How to Spot AI Writing: The Telltale Signs of Large Language Models
A ghost writer is haunting the English language, capable of mimicking everything from Shakespeare to corporate jargon with frightening speed. This linguistic spectre, powered by large language models, produces thousands of words a minute, leaving human wordsmiths spooked. I explore whether these models truly favor long words and em-dashes or if there are deeper patterns to identify their synthetic prose.
A ghost writer is haunting the English language.
- kranner
Surprised to find no mention of "load-bearing" and "gated" particularly for Claude.
In particular Opus 5 is scaling new heights of incomprehensibility with excessive metaphor-making, especially when it uses an existing word in the prompt or the code comments as a novel metaphor in an unrelated context.
- keiferski
One way to tell is if the tone is hostile, cynical, or otherwise not full of that giddy optimistic tone associated with what I’ll call “California Business English.”
The mainstream AI companies are loathe to output anything too controversial, so if someone is writing like Burroughs (in content, not merely style) they are less likely to be AI. That is possible to bypass with local models, but the vast majority of writers aren’t going to do that (yet.)
IMO we’re about to see an explosion of slang and offensive language in writing culture.
- VCFundedGenYer
AI can be overly wordy in most of its outputs. At work it's painfully obvious when someone phones it in - when you observe their typical style of terse, short and direct sentences suddenly replaced with bloated 5 paragraph musings complete with weird (often incorrect) punctuation, random bolded words, and bizarre wording, you know it's AI. This isn't rocket science.
- RinTohsaka
- anonu
> With every update, our study shows, AI writing is becoming more similar to human prose.
Any possible vice-versa: There's a meta problem with AI writing detection. I have found my (non-AI-assisted) prose possibly enhanced or modified by my learnings and observations at how LLMs write. In some sense they have made me better at structuring my thoughts and how to communicate them.