If you turn on HN's "Show Dead" setting, there are tons of LLM-generated comments on stories related to AI. You can see the human(s) behind the LLM trying to fiddle with the style of comment by making them skip proper grammar, capitalization, use or avoid certain phrases, and so on. The biggest tell for LLM content, though, is just the content as a whole: it sounds fake and ungenuine, like it passed through a committee of hostage negotiators to remove the speaker's own attachment/expectations.
replyThey can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.
The uncanny valley of text. It looks and sounds like a human, but lacks the "soul" / humanity that our intuition somehow perceives.
replyIt's really strange... I see some text with obvious tropes and sometimes I read something and there's no obvious AI trope... but it's just not human?
I had this conversation the other day. I'm a native German speaker originally, which is why I hand out commas like it's candy and capitalize things unnecessarily. Sometimes I notice these things and leave them in when I write something, since at least it gives you a good indication that a human wrote it... for now.
replyClaude's "write me a product description like a cool human would" is just using lower-case where it shouldn't be though.
replyThe problem is that omitting capitalization, commas, and so on signals, in addition to "not AI in default settings", but also "I'm part of the San Francisco AI in-crowd and Altman is my spirit animal".
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