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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Isn't it immediately obvious when Sonnet or Opus write something? It's not quite describable in words but you know it when you see it. The diction and tone gives it away.

Even Deepseek has a certain style to it I find. Are the AIs writing the whole thing or are they expanding on user-written text?

At this point someone really should make Scott's AI Turing test but for textgen, basically compile a big list of text excerpts on various topics - literary prose, scientific papers, fanfiction erotica/NSFW, forum/imageboard posts, etc. from both real texts/posts and AI gens in the style of, and see if people can tell the difference. I consider my spidey sense pretty well-tuned and would be curious to test it.

I find Claude and DeepSeek far harder to detect than ChatGPT. They have a far more 'human' default style, that doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. That might just be me, but even the average internet user has some ability to detect ChatGPT.

Of course, if you provide excerpts from your own writing and ask it to emulate you, or just refer to a known figure whose writing is in the corpus (Gwern, Scott etc), I wouldn't except to be able to tell unless strongly primed to be suspicious in advance.

I don't think so.

There is a certain flavor to LLM text but I think the newer models (last 4 months) are good enough to easily avoid that if prompted right. Even deepseek out of the box is a little cringe but it sobers up fast if reminded and remembers.