Comment by neogodless 14 hours ago
Do you have proof? A hunch? Quality issues that detracted from the article?
I despise AI slop, but this is a great article and a worthy cause. If AI was used, and helped make this article a reality, then the author did a great job of guiding the AI, and doing quality checks.
No 2025 HN thread is complete without someone accusing someone else of using AI or someone using the word "slop".
Bullet points? Must be AI. Em-dash? Obviously slop. Not only this, but that? Holy moly, AI slop.
(we ignore whether or not the writing is actually interesting, engaging, educational, etc. of course)
As someone who often wrote with bullet points, emoticons, some extra formatting, or dashes - albeit using the hyphen (incorrectly, I've learned) and not the em- - (:P) some LLM-generated text uses these things very liberally and much differently than most people did before. I didn't always have reactions like this, but after being baited by enough garbage search engine results and the like, I'm now often put off very quickly after noticing these patterns. And frankly, seeing it just makes it not feel worth it to continue reading and try to guess at what the person's actual ideas and thoughts are.
The article is cool; there's no doubt. But it could have been written without AI, and it would be better to write the article in human voice than to proliferate AI slop. Is it really so horrible to take the time to write things ourselves?
If you read this article and don't observe the tells of AI content, you have a problem (or maybe you don't, because no one cares anymore).
The tells in this article: There are lots of parts that look like AI - the specific pattern of lists, the "not this but that", particular phrases that are relatively unlikely.
For example, the strange parallelism here (including the rhyming endings): "Sunscreen balms – Licked off immediately Fabric nose shields – She rubbed them off constantly Keeping her indoors – Reduced her quality of life drastically Reapplying medication constantly – Exhausting and ineffective" The style is cloying and unnatural.
"That solution didn't exist. So we decided to create it."
"For the holidays, I even made her a bright pink version, giving her a fashionable edge." -- wtf is a fashionable edge? A fashionable edge over what?
"I realized this wasn't just Billie's story—it was a problem affecting dogs everywhere."
Sure these could just be cliche style (and increasingly we will probably see that as the AI garbage infects the writing style of actual humans), but they look like AI. It's not as bad as some, but it's there.
Everyone should be disclosing the use of AI. And every time someone uses AI, he should say "I don't care enough about you the reader to actually put the time into writing this myself."