Things that tripped my detector (which was set off before reading kave’s comment):
Excessive use of bolded passages throughout.
Bulleted lists, especially with bolded headings in each bullet.
Very frequent use of short parenthetical asides where it doesn’t make a lot of sense to use a parenthetical instead of a comma or a new sentence. Eg the parenthetical “(compute caps)” reads more naturally as “[comma] like compute caps”; the parenthetical “(actual prison time)” is unnecessary; the phrase “its final outcome (extinction)” should just be “extinction”.
Obviously humans write unnecessary or strained clauses all the time, but this particular sort of failure mode is like 10x more common in LLMs.
I would wildly conjecture that this behavior is in part an artifact of not having a backspace key, and when the LLMs write something that’s underspecified or overstated, the only option they have is to modify in a parenthetical rather than rewrite the previous sentence.
Rule of three: “the X, Y, or Z”. “Sentence A. Sentence B. And [crucially / even / most importantly], sentence C.” Obviously not a dead giveaway in one usage, but LLMs do this at a rate at least twice the human baseline, and the bits add up.
I’m not sure I can distill a nice rule here, but there’s a certain sort of punchy language that is a strong tell for me, where it’s like every paragraph is trying to have its own cute rhetorical flourish of the sort a human writer would restrain themselves to doing once at the end. It shows up especially often in the format “[short, punchy phase]: [short sentence]”. Examples in this post:
“The principle is clear: regulate by measurable inputs and capabilities, not by catastrophic outcomes.”
“We don’t have this luxury: we cannot afford an AGI ban that is “80% avoided.”″
I just want to say that all the things you listed (except maybe the last one, not sure) are things that I use routinely—as well as other LLM-associated things, such as liberal em-dashes—and I endorse my doing so. I mean it’s fair to use them as yellow flags indicated LLM writing, but if we delete the words like “excessive” from your descriptions these behaviors don’t seem inherently bad. I do think LLM writing is bad, both because
the actual words are bad (e.g. frequent use of vague words which, like a stable-diffusion image, kinda make sense if your eyes are glazed over but are meaningless slop if you think about it more sharply), and also because
Yeah, I’m trying to distill some fuzzy intuitions that I don’t have a perfectly legible version of and I do think it’s possible for humans to write text that has these attributes naturally. I am pretty confident that I will have a good AUROC at classifying text written by humans from LLM-generated content even when the humans match many of the characteristics here; nothing in the last 10 comments you’ve written trips my AI detector at all.
(I also use bulleted lists, parentheticals, and em-dashes a lot and think they’re often part of good writing – the “excessive” is somewhat load-bearing here.)
Mhm. Fair enough. I mean I believe you about having good AUROC. I think I would too, except that I don’t really care whether someone used LLMs at all or even substantially; rather the thing I’d both care about and also expect to have fairly good discernment ability for, is “Is the contentful stuff coming from a human mind?”. E.g. the bullet point
Nuclear treaties succeeded by banning concrete precursors (zero-yield tests, 8kg plutonium, 25kg HEU, 500kg/300km delivery systems), not by banning “extinction-risk weapons.” AGI bans need analogous thresholds: capabilities like autonomous replication, scalable resource acquisition, or systematic deception (these are merely illustrative examples, not formal proposals).
sounds pretty clearly like human content, and it’s useful content. So at that point I don’t care much whether some glue sentences or phrasing is LLMed. I think both my own writing and other people’s writing, before LLMs were a thing, already frequently contained some admixture of lazy wording and phrasing, which amounts to basically being LLM slop. I think that’s fine, writing everything strictly using only living language would be a lot of work. And you just skim those parts / don’t think about them too hard, but they’re there if you needed more signposting or something. (Not presuming you necessarily disagree with any of this, just riffing.)
One issue for me: I don’t want to spend that much time reading text where most of the content didn’t come from a human mind. If someone used a bunch of LLM, that makes the contentful stuff less likely to be meaningful. So I want to make use of quick heuristics to triage
Yeah, I basically agree with you here—I’m very happy to read LLM-written content, if I know that it has substantive thought put into it and is efficiently communicating useful ideas. Unfortunately right now one of my easiest detectors for identifying which things might have substantial thought put into them is “does this set off my LLM writing heuristics”, because most LLM-written content in 2025 has very low useful-info density, so I find the heuristic of “discard LLM prose and read human-written but lazily worded prose” very useful.
This was added raw by me 🤣 “We don’t have this luxury: we cannot afford an AGI ban that is “80% avoided.” In relation to the previous example about tax avoidance.
As I said to Kave: this is really helpful. I’ll keep this feedback present for future occasions. I really believe in the importance of a well-specified AGI ban. I’d rather not risk people taking it less seriously because of details like these! 🙏🏼.
