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Proofreading yes, automatic "corrections" no

Why is your bar that they must be hurtful to everyone? What do you suggest to do when they direct the same behavior only a certain group in the space? You say that it does not have to be political and I agree, but what if it is? What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?

It's easier to make my point about behavior that is unquestionably harmful, like what's discussed in the article. Nothing I said can't extend to less clear-cut cases; honestly my entire point is that you should weigh decisions like this based on whether behavior is harmful to the community (or vice versa) rather than based on either side's "politics".

> What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?

It doesn't matter. I wouldn't engage with whether or not they think they're acting in a justified manner. If the behavior won't stop, the behavior is harmful, and the community would be better off without it, then sometimes you just have to kick someone out.

The reason why I say politics are a distraction is because I don't think you need to bother to explain that someone is politically incorrect or how you are less so. You can, but none of that is actually relevant in a majority of cases. Removing someone from a community is not about being more correct or about them being incorrect, it's for the good of the community (and/or the good of whoever you're removing).


For the better part of two decades I frequented a particular forum, and one of the most common reasons people tended to eventually get banned wasn't because of any particularly egregious political opinion, but because whatever opinion they held they tended to turn every thread they participated in anywhere into either a thread about that or a thread about them.

I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.

But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657

I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.

I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.


> But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well.

It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.

There was a study years ago where a group of individuals were given white wine with red food colouring, and they were asked to describe the wine. All the participants described plumb and other notes that are exclusive to red wines.

These weren’t dumb people. And the people who claim to spot “obvious AI” aren’t dumb either. It’s just very easy to identify tells if you believe you already know the answer. Unfortunately that’s just how fucked up our human psychology is.


> One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity.

So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.

What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.


How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability? You need some external source of truth to judge that, otherwise all you know is that you can discern bad, obvious AI. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy

I can say that my false positive rate is very low which is enough in this context.

I’d expect false positives to be low. Bad AI has a distinctive style and is easy to pick up on. Just like bad toupees are easily recognized. The false negative rate would be far more interesting.

The false negative rate would be interesting but is irrelevant in this context. I was replying to a comment claiming that most people take issue with the ethics of GenAI rather than the quality and that people have a high false positive rate. I raise myself and my experience with people I know as a counter example.

There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.


It's not irrelevant in the context, you're just saying it doesn't interest you. Just because you chose to focus on one side of it, doesn't change the fact that you replied to a broader question of "How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability?"

And even if you had been right that the entire thread's context had been limited to just caring about false positives and not false negatives, it still wouldn't have been a problem for wat10000 to expand the discussion by talking about false negatives, too... they don't have a duty to only reply about the parts of a subject you chose to care about!

You could either just ignore the comment, or reply explaining why that side doesn't matter to you without trying to shut them down as if they did something wrong :)

Edit: Since you've mentioned Pangram a few times in other comments, FYI a lot of people (myself included) believe Pangram's accuracy & consistency to be bad enough that it shouldn't ever be treated as more than a gimmick.


“I can tell because I judge that my judgement is correct.”

How did you check? What was your oracle when you thought something was AI and when you did not?

I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.


How do you know that?

I trust Pangram's stats to be a good baseline.

Hey Claude, re word this until it passes pangram as not AI written.

As I explained in another comment the false negative rate is irrelevant in this context.

They are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.

You are moving the goalpost. OC is not talking about thoughts having to be unique. You can very much read someone else's thoughts, examine them critically and come to the conclusion of agreeing with them. You might then write a comment like OC putting these thoughts into your own words – maybe abridging them, placing different emphasize according to what you find most important or even adding new ideas – and quote or paraphrase something you found very fitting.

That is completely different from generating words that are not an expression of your thoughts or at the very best take some concise thoughts from the prompt and stretch them into a lengthy word soup.

Of course there are people who just parrot other people's thoughts without understanding them. That's closer to using an LLM. But you can often see how well someone understands something and how much reasoning of their own they put into it through their writing. And for the writer writing is a very good way to reflect on their own thoughts and to get them into order. Proper writing is thinking.


People accidentally hurt themselves with kitchen knives every day. They are also very often used for violent crimes.

Clearly we need to regulate the kitchen knife industry more. There should be a central authority that sells authorized kitchen knives with at max 6cm length and all other knives should only be available to certified chefs.

Once we have outlawed the longer knives and strong restrictions on ordinary kitchen tools become normal we should just outlaw knives altogether. You can still hurt yourself with a short knife. Only chefs should ever be allowed to own such a dangerous tool. Just buy or order readily prepared food. Why would you do this weird nerd thing called cooking anyway? Just choose from the official list of allowed foods.

The idea that we have to prevent people from being in control of their own computers — that's what a smartphone is — is deeply dystopian and authoritarian.


> People accidentally hurt themselves with kitchen knives every day. They are also very often used for violent crimes

People are rightfully nervous when they see someone walking down the street swinging a knife i.e openly misusing it or treating it casually

People don't realize how much software is being misused or treated too casually. They might be similarly bothered by lax security on databases and data leaks if they realized that it represented a threat to them


Yes, hold people accountable for their actions. Don't take away their freedom. We may prohibit individual actions that involve a general tool when they harm others. That is compatible with a free society. We may not prohibit fundamental tools¹ That is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. Especially when that tool forms the infrastructure for the flow of information and free speech.

