Hi! I work at IEEE Spectrum and there's no way an LLM wrote this. We have a pretty strict Generative AI use policy (bottom of this page https://spectrum.ieee.org/about). I'm guessing this is from writers using actual writing techniques that Gen AI stole from...
replyI took my introductory college writing classes at a college I can’t name-drop without sounding like a jerk, which also did a bunch of LLM research over the years. We used a TON of em dashes in our writing. It’s no mystery, to me, where that stylistically prevalent quirk comes from. I’ve definitely been accused of being an LLM bot.
replyI just wanted to relate a story.
replyI was speaking with my 14 year old nephew via messaging last month. It was about a deep topic, synthetic consciousness. He wrote such an intelligent reply that I asked him: hey, was this from an LLM? He was insulted. I did research with his parents and found out that 90% no, he's just a very smart kid.
Is there a name for this this mode of confusion yet?
Strikes me as an opposite of the Uncanny Valley.
replyIndeed. Along the same lines, the recent "humans parading as agents" on moltbook story made me think... what is the inverse of the goal of captcha? That's impossible practically, right?
replydeleted
replySchools have a strict Generative AI policy as well, and yet...
replyIt's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.
replyProbably similar to what I do with my papers and resumes, I write them myself then throw them through LLMs for suggestions and corrections, manually reviewing the output.
replyI didn't see any LLM-isms. Emdashes I guess, but I expect those in actual articles, they're only fishy in social media comments.
replyLLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.
replyI think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
It doesn't read like an LLM to me. What are you seeing?
replyI bailed, it just really kills my desire to keep reading.
replyIronic because IEEE Spectrum has an anti-LLM policy. So your complex about LLM writing styles has indirectly caused you to stop supporting genuine prose.
replySeriously there's no LLM stuff in here. Only emdashed which were used in journalism decades before AI was even a thing.
I feel for you, because moving forward more and more interesting and substantious articles will be written with llm-isms, either because LLM was used directly in writing or because the authors absorbed the style.
replyThe way this article was written, is the standard way these kind of US pop science articles have always been written. It's LLM that absorbed that, not the opposite.
reply