I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
> But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well.
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.
> One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity.
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.
How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability? You need some external source of truth to judge that, otherwise all you know is that you can discern bad, obvious AI. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
I’d expect false positives to be low. Bad AI has a distinctive style and is easy to pick up on. Just like bad toupees are easily recognized. The false negative rate would be far more interesting.
The false negative rate would be interesting but is irrelevant in this context. I was replying to a comment claiming that most people take issue with the ethics of GenAI rather than the quality and that people have a high false positive rate. I raise myself and my experience with people I know as a counter example.
There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.
How did you check? What was your oracle when you thought something was AI and when you did not?
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
They are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.
You are moving the goalpost. OC is not talking about thoughts having to be unique. You can very much read someone else's thoughts, examine them critically and come to the conclusion of agreeing with them. You might then write a comment like OC putting these thoughts into your own words – maybe abridging them, placing different emphasize according to what you find most important or even adding new ideas – and quote or paraphrase something you found very fitting.
That is completely different from generating words that are not an expression of your thoughts or at the very best take some concise thoughts from the prompt and stretch them into a lengthy word soup.
Of course there are people who just parrot other people's thoughts without understanding them. That's closer to using an LLM. But you can often see how well someone understands something and how much reasoning of their own they put into it through their writing. And for the writer writing is a very good way to reflect on their own thoughts and to get them into order. Proper writing is thinking.
People accidentally hurt themselves with kitchen knives every day. They are also very often used for violent crimes.
Clearly we need to regulate the kitchen knife industry more. There should be a central authority that sells authorized kitchen knives with at max 6cm length and all other knives should only be available to certified chefs.
Once we have outlawed the longer knives and strong restrictions on ordinary kitchen tools become normal we should just outlaw knives altogether. You can still hurt yourself with a short knife. Only chefs should ever be allowed to own such a dangerous tool. Just buy or order readily prepared food. Why would you do this weird nerd thing called cooking anyway? Just choose from the official list of allowed foods.
The idea that we have to prevent people from being in control of their own computers — that's what a smartphone is — is deeply dystopian and authoritarian.
> People accidentally hurt themselves with kitchen knives every day. They are also very often used for violent crimes
People are rightfully nervous when they see someone walking down the street swinging a knife i.e openly misusing it or treating it casually
People don't realize how much software is being misused or treated too casually. They might be similarly bothered by lax security on databases and data leaks if they realized that it represented a threat to them
Yes, hold people accountable for their actions. Don't take away their freedom. We may prohibit individual actions that involve a general tool when they harm others. That is compatible with a free society. We may not prohibit fundamental tools¹ That is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. Especially when that tool forms the infrastructure for the flow of information and free speech.
No, I definitely spent months fighting off bots across multiple hosts and never set up a robots.txt file anywhere nor did I look at the analytics dashboard on cloudflare.
To that point, Cloudflare quite literally tells you the source of the bot traffic on your sites that use it as a WAF! And what percentage they are allowing through, despite you setting rules specifically to block them by name.
Mad props to the people at the Archive. You are the heros we need in a formerly open internet that is surrendering to evil big corps and closing down free access.
The Internet Archive is in a really bad spot being attacked from multiple sides at once. But — while service has not been consistent — they have maintained open access. I can still access anonymously from Tor without Cloudflare or some other centralized gatekeeper showing me the middle finger.
If you got some money to spare, consider donating to them. They need it.
I'm expecting a full court legal attack on Wikipedia at some point. It's just too good for information, and companies would rather you use their chatbot to regurgitate that info now that they have their own copies. Google was already built to pretend as if they had some magic system giving you "Answers" that were 95% just the text of the infobox they used to have for wikipedia on the side.
It's going to suddenly be extremely valuable that wikipedia didn't settle for having a small rainy day fund and instead ceaselessly grabbed every fucking donation they could for two decades so they can fight such a legal battle.
I don't think there's much grounds for a serious legal attack at this point, and also it would look so horrible from a PR standpoint no non-desperate would dare it. Anyway, google has been steering enough traffic away, now that its AI jumps in with an answer and the wikipedia link which 99% of the response is based on is always hidden with a bunch of other overlaid icons. Google has surely managed to kill off a bunch of reddit and stackoverflow traffic with this trick.
Why would any chatbot provider attack Wikipedia *legally*? Captcha is fully solved, and agents are fully capable of acting as editors, pushing any agenda desired by the user.
Strangers can't really edit Wikipedia any more, especially if their edit is suspicious. It's a closed system despite the appearance. An anti-vandal bot or human will quickly revert your edit.
This is not really true in my experience aside from protected articles; however it is true that sometimes another human will make an edit which degrade the article quality or insist on keeping something that shouldn't be kept. Also, Articles on contentious subjects tend to be problematic.
