It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.

There was a study years ago where a group of individuals were given white wine with red food colouring, and they were asked to describe the wine. All the participants described plumb and other notes that are exclusive to red wines.

These weren’t dumb people. And the people who claim to spot “obvious AI” aren’t dumb either. It’s just very easy to identify tells if you believe you already know the answer. Unfortunately that’s just how fucked up our human psychology is.

So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.

What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.