6/27/2026 at 7:29:01 PM
Trivial to simulate. Though I disagree that AI writing is impossible to differentiate from human prose, at least for now. It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose (or, at least, much less interesting to read), though some are better than others, and I'm better able to spot writing from models I use regularly (Claude has a very distinctive style I can spot from a mile away, but that's true partly because I read its prose nearly every day when using it for coding).by SwellJoe
6/27/2026 at 7:47:21 PM
"It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose"You have no idea how many false positives and how many false negatives you have in your judgement. It is indeed impossible to differentiate between badly written human text and somewhat good written llm text.
by ahofmann
6/27/2026 at 7:55:35 PM
> You have no idea how many false positives and how many false negatives you have in your judgement.The default LLM style is pretty deterministic. "Not X, Not Y. Just Z", etc.
There are phrases and cadences which are very rare in human prose (<5%) but unusually common (+95% occurrences in LLM prose). It is not unreasonable to look at content which is 95% LLM tells and conclude that that an LLM authored it.
I have noted, IRL, that those people who read very little, and only read when they have to (work docs, etc) are literally unable to tell that a piece of prose sounds like an LLM even when it has about 12 occurrences of "Not X. Just Y" or "Not X, Not Y. Just Z" in as many paragraphs.
by lelanthran
6/27/2026 at 8:44:08 PM
It's really similar to special effects in tv/movies: Whenever there's something new it's hard to tell, but as we get used to it and start seeing the patterns it becomes easier to tell. The older the special effects are the more obvious it is. Quite often you can just kind of tell if something was special effects or practical effects without being sure why. And there are always some really well done ones that slip past everyone, or odd lighting that makes it look fake (a thread a day or two ago on here about a legal case involving a photograph, some people in the comments thought it was a painting).by Izkata
6/27/2026 at 7:38:13 PM
Depends on what’s being written, and who the audience is. Anything of any length would be hard to simulate in a way that would fool an author - writing has a certain flow to it. A cadence. The editing and restructuring, deleting of words, typos you don’t catch until some random reread, rephrasing of sections because you want to use the original phrasing later in the piece.Could you simulate something be typed? Trivially. Could you simulate something be drafted? Honestly, even if you wanted to put in all that time and effort, I’m not even sure LLMs are sophisticated enough to send the logical drafts, loops and edits that would pass a writers sniff test
by barrell
6/27/2026 at 7:55:42 PM
I think you could simulate something that passes a sniff test. A writer would probably spot implausibilities in the simulation if they paid attention, but then we're back to square one, because you can spot that something was written by an LLM after you've wasted your time reading it and realize that you've been led around in circles with superficial information and no coherent train of thought, but by then your time has already been wasted.by mike_hock
6/27/2026 at 7:51:24 PM
To add to this, one can’t ignore the relationship between signal and receiver. I’d imagine most people on HN have enough pre-LLM reading experience to have a decent sense of what was written by an LLM versus a human.And as LLMs get better at producing human-like text, that same pre-LLM reading experience, which helps people tell the two apart, will become less and less common.
by madhatter999
6/27/2026 at 7:57:57 PM
Or maybe 2 out of 3 guys you call "AI" actually wrote it themselves and you were too prejudiced to believe them.by tsss
