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This is just good writing. The kind that AI is meant to emulate. Alas we're at an age where writing well is identical to writing like a machine.

I suggest polite rebellion. Write well. Get better than the machines.

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But it's bad writing, as GP points out. The second paragraph is particularly confusing—its central metaphor is clumsy (in my experience LLMs struggle with metaphors).

That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.

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This is terrible writing, and if you can't tell, there is something deeply wrong.
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i wrote three paragraphs of a management summary today, fully by hand, and got 100% ai back from pangram. ymmv.
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I agree that pangram is not infallible. It has a reported FP rate of like 1/10,000, which is decidedly not zero! Having used AI to write fiction before, and working with LLMs all day, I do feel pretty confident in my ability to detect them. Pangram is just a way to make sure I am not totally ungrounded. Moreover, I don't actually particularly care if someone uses an LLM in the process of writing their work. What I care about is how it sounds. This story reads like an LLM wrote it, optimizing towards what a novice writer would find appealing.
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It seems you have more time on your hands than the author.
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Is the joke that it took me like 3 minutes to write this? If so, I think that's a bit unfair to the author. I think this is something that was at least shaped. But I feel very confident its LLM written. If it isn't LLM written, then I also think it is bad writing, but that's a separate point.
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I think they were supporting you -- you had free time because you carefully evaluated whether the random story you came across was AI. The 'author' did not have free time because they asked an AI to generate a story instead of writing one theirself.
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The author was an LLM.
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The original appears to be written in Russian (there's a toggle in the heading). In Russian, it sounds quite good, I coudn't detect any smell at all. Sure, good writing style these days always raises suspicion. :-)
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The text read to me like it was, first and foremost, a translation from Russian. It wasn't the names that gave it away to me. It was the text itself. Even in English, it had unmistakable Russianness all over it. I switched the blog language to Russian. Didn't feel like an LLM. Felt rather like written by someone who had read a lot of Viktor Pelevin or maybe Leonid Kaganov.
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Oh! I mean that could be a good explanation. Written in another language and then translated over via LLM.
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I'm pretty sure it was. The wordplay on the Russian “пока” meaning both "goodbye" and "for now" (as in "not yet") is key here
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The story itself is decent and competently written, see how it keeps track of the analogies and phrases by different characters (wrapping it all up in the end, tying the "no-man's minute" or how the ex wife told him he was always somewhere else than here). If an un-assisted LLM did this, I'd be surprised. I think there may have been LLM-assistance to polish it up (maybe) but there are some human ideas in here. I'd be interested in the author clarifying this.
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The sad thing is that an LLM can't really polish a story. "Polishing" is the most important stylistic work. Even a rough hard to read story is superior to one polished by an LLM.
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I think the theory posed above (that the original story is in Russian) makes a lot of sense.
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100% Human or 100% AI?
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> What is the human's job here? Waking up?

Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.

> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.

> Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".

You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: the main character can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for ease of remembering and identification.

> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell

But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.

Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.

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Just speaking english as a second language will cause your writing to trigger Pangram detectors, for whatever reason. Its a dumb platform meant to scam universities who think it works.
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Having English as a second language won't cause you to add a bunch of laboured pointless metaphors.
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No, but a lot of Russian writers are a fan of them I find, and this reads as LLM translated from Russian to me
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