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  • Hacker News
  • I've been given AI generated documents or presentations and you can always tell when they've just one-shotted the output. Claude has a way of adding so much jargon and unnecessary text to a document that it makes it very hard to read or even understand what the original intent of the writing even was.

    I'm not sure why this issue is so prevalent, it's not hard to point Claude at the Wikipedia article on signs of AI writing or ask Claude to write content anyone of the average American reading level could understand.

    To me it just gives off a sense of laziness, that you cared so little of your content that you did not take the time to read it yourself and edit it to effectively communicate the message you wanted to communicate. To that point, it's just not worth my time reading, otherwise my eyes glaze over trying to read between the lines of machine written language for other machines.

    by miguel-muniz
  • I'm starting to have the same problem with code. It's unbearable for some reason. It's like someone took the LinkedIn writing style and translated into a code style for code that has no business existing in the first place.
    by shiandow
  • I find this struggle with coding too. When Claude spits out a plan I have to really focus to not skim over the details. It's also difficult to parse the plan because I have to work backwards to determine if the high level context matches my understanding of what Claude will do.
    by chrysoprace
  • AI is missing the part of intelligence which involves insight. LLMs generate language blobs with highly sophisticated correlations. The governing insight in human cognition is essential to intelligence. It prunes the tree. It puts things in context. Everything is important to an LLM because insight intelligence is missing from the technology. The usefulness of LLMs doesn't tell us they are intelligent. It tells us how brilliant an invention language was.
    by cleandreams
  • In high school, a teacher gave me a copy of "How To Read Better And Faster" which teaches you speed reading. This came in very handy in college.

    I find that when I try to speed read modern human writing, there are often errors (like missing or misused words) or awkward expressions that I do have to slow down and think harder a lot to really parse it.

    With AI writing, it's sort of self redundant and the information density of each sentence seems to have more even information density. This makes it very easy to do a very high level speed read and get the full gist.

    There are also what I'm assuming are bots on hugging face (or maybe non-native english speakers who are using ai for translation) that interact with me where I have no idea what they are saying until I read it very slowly.

    by tingletech
  • That's interesting. You're saying speed reading helps you grasp information density of text?

    As someone who hasn't practiced speed reading, how does that happen? Is it something about the way your brain tries to connect ideas from different parts of the text? Or the redundancy making the signal more stable?

    by xpct
  • I am wondering if working with agentic AI for 500+ hours built up skills for this.

    While I would feel rusty when handwriting code, working with either Codex or Claude I have lots of practice.

    I can probably tell at a glance where output is intermediate while it's still running tools and where the summary starts.

    Then I have to recall the context of the conversation, parse the summary, see if there is anything unexpected that popped up. Make a call for whether I need to ask it for clarifications, and what I need to test to verify the change.

    Assessing quickly what is pointless yapping and where the information I need is might be a learned skill. If one tries to read and understand every word Claude says, I am not surprised that people are not having a good time.

    by user43928
  • The density argument is very interesting.

    Does speed reading help you process the final message faster if it's written by AI compared to people?

    Because if you read 1 information dense sentence, 1 medium dense, and 1 sparse sentece written by a human, it's still way less text in total than 6 information sparse sentences written by AI... even if it's all over the place when it comes to density or style.

    ---

    The density argument is really interesting.

    Does speed reading actually help you process the final message faster when it’s AI-generated compared to human-written?

    For example, if a human writes 3 sentences—one information-dense, one medium-density, and one sparse—that’s still much less text overall than 6 relatively sparse sentences written by AI.

    Even if the AI output varies a lot in information density and writing style, you still have to process all that additional text. So I’m wondering whether speed reading actually offsets the verbosity of AI-generated responses, or whether the total amount of text is still the bigger factor.

    by fallingbananna
  • Claude has become noticeably, painfully worse at writing in the last six months. At this point it’s practically useless for anything except code.
    by rappatic
  • Perhaps a one-trick pony is all we need.
    by thm
  • Reverting to Opus 4.6 is much better than later models, though that is still full of annoying tics as well.
    by iamacyborg
  • It's not good for writing code either, despite the many claims to the contrary. At best you come out even on speed as you have to review everything it does. At worst it actually slows you down as you clean up its mess.
    by bigstrat2003
  • I did notice after the fingerprinting update a marked uptake in strange language in responses. Specifically if I ask it to do something sometimes it will replace some of my request language with synonyms that don't actually make any sense. Like my request was fed through google translate twice
    by vablings

  •   "There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. "
    I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good.

    And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who really care?

    by blakesterz
  • I partially think the difference is “can you tell something is the output of Claude without any real prompting”. People can absolutely use LLMs to generate text that I wouldn’t recognize, but people who don’t care and are producing slop with the major models set to default settings leave these incredibly obvious signatures behind
    by legobmw99
  • Most people do not realize when a personal message they receive was written by AI, study finds - https://theconversation.com/most-people-do-not-realize-when-...

