Agreed, I like the Oxide podcast as well, even though it’s hardware I’m unlikely to ever see never mind use, it’s nice that someone somewhere is still trying to be what they are trying to be.
Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.
They have a ton of rfds publicly available that are worth reading. Recently, read this one: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0161 because I'm researching clickhouse for my work (there is also a podcast ep on it). Even if you never use their hardware, just reading their work around the software they use/make is incredibly valuable as an engineer.
I would go even further, I want a browser extension that scans all words on every page and colours them more and more transparent as the likelihood of llm prose is increased.
That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking."
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.
I don't think this is about edge cases where someone has successfully disguised the writing to some degree: the current crop of LLMs have some pretty blatant (and frankly annoying) habits by default, ones that are hard to miss once you have read a decent amount of their output. If I had to describe them broadly, I would say they are a collection of habits which are common in certain kinds of persuasive and emotive writing, but are usually applied way out of proportion to the topic at hand, which tends to make the result quite grandiose, overly dramatic, and tiring to read: a LLM will often write a TODO app README like it's a cross between a thriller novel, a political speech, and a bombshell news article. There's lots of specific tics (and just by sheer volume and uniformity almost any habit an LLM picks up is going to rapidly shoot into cliche regardless of its own merit) but this is the general effect which I think is objectionable independent of the source of the text.
I do think the sensitivity to it can vary a lot: it depends a lot on how much and how closely you read the text, and how much exposure you have to LLM writing. Certainly it seems like a lot of people just don't really notice, or at least don't care much.
This is very handwavy and dismissive. It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. We’ve all seen so many examples of the exact same cadence and verbiage that we’ve learned how to identify it pretty reliably. The ones who are “slipping past us” are actually putting in the work make not just pasting raw LLM outputs, which is the real issue here. If somebody has edited it meaningfully after the fact then it’s not the same crime.
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.
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.
Well, give it a shot -- you'll likely find that that technique doesn't work nearly as well (at least with Pangram 4) as you think it might. When we had Max on the podcast[0], Adam explicitly asked him about exactly this (after all, you can give an LLM access to Pangram and let it iterate!), and Max reported that someone had attempted to do this -- and ended up burning through $700 in tokens and had a "sad Claude." Another interesting bit: according to Max, newer models are diverging more from human writing not less. I think that that was more anecdotal than quantified, but an interesting comment nonetheless.
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.
"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.)"
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.
>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.
I hate to say this but AI assisted short pitch deks from founder to angel (usually their first time) have improved with AI. But also, they follow the same formula so are sorta obvious. Still, the decks are generally more business focused than typical founders early deck being very product/solution oriented.
> 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?
This is (obviously?) false, but considering how well-capitalized we are at the moment, you do have me wondering what a quid pro quo would be for; perhaps in this fictional universe Pangram has lucked into some of the PCIe clock buffers that we've been scrambling to secure enough of?
By "quid pro quo" I wasn't suggesting that Pangram's PR people's podcast placement was pay-for-play, just that they traded access for your positioning of their tech and their exec in your content marketing efforts.
That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.
Yeah, fair -- and definitely not: I am earnestly just a fan of what they built (and I also think it's really important as a way of getting a check against rampant LLM use).
> 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.
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).
Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.
Glad those words proved prophetic!
[0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...
AAUGH IT BURNS
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.
I do think the sensitivity to it can vary a lot: it depends a lot on how much and how closely you read the text, and how much exposure you have to LLM writing. Certainly it seems like a lot of people just don't really notice, or at least don't care much.
If you want to read something good, read a good book.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-detectio...
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.
The chief grief appears to be phoning in the whole process.
I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...
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.
Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.
this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately
Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?
That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.
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.