That said, some specific things that feel very AI-y are the mostly short, equally-sized paragraphs with occasional punchy one-sentence paragraphs interspersed between them; the use of bold when listing things (and the number of two-element lists); there are a couple of "it's not X, it's Y"-style statements; one paragraph ends with an "they say it's X, but it's actually Y" construct; and even the phrasing of some of the headings.
None of these are necessarily individually tells of AI writing (and I suspect if you look through my own comments and blog posts on various sites, you'd find me using many of the same constructs, because they're all either effective rhetorically, or make the text clearer and easier to understand). But there's something about the concentration of them here that feels like AI - the uncanny valley feeling.
I would put money on this post at least having gone through AI review, if not having been generated by AI from human-written notes. I understand why people do that, but I also think it's a shame that some of the individual colour of people's writing is disappearing from these sorts of blog posts.
It’s not uncommon, as basic writing advice, to use sets of three for emphasis. That isn’t a signifier of LLM generation, in my opinion.
“The rule of three is a writing principle which suggests that a trio of entities such as events or characters is more satisfying, effective, or humorous than other numbers, hence also more memorable, because it combines both brevity and rhythm with the smallest amount of information needed to create a pattern.”
It’s how I was taught to write, but I understand that my personal experience can’t be generalized to make sweeping statements.
Do you have data that suggests it’s uncommon in human-authored blog posts and more common in LLM-generated text?
I don't think that's exactly it.
Speaking of LLM-writing in general, it seems to greatly overuse certain types of constructions or use them in uncommon contexts. So that probably isn't so much using the rule of threes, but overusing the rule of threes in certain specific ways in certain specific contexts.
"this sounds like AI"
"professional writers use this technique"
"they can't be a professional writer, they're using AI"I use groupings of 3 and try to make things punchy myself sometimes, especially when I'm writing something intended to sway others. I think the problem with this article is the way it feels like the perfect average of corporate writing. It's sort of like the "written by committee" feel that incredibly generic pop music often has.
When I write things, I often go back and edit and reword parts. Like the brushstrokes in an oil painting, the flow of thought varies between paragraphs and even sentences. LLMs only generate things from left to right (or vice versa in RTL languages, I presume). I think that gives LLM generated text a "smooth" texture that really stands out to anyone who reads a lot.
The biggest factor is simply how long you've been using LLMs to generate text, how often, how much. It's like how an experienced UI designer can instantly tell that something is off by a single pixel off upon first seeing a UI, whereas if you gave me $200 to find it within 10 minutes I might well fail.
HN Note: Yes the rule of threes is broader than just this particular pattern here, but in my opinion this common writing and communication pattern is a specific example of the rule of threes.
Punchy repetition in a set of 3. Yes. LLMs are able to capably mimic the common patterns that how to write books have suggested for the last 100 years as ways to make your writing more "impactful" and attention-grabbing. So are humans. They learned it from watching us.
I am a little bit worked up on this as I have felt insulted a couple times at having something I've written been accused of being by an LLM, in that case it was because I had written something from the viewpoint of a depressed and tired character and someone thought it had to be an LLM because they seemed detached from humanity! Success!
I too would like to be able to reliably detect when something has been written by an LLM so I can discount it out of hand, but frankly many of the attempts I see people make to detect these things seem poorly reasoned and actively detrimental.
People have learned in classes and from reading how to improve their writing. LLMs have learned from ingesting our output. If something matches a common writing 101 tip it is just as likely to be reasonably competent as it is to be non-human. The solution to escape being labelled an LLM is not to become less competent as a writer.
I have been overly verbose here, as I am somewhat worked up and angry and it is too late in the morning to go back to sleep but really too early to be awake. I know verbosity is also a symptom of being an LLM, but not giving a damn is a symptom of humanity.
>LLMs are able to capably mimic the common patterns that how to write books have suggested for the last 100 years as ways to make your writing more "impactful" and attention-grabbing. So are humans. They learned it from watching us.
Don't forget that LLMs (at least the "instruct" versions) undergo substantial post-training to align them with the authors' objectives, so they are not a 100% pure reflection of the distribution seen on the internet. For example, it's common for LLMs to respond with "You're absolutely right!" to every second message, which isn't what humans usually do. It's a result of some kind of RLHF: human labelers liked to hear that they're right, so they preferred answers containing such phrases, and those responses became amplified. People recognize LLM-generated writing because LLMs' pattern distribution is different from the actual pattern distribution found in articles written by humans.