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
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