This tells us more about your bias then Wikipedia bias, observe that WWII and Bosnian War have their own Wikipedia articles regardless of any genocide occurring in them.
Are you disputing that Gaza had more births than reported deaths during this period, or do you have other examples of “genocides” where the population grew during their genocide?
Funny how you led with a desire to get Wikipedia to align with one side in a conflict, and an opposition to the “mainstream” having no diversity of opinion in your view, yet the moment you are confronted with alternative viewpoints and facts you refuse to engage with the content, and instead try to silence views that you don’t like.
Started reading,
the text is dreadfully lengthy, hard to stay concentrate on due to all the filler and mindlessly arranged words that obscure the actual content,
notice AI tell signs.
Stop reading,
paste into Pangram,
mostly AI,
scroll down on the text,
find this:
> Note: The author used AI tools to assist with drafting and language. The technical work, analysis and conclusions are the author’s own. For more information about our policy on AI-generated content, see our Contributing to RIPE Labs page.
Do better RIPE. I assumed RIPE had some standard. If you decide to not have any standards, at the very least put the AI disclaimer at the top so I don't waste my time on slop. It's disrespectful.
Does anyone have an article about NDP and GRAND that is not slop and worth sharing and reading?
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or the article, but as far as I understand it from a cursory reading this is not a jailbreak. They use this one prompt for fine tuning and use the model's response to the prompt as the sole underlying benchmark.
How would you do this with a closed weights model?
Perhaps it would be useful if both of you could provide examples of supposedly good and bad code – the latter being the result of a genuine effort to produce good code with state of the art models. Just asserting that LLM code is good or bad ends in a yes - no - yes - no back and forth circle immediately.
I just used an LLM (along with my decades of operating system development experience) to create a macOS tool [0] that lets me see through windows, instead of having to continually command+tab between windows.
The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have.
The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools.
LLMs have been good at knowing what's in the manual from v1.0. Super good at that. Pretty good translators. Pretty good at doing things that have been done a million times before, like your CRUD app. Super mediocre at everything else.
LLMs as things that know what's in the manual are AAA+. Extremely helpful. Very good at making a rough draft of something filled with a lot of stupid mistakes and no new abstractions. That's what your transparent window thing is. Something that you could never ship, is probably too big and doing senseless things for no intelligible reason, and definitely has bizarre bugs.
What in the world are you talking about? I was literally an senior engineer on the Windows Kernel team, the Visual Studio team, and the Xcode team at Apple.
This application, named Seymore, is being evaluated for purchase by several tech companies. (It helps having good industry contacts)
There was a ton of interesting engineering required to make this work at 60 fps+ without resorting to hacks or using private APIs. Most macOS engineers wouldn't even know where to start.
I've shipped code that is used by billions of people and all you just did was spew a bunch of bullshit. As someone who has built their own LLM from scratch, I have an extremely good idea of what they can and can't do.
If you don't know how to use these tools, you'll end up with crap. If you DO know how to use them, they are incredibly useful.
I don't agree with using your credentials to show your code quality, but I don't doubt you have better standards than most developers. That said, stop trying to change their minds. Antirez was a good at programming until he started coding using AI only. The same will be said about Carmack and Linus.
What they are saying is increasingly difficult to defend, but they will do it anyways. I see the same arguments at my job, and I just gave up arguing against
I mention my background because it is relevant context: I spent nearly 30 years building software used by billions of people. If you use Windows or macOS, you have likely used code I helped ship. I’m not going to apologize for that experience or pretend it does not inform my judgment.
Some engineering problems (such as designing a performant thread-quantum algorithm) require depth accumulated over years of working on real systems at scale. That is not elitism; it is simply how specialized expertise works. Experience is unevenly distributed, and that matters when evaluating technical claims.
When I say I trust LLM generated code, I mean that in a qualified, engineering sense. I do not treat an LLM as a slot machine: enter a prompt, paste the output, and hope. I use a deliberate workflow for decomposition, prompting, review, testing, validation, and integration. Developing that workflow took substantial time and experimentation.
The useful question is not “Can an LLM write code without oversight?” It obviously cannot, at least not reliably for nontrivial work. The question is whether an experienced engineer can build a process that makes LLM output trustworthy enough for particular classes of work. In my experience, the answer is yes. But the process, judgment, and willingness to do the work are the hard parts.
I mean, you could easily construct a mirror image of both of those, and I would say that that's closer to the reality of what the content available to downrank is actually like. I don't think questions like yours are engaging honestly or in good faith.
The person you’re replying to isn’t going to substantively respond, because fragile snowflakes typically won’t engage when they recognize that answering a simple question exposes their hypocrisy.
That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith.
We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages.
Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
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