The revolt of the reader: why LLM-authored writing is driving audiences away
Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer, argues that readers are increasingly fed up with LLM-authored writing and can easily spot it. Citing a survey where 78% of developers stop reading when they detect an LLM and 71% avoid the author in the future, he emphasizes that authenticity trumps polish. He introduces Pangram 4, an AI-detection tool with low false positives, and shares how Oxide now mandates that public writing be Pangram-clean. He compares the rise of LLM writing to early spam, predicting it will become ineffective as detection improves.
To use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader: we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create.
- kierangill
My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
- kccqzy
I would love to use Pangram but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain. The error was “This email address can't be used for signup. Please use a different email.” I’m not about to create a Gmail is to use your service. To me the attack on the decentralized nature on Internet infrastructure is no less serious than the attack on the human provenance of writing itself.
- runako
Disclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else.
IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest.
Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves.
There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.
(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)
- duhhhhh1212
Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap.
Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).
- pshirshov
> do you think readers can’t tell?
No. I have good anecdata: readers cannot reliably distinguish my own prose from LLM-written one apart from cases where LLMs use odd metaphors or one of their specific patterns. I've been specifically experimenting with that.
- usernametaken29
For me it’s AI videos or music / narration that is beyond off putting. What’s worse now it seems people are writing their YouTube scripts with Claude et al. so at times even if it is a human creator you can clearly and immediately tell the words are not their own. To those creators I have but one message: IT SUCKS. I’d rather have you ramble incoherently in your mic then reading an LLM script and I will remove you from my feed immediately. I concur with the author on all accounts. We all can tell the BS people are selling us, unoriginal ideas, shallow concepts, open ended questions that hint at exactly nothing. Don’t be an LLM echo
- rdiddly
This reader revolted after the second unnecessary (and exclaimed!) parenthetical. You can't please some people.
- jimbobimbo
I see this at work. People are "writing" specs and design proposals with bots. This is noticeable and is a huge turn off. I don't have issues with using bots to aid research, but I'm not reading the doc you slopped together.