Like a lot of folks, the 'tells' of LLM writing for me are more of an 'I know it when I see it' than a specific set of hard criteria (which is probably why it's so hard to make a tool for it), but if I could sum it up, it's something like this:
I always had a high faculty for language, and when I was young, even very young, I was able to speak in full sentences much like I'm doing now. What I didn't have was context. I didn't know how to relate to people socially, and then later on, I wasn't as experienced an engineer as my peers, but I was trying to act adult and mature in both ways.
So I tried to write in ways that were catchy and unnecessarily complex, because I thought that conveyed sophistication and intelligence, and that I knew what I was on about more than I did. It's the kind of writing that gets you through a 30-page final paper for a class you don't really like, or a research project you didn't finish. The term I often use when complaining about my colleagues' LLM output is "flashy but meaningless."
As my confidence grew, I started writing in simpler (though still not the most concise, that's just not who I am!) ways, because it became easier to convey ideas simply in a way that made it obvious I understood them.
When you think about what LLMs are - word machines without (or with very limited) context - you can see why they write the way they do. They are always acting; trying to replicate a human contextual experience with only weights and tokens to carry them through it. That fact is part of why I am skeptical of their ability to suprass humans in reasoning based on their own output.
I always had a high faculty for language, and when I was young, even very young, I was able to speak in full sentences much like I'm doing now. What I didn't have was context. I didn't know how to relate to people socially, and then later on, I wasn't as experienced an engineer as my peers, but I was trying to act adult and mature in both ways.
So I tried to write in ways that were catchy and unnecessarily complex, because I thought that conveyed sophistication and intelligence, and that I knew what I was on about more than I did. It's the kind of writing that gets you through a 30-page final paper for a class you don't really like, or a research project you didn't finish. The term I often use when complaining about my colleagues' LLM output is "flashy but meaningless."
As my confidence grew, I started writing in simpler (though still not the most concise, that's just not who I am!) ways, because it became easier to convey ideas simply in a way that made it obvious I understood them.
When you think about what LLMs are - word machines without (or with very limited) context - you can see why they write the way they do. They are always acting; trying to replicate a human contextual experience with only weights and tokens to carry them through it. That fact is part of why I am skeptical of their ability to suprass humans in reasoning based on their own output.