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Show HN: Qwen3-4B with the AI writing tics trained out

76 points erikkannike 1 hour ago 47 comments

anilgulecha 1 hour ago | parent

What's with the very distracting cursors of others?

mullenba 1 hour ago | parent

Exactly. I was interested in the article but I don't have time for that nonsense.

markgavalda 1 hour ago | parent

Agreed. In the upper right corner there's a "hide" button that I immediately clicked. Then read (ok, skim read) the article.

HumblyTossed 1 hour ago | parent

Agreed. Just because you _can_ do a thing, doesn't mean you should.

awestroke 1 hour ago | parent

Nobody knows what it means, but it's provocative. It gets the people going

Almondsetat 1 hour ago | parent

going... away?

maven29 1 hour ago | parent

The ancients brought us "reading mode" in browsers as an escape hatch for exactly this kind of cruelty

jmusall 1 hour ago | parent

There's a "hide" button in the top right corner

2bird3 1 hour ago | parent

All it is missing now is a chat and a friend/follow feature.....

RonanSoleste 1 hour ago | parent

I don't understand why this is a feature and what it brings other than shout "you are being watched by random others". Exited the site before ending the first block.

ac2u 1 hour ago | parent

Is it still capable of writing an essay about AI writing tics or has the very means of producing said tics, even when the model is asked to do so to demonstrate, now abitterated?

swiftcoder 1 hour ago | parent

Impressed how little hardware is needed to train this.

hashmap 1 hour ago | parent

I saw those moving dots and snap-closed the page.

chmod775 1 hour ago | parent

Models have proclivities, and many people use the same model.

Imagine all books on earth were written by just 5 people - and worse, they could not remember what they had written yesterday. You would quickly get tired of reading the same flourishes and patterns over and over.

Whatever style models currently in use have, that's what people are going to be tired of, and it's what they're going to recognize as "AI".

sejje 52 minutes ago | parent

I predict by the end of the year they'll have a style/voice selector for responses.

You can already do that in your agents.md file, of course, or ask for a re-write and dodge the sameness.

wongarsu 41 minutes ago | parent

The most difficult thing in doing it yourself is knowing what to ask for. I can ask my model to talk like a caveman or like a Baltic pirate. But asking for something more nuanced, in the range of regular speech, requires the correct lingo

I'm sure it's trivial for somebody who has studied communication or contemporary linguistics, just as it's trivial for me to ask an LLM for tenant-isolation using row-level security in an app

CharlesW 23 minutes ago | parent

> I'm sure it's trivial for somebody who has studied communication or contemporary linguistics…

But you know what you like, and you know what bothers you, and the good news is that you don't have to one-shot a solution. You can create a skill and refine it over time. As you test and/or use it, identify copy you don't like and tell the LLM what you prefer instead, and ask it to distill and generalize that feedback into the skill.

ndriscoll 23 minutes ago | parent

You could try taking a body of your own writing and asking it to characterize it/come up with a prompt (or fine tune if you can) describing your style and quirks.

techjamie 7 minutes ago | parent

This is usually what I've had luck with. I've given it samples of my writing and told it to emulate my style. It did help, but it took some charistics of my speech and cranked them up to 10. I guess in hindsight I could have mentioned for it to take my writing quirks it finds and only apply them in moderation.

Reading what I did get out of it was just a bit uncanny valley strangely enough. Very much had some "hey there fellow kids" energy.

nekusar 3 minutes ago | parent

"Write this thing, in the style of $author"

That works right now.

hypfer 1 minute ago | parent

Why would one leave writing to the clanker though, given that expression is literally the only thing worth doing as a human?

They're supposed to do the grunt work, but the meaning and the connection is a humans-only thing.

Royce-CMR 51 minutes ago | parent

Applause earned. Neat results especially out of such a small model.

Separately we have overlap between AI slop styles and right for the situation writing styles which this highlights.

Using the new CRM example, the clean version looks like a millennial student who rambled on a page, and the AI slop version looks like a draft I could send for PR to corporate managers. I buy the former looks more real, but it also looks sloppy and doesn’t work for most of my use cases.

When I was in school, the structured essay style of the “slop” examples was encouraged and I see it continue to resonate in corporate. The cleaned up versions here def have use cases - reviews for example.

