The revolt of the reader

turtleyacht

A lot of similar pieces have not considered a post is both the first and final work of a thing: opinions, and experience, and less of much in cited facts; with AI, that there even was a revision pass at all. I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon. Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.

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).

CharlesW

> Indeed, Pangram has become important to so many of us that I was thrilled when Pangram Labs co-founder and CEO Max Spero joined us recently on Oxide and Friends. Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?

cagenut

if its not worth your time to write, its not worth my time to read this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately

Lerc

How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text? If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it. There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI. There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand the amount that they register I don't think you can draw a conclusion of the overall state.

MarkusQ

"I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us.)" I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...

overgard

In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading.

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.

throwaway219450

> Today, legitimate businesses are very careful about how they use bulk e-mail I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder. PR pieces and software companies don’t write tutorials to be helpful, they are advertising to you. If the LLM can do it for cheap, they really don’t care.

Forgeties79

>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. Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.

dyauspitr

This meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.

ofjcihen

Look, in the future we may get to a point where LLMs are indistinguishable from humans in writing style. Even then, I would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas. Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you’re going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”. All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding.

singpolyma3

The idea that readers "can tell" remains laughable. Readers routinely claim they "can tell" on things that turn out to be entirely hand authored. If you want to read something good, read a good book.

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.

KPGv2

> To those who read broadly, the hand of the LLM is so clear it’s as if the writer’s intellectual fly is open I dunno, man, according to Hardcover, I've read 76 fiction books this year, and I can't tell. All the "AI tells" fail the vibe check. I'm a writer and I get flagged by many of them. And according to PhD linguists with expertise in the field, most AI tells are just the equivalent of old wives' tales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA I vaguely recall that researchers were able to train people to tell, but only for a minority language that AIs likely aren't particularly good at mimicking, and after training . This whole thing reminds me of how "you can recognize a vegan because they'll tell you." There, you have a ton of false negatives (i.e., since you aren't polling people to find out if they're vegan, you're only flagging the obvious vegans and missing all the regular people who happen to be vegan). Except here, it's a bunch of false positives and negatives I bet. You don't really have a way of knowing, so you're accusing some people (without complete accuracy) and missing some people (without complete accuracy). But you have no way of knowing, so you're just like "hell yeah, my vibes tell me I'm right." Research and experts disagree.

gdwatson

I am bad at recognizing LLM writing off the bat, though I am getting better. It's pretty common that the writing is good enough to get me reading on a topic I am interested in; then, once I am invested in the piece, it turns out to be shallow, wildly incomplete, or simply wrong. It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.

timcobb

I'm confused and disturbed by the need to invoke Pangram (a model) as the arbiter of slop here. Slop, like smut, is self evident. You know it when you see it. Yes, some effort may be required before realizing that something is slop, which, yeah, is annoying, but that's nothing in comparison to outsourcing your shiite detection to a model! What do you get, except the loss of self worth, by needing a model to have the confidence to call something slop? > Why do people have this reaction? Beyond having to endure aggravating stylistic tics, when reading a piece that has had substantial LLM assistance, we — the readers — don’t know what is real and what isn’t. This is well said. But, here too, I would pause and reflect on what it means to (think you) know what is real and what isn't in a pre-LLM setting. For example, authority bias predates LLMs, and can have disastrous consequences.

Julesman

AI detection should NEVER be used in an educational setting where the only acceptable false positive rate is 0%. That being a rate that which will never be achieved.

jan_m_savage

In a way, The ubiquity of AI-generated material will force the world to acknowledge the superiority of the human mind. Already on Youtube there are channels proudly claiming their music was not generated by AI. Will the software industry have similar disclaimers? (some already have).

nkurz

Hi Bryan, I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human? In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i... What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?