have read the thread.
That wasn't my statement. I still agree with it though. Humans do need context to respond. We don't respond to comments in a vacuum. We respond with whatever context we have available to us. Whether or not someone is a bot is not a fact available to us. But the comment or post being replied to is. That is material.
In the comment "engage with (or dismiss) the material, not the pen," I understood the material to be whatever content I'm consuming, and not the mechanism by which the content was produced (the pen).
Edit to add: I don't think prolificness of bots has a true bearing on time wasted. I respond to lots of HN comments, written by humans or bots, that don't get responses or votes (ups or downs). But that has always happened since the dawn of social media. That's just how public forums works.
As long as humans are able to consume the content and similarly engage, I don't really think it matters. Again, we're several comments deep on a piece whose origin is very likely a bot. And we're having fun engaging. Or at least I am. You seem smart and I like chatting with smart people.
"What's the current discourse on LLM writing tells as of today? Create a Markdown checklist."
Squishy brain heuristics can't last long enough to matter in this environment. Personally, I created a Claude skill to run this query (with some refinements) and check it against an article I suspect of being lazy AI writing. If it's good AI-supported writing, I probably won't suspect it, and I won't care if it is.
The people trying to fool you with lazy writing run the same list on their outputs to have the LLM fix it.