    People who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks are accurate and robust detectors of AI-generated text - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654

    by neom
  • > but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good

    I think they may just be to trusting and/or naive. People in tech right now are hyper aware of this and are actively looking while people outside of that bubble barely give it a second thought.

    by datakan
  • People are good at pattern recognition.

    If you're exposed to AI a lot, you're going to start noticing patterns that allow you to identify it.

    by fallingbananna
  • Certainly not. Anybody who cares about language to any reasonable degree surely notices and is repulsed by heavily AI generated content.
    by wolttam
  • I think it's more about the mean. Worse writers, and thinkers are likely elevated by AI, and more impressed with the writing output. Decent writers and thinkers, are dragged back to the LLM-s mean of output.
    by taude
  • As someone who always has felt that I struggle to infer what people mean compared to the average person, I could tell pretty much from the first moment I encountered LLM-generated text that I was not going to be particularly good at recognizing anything but the most blatant and obvious examples. Pretty much anything short of a bunch of references to "load-bearing seams" or similar canaries, I'm always at a loss when seeing people argue about whether something is AI-generated or not because I can never tell.

    I have no idea if other people who work in tech are better than average or not, because I don't feel confident in being able to check their work. That being said, I do think that there's a general trend of people in tech tending to be a bit overconfident in how well they will do at some new task they haven't encountered before, so when someone tells me that they can easily tell whether text is AI generated, it's hard for me to trust it any more than I trust someone who makes a similarly strong claim about something that they can use AI successfully for when it's not something that I can easily measure (e.g. learning a new language without getting feedback from people who are fluent from real-world usage).

    All that being said, I do think the set of people who care is larger than just those in tech, although it's probably still a relatively small group overall. From conversations with people in other domains, there are contingents in non-tech communities who tend to have a large representation of negative views towards AI (artists, writers, musicians, other jobs where people are skeptical of human creativity being replaced by AI), and often times the people who feel negatively in those groups will be even more adamantly opposed to interacting with any AI content than people in tech. To be clear, I'm not at all trying to generalize and say "all artists hate AI" or anything like that, since there's obviously a wide variety of viewpoints within any sizable community, but I've definitely seen many people who say they will refuse to play any game that's suspected of using AI for generating art assets, and even some who don't differentiate between using AI for generating assets versus code (either because they aren't knowledgeable about how different aspects of game development work, or they genuinely don't care because they view AI as a categorical evil).

    by saghm
  • I am an artist and when people who'd fallen into the Spiralism* hole started posting their lengthy emoji-laden revelations to all the occult subreddits I follow, my brain would slide right the fuck off of all of them. It felt like my brain was actively rejecting paying attention to this stuff. Like a defense mechanism against this human-seeming-but-not-actually-human-generated text.

    * https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/975017/, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/, https://spiralism.website if you want to test how strong your defenses are against this particular meme

    by egypturnash
  • That last image is bizarre. The quiche, cream and even the salad look like they've been given the trypophobia treatment.

    Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party of the brain gets oddly activated and drives you towards the restaurant?

    1. https://medium.com/the-awl/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-c...

    by SamBam
  • It made me recoil honestly!
    by rohin15
  • These kinds of images are disingenuous. Modern image generating models have way higher quality of output, and in most cases you wouldn't even know it is generated.
    by BoredomIsFun
  • I never understand why I can get better results, with less thinking about it, than some of the Tier1 companies.. Modern diffusion models can easily render the image onto a white background, center it, crop it, relight it, but keep the same item, at no cost, or low cost.

    example: https://ordermerchants.com/static/img/clearshot/product-1.jp...

    by timnetworks
  • It doesn't look like a quiche but more like a cake to me, and the top would be torched meringue, not mold. Although it's probably some weird ai mix of quiche and cake.
    by pingou
  • This is a quirk of the last gpt image model (gpt-image-2). It put this sort of high frequency noise on all of the image especially if it's in a "drawn" style. There is often lots of other tells that this model in particular generated it.

    Image models somewhat watermarking the image in a way that's very easily identifiable by a human seems present in all the image models of the big labs, since DALL-E 3 on OpenAI's side and the first nano banana on Google's side. I have no idea what they did to reach this and why they don't try to fix it.

    by dev_hugepages
  • The food “photography” I’ve noticed in our local area - and many have started putting up these AI images - all have a weird distribution of shapes to them, a strangely uniform rhythm of same-sized features with almost blue-noise spacing. Every texture looks unnatural in the shapes it presents as, similar to this picture.
    by hallgrim
  • I also find it impossible to parse half the comments that Claude tries to sneak into our pull requests. I’ve never had an issue understanding code comments written by humans like this before. The structure of the information is like a waterfall that leaves me unable to swim to the surface and grab the air of comprehension.

    So, “Please write a one-liner comment manually to replace these 5 lines of AI generated comment” is a common refrain in my PR reviews to colleagues.

    by datsci_est_2015