Main point - different styles for different situations and our AI slop versions vs humanized versions both overlap different areas of the “ideal” we continue to look for.

trilogic 50 minutes ago | parent

The q4 loops after 16k tokens generated. Great idea though, hope to see more models like it. Thanks. https://huggingface.co/erikkannike/qwen3-4b-deslop-v4/discus...

charv 49 minutes ago | parent

Side note but the multi-user cursors was a super cool feature, not sure it was relevant to this article but would love to see it on more interactive pieces (a la The Pudding, etc.)

JustSkyfall 46 minutes ago | parent

It's definitely a slight improvement, but it is still rather obvious that the output is AI-written :(

mrweasel 42 minutes ago | parent

The tell tell sign for me is that it's still incredibly hard to read. AI tend to write in a style that I'm unable to easily read (humans does that as well sometimes). I constantly have to go back and re-read the previous sentence, because the text simply doesn't register.

A next step I'd suggest is asking the LLM to use shorter words when available.

BoredomIsFun 39 minutes ago | parent

Did you check this? https://huggingface.co/sam-paech/gemma-3-27b-it-antislop

j45 6 minutes ago | parent

LLMs as a word generator love generating words, and that includes generating bigger words when simpler ones will do.

BoredomIsFun 44 minutes ago | parent

This is not the first deslop. The true pioneer is this dude: https://huggingface.co/sam-paech/gemma-3-27b-it-antislop. This model is a perfectly usable, full size not-toyish model.

f311a 35 minutes ago | parent

Why would you support this sort of projects? LLM text should be spottable for as long as possible, otherwise human communication and expression on the internet will be killed.

squidbeak 23 minutes ago | parent

In what sense will it be killed? I don't plan to stop writing my own messages or notes, just because AI can write, and I seriously doubt many other people who prefer their own voices will change either.

f311a 19 minutes ago | parent

Well, imagine that 90% of the comments on HN are generated and it's very hard to spot it. Would you read them?

konart 15 minutes ago | parent

Imagine that 90% of the comments on HN are generated and it's very hard to spot it. And you read them.

ndriscoll 13 minutes ago | parent

Are they interesting, well thought out, well articulated, and insightful?

https://xkcd.com/810/

chownie 6 minutes ago | parent

> Are they interesting, well thought out, well articulated, and insightful?

The average AI post is likely a carbon copied reddit comment from 2011, that is to say, "no".

chownie 15 minutes ago | parent

I stopped using reddit entirely because it's bots talking to other bots on threads posted by bots, I stopped making posts at the start of this year because I no longer know if a human being is ever reading them. I then deleted the account.

I am increasingly feeling that way about HN, too. If this is all the equivalent of a videogame conversation with an AI, why am I bothering to put the effort in?

10111001 34 minutes ago | parent

Now can I have a model with the AI writing tics trained to the max?

I want my boss to know I'm a Good Boy using AI.

Izmaki 29 minutes ago | parent

You can definitely get far with skills and personal instructions. That is my estimate, not research.

(*defeated chuckles and gazes towards my Claude session*)

BSOhealth 32 minutes ago | parent

for https://slopwash.com I’ve started approaching this more as an eval problem than something to go post-training for. I’m excited to be trying these new Jev-type models in more of a harnessed approach. maybe some heavy LLM to measure preservation of intent

bschwarz 28 minutes ago | parent

    and needs no system prompt
A human would write "and doesn't need a system prompt."

jwr 27 minutes ago | parent

Why kill the em dashes? They are a legitimate mark — one that I have been using for years. On a Mac, you quickly get used to pressing shift-option-hyphen. Em dashes are typographically correct and should be used.

literalAardvark 24 minutes ago | parent

Because no one knows what those are, and they're a major indicator of AI writing.

ahmedfromtunis 22 minutes ago | parent

Or at least match the pre-llm human usage frequency.

A total, artificial lack of em dashes can in itself be perceived as another sign of AI writing.

sram1337 15 minutes ago | parent

Have you released the detector?

j45 7 minutes ago | parent

This still scores as 100% AI generated on tools like pangram.com.

It stil contains a triple construction, but ranks much cleaner on slop-cop.