Scored 100% on a Pangram of the first few paragraphs.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> 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".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
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.
Having used Claude a fair bit, it reads like the very distinct style Claude settles on when it tries to write fiction. I mean it's hugely improved from the early attempts of LLMs to create fiction (remember the adverbs!), but it's still pretty awful.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Living in a totally conceptual space all day has major downsides on your ability to enjoy your meat suit. Meat suit firmware can only apply updates when you are offline. A lot of us are walking around with severe security vulnerabilities and runtime bugs.
On the contrary -- AI would either replace you completely OR (more likely) allow you to produce more per unit time. There was never any thought or suggestion to reducing the total amount of time you would work.
The problem is that enjoyment has, oddly enough, been misallocated to all the liminal spaces and moments in life. So most optimization tends to elide enjoyment.
Enjoyment elision is the number one cause of meat suit user dissatisfaction. The engineers insist it's not a compiler design bug, stating that those moments of enjoyment are, in fact, unreachable. The UX team says it's not the user's fault either, as it's a fully intended UX choice. The current proposed solution is to push this issue upstream, requesting that all enjoyment be moved from the journey to the destination.
I don't think it's that bypassing enjoyment is trivial.
It's that enjoyment is a secondary function to contentment and the user is allowed to pursue this secondary function according to their own desires. It is just that we often aren't taught the value of or the techniques involved in finding enjoyment.
Consider a professional athlete, a recreational league player, someone who watches their favorite team, and a team manager.
They are all engaged in their activities, originally, because of some enjoyment derived from the game.
But how often does each of them enjoy playing the game?
The recreational player probably gets more fun out of playing the game than the ones who choose to watch, even if they played in highschool.
When was the last time the player enjoyed the ritual of watching a game they aren't involved in?
The one who goes to every game probably gets more enjoyment from watching the game than a player on the sideline.
How often does a player enjoy arm-chair calling another game as opposed to a manager?
But, what happens as we age or in the face of injury? We learn to adapt to enjoying other aspects of our favorite activities. We do so because we are forced to without realizing that we could have been enjoying watching the game just as much as we do now post-injury.
We see this in streaming and video games: People who watch endless hours of games they'll never play, and streamers who never watch others play.
We see this in labor. As the buddhists say, "Before enlightenment; carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment; carry water, chop wood." Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, in other words.
The difference between a miserable manager and a jovial janitor is their ability to find enjoyment.
> Will it rain over forty percent of the city? Will it rain for forty percent of the day? Or does the speaker just not know and is too shy to say so?
Unrelated, but to answer his question, it's the probability that a random spot in the covered area will get at least a smidge of rain at some point in the covered time period. A 10% chance of rain can mean either that the forecaster is 100% sure that exactly 10% of the area will get rain, or it can mean that the forecaster sees a large rainstorm nearby which would cover the whole area if it arrived, but which only has a 10% chance of arriving. Or anything in between. If there's a rain cloud meandering over the city, covering 1% of the city at a time, and over the whole day it randomly walks over 10% of the city, that's also a 10% chance.
I had wondered about this. What you're saying makes sense, but, living in Portland, I had come up with my own explanation. When I see 10% here, I usually take it to mean something like "it will rain for six minutes every hour", or for 10% of the day.
The _prose_ itself here is 100% LLM-generated, with the famous ticks present and all. You like it not because it's not Claude-prose (it is), but because it has a nice concept and some smart writing in human parts of it.
A few pages of text can be produced by a human using exactly the same words as an LLM would. I don't think it's possible to know for sure if a text is AI-generated or not unless you either generated it yourself or wrote it yourself.
Edit: I found this piece interesting, if a bit bleak. The prose reminded me a little of William Gibson.
HN has a lot of people submitting/upvoting AI-generated content, and also a lot of people who work with AI extensively and therefore know how to identify it. It's not a big surprise.
I had to skip lots of it. Funnily enough I didn’t think it was LLM made, just someone who wanted to practice their storytelling skills a bit eagerly. A bit of a /r/LinkedInLunatics feel to it.
Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story? I assume the later but you never know these days…
> Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story?
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
What year is this set in? 2027? 2028? A lot of it feels like present day.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
Not gonna get into the "is this LLM speak or not" debate, but this nevertheless reads like someone who read a modern fiction book once, and is (badly) trying to impersonate it.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> 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".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
I suggest polite rebellion. Write well. Get better than the machines.
Literally none of these statements are true.
That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.
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.
One often wonders why bypassing enjoyment is so trivial, would you say this is a feature or a bug?
Enjoyment elision is the number one cause of meat suit user dissatisfaction. The engineers insist it's not a compiler design bug, stating that those moments of enjoyment are, in fact, unreachable. The UX team says it's not the user's fault either, as it's a fully intended UX choice. The current proposed solution is to push this issue upstream, requesting that all enjoyment be moved from the journey to the destination.
What are good logs or signals a meat suit user could monitor in order to watch for misallocation and allow the program to recover?
I guess a meat suit user best system is to ensure its peer network has stable connections and to care for those.
It's that enjoyment is a secondary function to contentment and the user is allowed to pursue this secondary function according to their own desires. It is just that we often aren't taught the value of or the techniques involved in finding enjoyment.
Consider a professional athlete, a recreational league player, someone who watches their favorite team, and a team manager.
They are all engaged in their activities, originally, because of some enjoyment derived from the game.
But how often does each of them enjoy playing the game?
The recreational player probably gets more fun out of playing the game than the ones who choose to watch, even if they played in highschool.
When was the last time the player enjoyed the ritual of watching a game they aren't involved in?
The one who goes to every game probably gets more enjoyment from watching the game than a player on the sideline.
How often does a player enjoy arm-chair calling another game as opposed to a manager?
But, what happens as we age or in the face of injury? We learn to adapt to enjoying other aspects of our favorite activities. We do so because we are forced to without realizing that we could have been enjoying watching the game just as much as we do now post-injury.
We see this in streaming and video games: People who watch endless hours of games they'll never play, and streamers who never watch others play.
We see this in labor. As the buddhists say, "Before enlightenment; carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment; carry water, chop wood." Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, in other words.
The difference between a miserable manager and a jovial janitor is their ability to find enjoyment.
Unrelated, but to answer his question, it's the probability that a random spot in the covered area will get at least a smidge of rain at some point in the covered time period. A 10% chance of rain can mean either that the forecaster is 100% sure that exactly 10% of the area will get rain, or it can mean that the forecaster sees a large rainstorm nearby which would cover the whole area if it arrived, but which only has a 10% chance of arriving. Or anything in between. If there's a rain cloud meandering over the city, covering 1% of the city at a time, and over the whole day it randomly walks over 10% of the city, that's also a 10% chance.
Thank you for sharing.
Edit: I found this piece interesting, if a bit bleak. The prose reminded me a little of William Gibson.
Bottom bit was confusing. Did he actually get hit or was it just a story? I assume the later but you never know these days…
What do you mean? This is clearly fiction. The person in the story is dying, the author hasn't died.
Or do you mean whether the person in the story actually died? Yes, he did. He's not typing, these are meant to be his thoughts. He's "stretching" the minute of his death; the story makes an analogy with the no-man's minute of the bug he was trying to debug:
> Tanya used to say I was always somewhere other than here. Now it's true. Only I still don't know where. Sometimes I think it's in that very minute. The server thinks I've been sent. The warehouse thinks I haven't been received yet. And both are right, each by its own clock.
He's been "sent" (to the afterlife) by this plane of existence (the server), but the warehouse (the afterlife) still hasn't received the message, hence "the minute". He's living in that eternal minute, Owl Creek style.
How can you be so sure, 100%? What are the famous ticks that you see in the story?
Anyone else here interested in road course tracking (HPDE) or racing? If so, where do you go?
I'm in the US Midwest and have been to Putnam Park, NCM, mid-Ohio, Pitt Race (private now...sad), and Ozark's.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
Yes! x forecaster confidence