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0 pointsHansenq14d ago0 comments

I only went to Pangram because I read through the essay and could not help but notice the Claude-like sentence structure and AI-isms in it, which distracted me and completely made me distrust the thesis of the piece.

My understanding is that Pangram is the best out of all of the AI detectors and if there is a better one I'm happy to switch to it. And it's easier to point to them than to give explicit sentences and examples about why it reads so AI-generated (and since you want it, it's these sentences in particular: "The message was unambiguous: energy is finite, security is earned, and comfort has a cost.", "That template is being applied again today — and markets have accepted it.", "One country never made the West’s mistake.", etc.)

Reading through it again, there are so many emdashes. And don't get me wrong, I was a liberal user of emdashes before AI! But just like, if your job is to communicate your thoughts to a wide audience at least respect their intelligence enough and not rely on crutches just to get an article out against a deadline.

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stereolambda14d ago

To me these look like professional writing, and I've seen worse LLM'isms. I am with some people in that I don't usually want to read pieces where GenAI was involved. But this is one of the cases where I wouldn't want the remedy to be a life of constant purity tests and suspicion. There has been enough of that in contemporary culture. I want to trust people and let them be by default. I mean, I don't want writers to specifically memorize current LLM'isms in order to avoid them: or worse, to prompt an LLM to strip them. I believe from experience than GenAI texts have secondary bad characteristics, mainly being bland in style and thought, and often going nowhere, like mandatory student papers. This should be enough to bury or criticize them on merits more often than not.

I do see myself treating slightly broken grammar, typos as a slightly positive signal in writing in the recent years. I also see that this is messed up - I'd like to respect someone in kind if they put care in writing - and easy to fake if anybody wants to, with an LLM. If you do strongly suspect GenAI writing, I mean it's fair if a sincere opinion, but I'm tired of having those as top comments with a whole response tree. Ironically contributing to that now.

K0balt14d ago

It’s either heavily AI written or the authors style has been heavily influenced by LLM writing. That said, using LLMs when writing does not mean the article is not informative, thought provoking, or relevant. An idea fleshed out in prose by an AI is not the same as AI generated content. But it is lazy writing.

How do we create an environment that incentivizes human writers to focus on their craft instead of “productivity”?

Thats maybe one of the more pressing issues of our time.

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