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Hmmmm, I didn't read that as AI. What gives?


It reads like marketing speak is the problem. Why is it written in such a urgent, compelling manner with those short punchy sentences? It may not be AI, but no one writes like that naturally. Maybe the author picked it up from reading a bunch of AI writing? The repetition of using you as a subject is also a red flag.


It's the same style I see on Twitter and LinkedIn a lot.


Perhaps that's a you issue? but it has tells all throughout the text.


Would you mind elaborating on what other tells the text had that it's written by AI?

The top comment only based off of one sentence which to me doesn't seem AI. And the author is saying in comments here that it's not AI.

I am genuinely curious as I'd like to update my brain on how to detect AI slop if that's the case here.


> "they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about."

This metaphor doesn't really feel coherent.

> "What is dying is acquaintance."

This is a very odd topic sentence.

> "The kids coming up will not feel this as a loss, and they are not wrong not to."

Claude loves stacking big piles of negatives and arguing both sides of everything.

> "I went looking the other night for a recording of a modem connecting. People keep them around like pressed flowers."

No they don't?? People don't keep recordings of modems connecting around like pressed flowers. I, of course, understand that this is a simile. The simile just does not make sense.

> "I played one back for no reason except to hear it."

Again, note the unnecessarily florid negative phrasing. It would be much more parsimonious to write "I played one back just to hear it"

> "I know that sound by heart. People will never know the machine that just played the sound back to me. Not the way I knew the one that used to make it."

> "The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium."

The X -was- the Y, twice in short succession, to say the same thing.


The problem here is, you might be right, it makes sense. But, make it more approachable. Tell people why you think that, elaborate. Don't assume everyone is on the same page.


My problem is that my personal AI detector running on wetware just goes ping and it's hard to articulate why. I agree with the person you're replying to on all points but also, when I think something is AI, it's very much just a little brain ping that I would have to laboriously try to work backwards from.

LLM text often just is missing the cadence of human-written text. It never slows down or speeds up; it keeps a relentless pace. Sure, a human can write like that, and I'm sure people do, but I find it enervating to read, whether it was a human or an AI that wrote it.


There's an old saying of "Never Wrestle with a Pig. You Both Get Dirty and the Pig Likes It" which I'm about to fall victim to here.

The bulk of your comment history seems to be finger-wagging these kinds of slop accusations on others. Maybe you're right with the others, but I definitely know you're not right on this one.

What you're pointing out here sounds more like you just don't like the style of writing and the attempt to add some nostalgia to it, which is perfectly okay to not like. That's not something I can do much about and I'm not forcing you to read the post.

Yet you clearly read the post, and I think we'd all get more out of hearing what you think of the underlying premise rather than you circling some adjectives.


What did you mean by "they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about"?

What does it mean to be easy with a light switch?




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