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Has AI Tells

https://theconsensus.dev/blog/2026/10/14/has-ai-tells.html?focus=1
32•7777777phil•1h ago

Comments

taylorgibson•36m ago
Is there a link I'm missing to the tool this article is discussing?
arjie•31m ago
No. There is no link. But crucially, they have given you modern source-code for the entire thing. You should be able to use an LLM agent to produce a similar tool. And the diversity of such tools may well restore diversity of textual conversation.
jiaaro•8m ago
I don't see the source code, where did you find that?

[Edit] Or are you implying that readers should direct an LLM at the entire article and expect an equivalent tool to be produced

arjie•5m ago
Haha, yes, the latter. The textual description is the critical source code. Here, it tells you that you:

* compare pre-LLM and post-LLM writing using 2023 as your index year

* create some 100+ fixed rules rather than a sophisticated model

* use a fixed threshold to kill

jakzurr•25m ago
I read it as it's an in-house tool used at theconsensus.dev for labeling articles in their feed, because using Pangram on every article would cost too much.
Isamu•33m ago
I think we should start to shift away from pure concern that a text is written by AI and toward strictly rewarding better writing. I realize that only some of this involves literal pattern matching against annoying AI ticks that grate like fingernails on a chalkboard.

But moving forward the goal should remain that writing should be comprehensible and not overly reliant on templates and other annoyances.

xyzsparetimexyz•28m ago
No, I am capable of assessing whether a text is written well. I do want to know if someone cared enough to write it themselves though. That's an important piece of metadata.
Zambyte•4m ago
It depends on the goal of the text. I don't care if technical documentation is written by human or machine. I care if it's correct and helpful. I don't care if a letter providing emotional support for a lost loved one is a perfectly accurate, beautifully structured piece of text. I care that it's heartfelt, coming from a person that meant what they wrote. Such metadata is important for the latter, but irrelevant for the former.
socializer•24m ago
No. There's a problem with fully-AI writing that is independent of quality: you can produce a practically infinite supply of it at nearly zero cost. This means that if we don't push back, it's simply bound to crowd out human expression. You already see this on your social media feed, if you're paying attention.

I see inherent value in hearing from and talking to other humans. There is, unfortunately, a lot of AI content hustlers who want to rob me of this so that they can get more links to their website, more eyeballs on their product, etc.

The answer here isn't to demand that submarine marketers and SEO dudes prompt better so that the text is more pleasant to read. It's to cordon it off wholesale. And yeah, that sucks for some corner cases, but there's nothing else we can really do.

pessimizer•20m ago
> But Cynthia Dunlop's survey on tech reader preferences has shown that people overwhelming dislike AI-written articles, preferring even "bad" human writing to "good" AI writing.

I would absolutely ignore surveys on this, and pay attention to studies on this (or run your own if you have a mix of slop and human-written articles on your site.) People don't know their preferences.

It's fine to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how they might vote; it's dumb to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how the economy is doing.

rubikscube09•7m ago
it's the same thing with rsearch papers right now as well. it seems to be the first time in history where one can produce "intellectual" content at a rate exponentially faster than one can read it or process it.
acedTrex•22m ago
No, absolutely not. We will continue to value output that purely shows human thinking and effort.
willmarch•15m ago
Why?
programjames•14m ago
Will we? I will value output from people I personally care about, because I want to know more about them. But what about the other 8 billion people? Do you value their output because they are human or for some other reason?

Say there was a Chinese artist in a room...

kingstnap•2m ago
I'm fine with AI writing as long its not bad. The issue is that its far easier to produce large amounts of poorly made AI writing over well made AI writing.
decidu0us9034•20m ago
To be honest, if I am given any reason to suspect someone put less effort into writing something than they expect me to put into reading it, I'm not going to, if I have a choice. And it seems most prevalent in areas of life where you don't have a choice, so to me it feels like an abuse of of the social contract.
programjames•19m ago
When people communicate to me I want them to maximize my comprehension bitrate. AI output is usually dense in incomprehensibility and sparse in bitrate. But the prompt they fed into the AI? Much higher bitrate. And if it's hard to understand, well I can always ask my own AI to help me interpret.

I understand it is a little selfish to want people to maximize my comprehension (what about the thousands of other readers?). I also understand there can purposes other than communication in writing (fiction -> pleasure, poetry -> art). I agree with you that we shouldn't care if it's AI or human writing for these other purposes. But when the goal is one human transferring bits from their brain to mine, playing telephone with an AI cannot be more efficient (it necessarily decreases channel capacity).

There are two exceptions.

1. When AI is good enough to "read people's minds" it can extract extra bits than what they explicitly meant to include in their prompt... but at that point why am I even bothering to listen to them, and not have the more powerful, smarter AI tell me what they think?

2. AI can run experiments or prove things, and I shouldn't have my AI duplicate that work. In this case I would want them to explain what tasks they set the AI out to do, and then provide the results. I would not complain if the results are an AI writeup, though usually I would want to know what in the results the human author felt was important.

karahime•18m ago
Yes, definitely. The search for a way to root out some kind of ephemeral origin or quality besides what is reflected in the text is fundamentally pointless and doesn't improve anything.
bigstrat2003•16m ago
> I think we should start to shift away from pure concern that a text is written by AI and toward strictly rewarding better writing.

I am a human supremacist. I believe humans have intrinsic value and what they produce has intrinsic value (no matter how poorly written it might be). I do not think that the output of a machine has any value, nor am I interested in reading it.

TimPC•4m ago
A lot of the annoying AI writing is actually good writing patterns done far too often. Rule of three is something every writer should use but not three times in one paragraph, etc.

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