[1] General purpose computing


How did you dertmine it was those two companies? Also did you disallow them in robots.txt?

No, I definitely spent months fighting off bots across multiple hosts and never set up a robots.txt file anywhere nor did I look at the analytics dashboard on cloudflare.

I'm asking sincerely, how do you get to the conclusion that it's those two?

To that point, Cloudflare quite literally tells you the source of the bot traffic on your sites that use it as a WAF! And what percentage they are allowing through, despite you setting rules specifically to block them by name.

It’s baffling.


Mad props to the people at the Archive. You are the heros we need in a formerly open internet that is surrendering to evil big corps and closing down free access.

The Internet Archive is in a really bad spot being attacked from multiple sides at once. But — while service has not been consistent — they have maintained open access. I can still access anonymously from Tor without Cloudflare or some other centralized gatekeeper showing me the middle finger.

If you got some money to spare, consider donating to them. They need it.


I donate to them every year b/c I fully agree they’re doing a thankless critical job very well.

Finally signed up for 10$/month donation. Thanks for the inspiration!

Thank you for the inspiration! I just made my first donation.

I have a recurring donation, there is so much cool stuff in the archive. It really is the library of the internet, and I love it.

I've been donating $5 to them monthly for I don't know how long. I've only recently bumped it up to $25. They're the heroes of the internet age

fully expect them and wikipedia to get assaulted by AI companies to monopolize data source access in the near future.

The future is bleak :\


I'm expecting a full court legal attack on Wikipedia at some point. It's just too good for information, and companies would rather you use their chatbot to regurgitate that info now that they have their own copies. Google was already built to pretend as if they had some magic system giving you "Answers" that were 95% just the text of the infobox they used to have for wikipedia on the side.

It's going to suddenly be extremely valuable that wikipedia didn't settle for having a small rainy day fund and instead ceaselessly grabbed every fucking donation they could for two decades so they can fight such a legal battle.


I don't think there's much grounds for a serious legal attack at this point, and also it would look so horrible from a PR standpoint no non-desperate would dare it. Anyway, google has been steering enough traffic away, now that its AI jumps in with an answer and the wikipedia link which 99% of the response is based on is always hidden with a bunch of other overlaid icons. Google has surely managed to kill off a bunch of reddit and stackoverflow traffic with this trick.

Why would any chatbot provider attack Wikipedia *legally*? Captcha is fully solved, and agents are fully capable of acting as editors, pushing any agenda desired by the user.

Strangers can't really edit Wikipedia any more, especially if their edit is suspicious. It's a closed system despite the appearance. An anti-vandal bot or human will quickly revert your edit.

This is not really true in my experience aside from protected articles; however it is true that sometimes another human will make an edit which degrade the article quality or insist on keeping something that shouldn't be kept. Also, Articles on contentious subjects tend to be problematic.

Wikipedia is not a challenge to the system. If it were, it would be excluded from search results, much like blogs are now.

This became obvious to me when from 2023-2025 they refused to call it anything other than "Israel-Hamas war"

It's since been renamed to "Gaza genocide", as it should have been all along - but it took forever to get there.

This is because of their policy of only mirroring what mainstream media outlets are saying.


This tells us more about your bias then Wikipedia bias, observe that WWII and Bosnian War have their own Wikipedia articles regardless of any genocide occurring in them.

It’s the only “genocide” in history where the population being genocided grew during their genocide.

this is not correct

Are you disputing that Gaza had more births than reported deaths during this period, or do you have other examples of “genocides” where the population grew during their genocide?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Account created 1 hour ago and only made these two comments, no others. Dang should investigate where these bots are coming from.


Funny how you led with a desire to get Wikipedia to align with one side in a conflict, and an opposition to the “mainstream” having no diversity of opinion in your view, yet the moment you are confronted with alternative viewpoints and facts you refuse to engage with the content, and instead try to silence views that you don’t like.

on what basis?

Interesting topic.

Started reading, the text is dreadfully lengthy, hard to stay concentrate on due to all the filler and mindlessly arranged words that obscure the actual content, notice AI tell signs.

Stop reading, paste into Pangram, mostly AI,

scroll down on the text, find this:

> Note: The author used AI tools to assist with drafting and language. The technical work, analysis and conclusions are the author’s own. For more information about our policy on AI-generated content, see our Contributing to RIPE Labs page.

Do better RIPE. I assumed RIPE had some standard. If you decide to not have any standards, at the very least put the AI disclaimer at the top so I don't waste my time on slop. It's disrespectful.

Does anyone have an article about NDP and GRAND that is not slop and worth sharing and reading?


I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or the article, but as far as I understand it from a cursory reading this is not a jailbreak. They use this one prompt for fine tuning and use the model's response to the prompt as the sole underlying benchmark.

How would you do this with a closed weights model?


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