Things that tripped my detector (which was set off before reading kave’s comment):
Excessive use of bolded passages throughout.
Bulleted lists, especially with bolded headings in each bullet.
Very frequent use of short parenthetical asides where it doesn’t make a lot of sense to use a parenthetical instead of a comma or a new sentence. Eg the parenthetical “(compute caps)” reads more naturally as “[comma] like compute caps”; the parenthetical “(actual prison time)” is unnecessary; the phrase “its final outcome (extinction)” should just be “extinction”.
Obviously humans write unnecessary or strained clauses all the time, but this particular sort of failure mode is like 10x more common in LLMs.
I would wildly conjecture that this behavior is in part an artifact of not having a backspace key, and when the LLMs write something that’s underspecified or overstated, the only option they have is to modify in a parenthetical rather than rewrite the previous sentence.
Rule of three: “the X, Y, or Z”. “Sentence A. Sentence B. And [crucially / even / most importantly], sentence C.” Obviously not a dead giveaway in one usage, but LLMs do this at a rate at least twice the human baseline, and the bits add up.
I’m not sure I can distill a nice rule here, but there’s a certain sort of punchy language that is a strong tell for me, where it’s like every paragraph is trying to have its own cute rhetorical flourish of the sort a human writer would restrain themselves to doing once at the end. It shows up especially often in the format “[short, punchy phase]: [short sentence]”. Examples in this post:
“The principle is clear: regulate by measurable inputs and capabilities, not by catastrophic outcomes.”
“We don’t have this luxury: we cannot afford an AGI ban that is “80% avoided.”″
I just want to say that all the things you listed (except maybe the last one, not sure) are things that I use routinely—as well as other LLM-associated things, such as liberal em-dashes—and I endorse my doing so. I mean it’s fair to use them as yellow flags indicated LLM writing, but if we delete the words like “excessive” from your descriptions these behaviors don’t seem inherently bad. I do think LLM writing is bad, both because
the actual words are bad (e.g. frequent use of vague words which, like a stable-diffusion image, kinda make sense if your eyes are glazed over but are meaningless slop if you think about it more sharply), and also because
LLM writing where any words that are apparently-meaning-bearing were principally added by the LLM will fail to be testimony, which destroys most of their value as communication: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXujJjnmP85u8eM6B/policy-for-llm-writing-on-lesswrong?commentId=MDtbuQZcaXoD7r4GA
Yeah, I’m trying to distill some fuzzy intuitions that I don’t have a perfectly legible version of and I do think it’s possible for humans to write text that has these attributes naturally. I am pretty confident that I will have a good AUROC at classifying text written by humans from LLM-generated content even when the humans match many of the characteristics here; nothing in the last 10 comments you’ve written trips my AI detector at all.
(I also use bulleted lists, parentheticals, and em-dashes a lot and think they’re often part of good writing – the “excessive” is somewhat load-bearing here.)
Mhm. Fair enough. I mean I believe you about having good AUROC. I think I would too, except that I don’t really care whether someone used LLMs at all or even substantially; rather the thing I’d both care about and also expect to have fairly good discernment ability for, is “Is the contentful stuff coming from a human mind?”. E.g. the bullet point
sounds pretty clearly like human content, and it’s useful content. So at that point I don’t care much whether some glue sentences or phrasing is LLMed. I think both my own writing and other people’s writing, before LLMs were a thing, already frequently contained some admixture of lazy wording and phrasing, which amounts to basically being LLM slop. I think that’s fine, writing everything strictly using only living language would be a lot of work. And you just skim those parts / don’t think about them too hard, but they’re there if you needed more signposting or something. (Not presuming you necessarily disagree with any of this, just riffing.)
One issue for me: I don’t want to spend that much time reading text where most of the content didn’t come from a human mind. If someone used a bunch of LLM, that makes the contentful stuff less likely to be meaningful. So I want to make use of quick heuristics to triage
Yeah, I basically agree with you here—I’m very happy to read LLM-written content, if I know that it has substantive thought put into it and is efficiently communicating useful ideas. Unfortunately right now one of my easiest detectors for identifying which things might have substantial thought put into them is “does this set off my LLM writing heuristics”, because most LLM-written content in 2025 has very low useful-info density, so I find the heuristic of “discard LLM prose and read human-written but lazily worded prose” very useful.
This was added raw by me 🤣 “We don’t have this luxury: we cannot afford an AGI ban that is “80% avoided.” In relation to the previous example about tax avoidance.
As I said to Kave: this is really helpful. I’ll keep this feedback present for future occasions. I really believe in the importance of a well-specified AGI ban. I’d rather not risk people taking it less seriously because of details like these! 🙏🏼.
80% of those are things I semi-regularly do in my own prose, FWIW