There's a similar story about a modern relative of Cheddar Man, this one going back 10000 years. Even more incredibly, the modern relative lives just down the road from where the ancient ancestor was found.
Did Courtney Eberhard, Senior Marketing Specialist at FamilyTreeDNA, use AI to write this article? It reads like it.
Edit: ah, it helps to read the press release properly, the research was done by by this company, so it makes sense that they're the primary source and that the marketing manager (and probably AI) wrote the article. I retract the accusation I've made below.
Digging into it further, googling "ötzi heddi abbad" I just find Dead Internet results leading back to this -- dare I say it -- hallucinated article. The image caption refers to "Augustin Ochsenreiter" but it seems he's just a general Ötzi researcher and his name is mentioned for the image credit.
While I understand you retracted your assumption that someone used AI to write their response, I feel the increasingly gratuitous leveling of "AI Ghostwriting" accusations is detrimental to HN and writing as a whole - plenty of humans can write write in cohesive passive tense (and in fact, plenty of us who did really well in our writing classes do so), and more critically, if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI?
And more fundamentally, ghostwriting has been the norm for decades, and something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.
Quality of writing matters cause it affects the comfort of reading. Slop remains slop even if the argument it holds is ok. Like here for example one question is posed and answered twice within two paragraphs distance. It reads weird, and I wouldn't expect it from a human.
I feel like it's appropriate to call out slopstyle articles. Truthful or not, slopstyle should be discouraged, same as Linkedinfluencer style should be discouraged. Neither style encourages succint communication.
I'm probably the only person who thinks that this was written with an LLM (Claude).
The code supporting it likely was too. The people who talk about "taste" being the last defense against AI aren't wrong and I think that that topic, along with a lot of others that are essentially of a philosophical import are beyond the ambit of what most people want to discuss when they criticize AI generated content. We can only wave them off for so long.
> This attempt could be refined but it's a decent start:
>> [...] having a polished appearance but lacking originality. None of the points it makes are novel and it doesn't connect them in novel ways either.
I have some bad news for you. Not every human is a Mozart or an Einstein. The long tail of human output has plenty of examples of the lack of originality, from bodice-rippers and pulp paperbacks and sloppy 'journalism' and 'style' magazines and articles, to carbon-copy soldiers, children in school uniforms, derivative music and film, the 5-minute Bruce Willis vehicles at the tail end of his career (though he clearly had a very good reason to make those), the cookie cutter quick-fab homes in American sub-divisions, cogs in human machines and systems of all sorts, the banality of life itself (at times) ...
It's just amazing that DNA survived the ravages of such a long time, and even more amazing that human technology can use this to identify relatives so far apart in time or space. And then the wonders of DNA itself, what an absolutely mind-blowing bit of nature. Thinking about the structure of the universe, from quarks and fundamental particles to the large scale structures seen through telescopes, that's just wild. And then there's the ability of our mind to perceive and imagine and wonder about this .... no words.
The modern man was not a descendant of Otzi - he just had a common ancestor that lived two thousand years before Otzi.
If you go far enough back, I am also a relative of Otzi, through mitochondrial Eve. I can tell you this with absolute certainty without giving my DNA to some for-profit.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-family-link-that-reac...
Edit: ah, it helps to read the press release properly, the research was done by by this company, so it makes sense that they're the primary source and that the marketing manager (and probably AI) wrote the article. I retract the accusation I've made below.
Digging into it further, googling "ötzi heddi abbad" I just find Dead Internet results leading back to this -- dare I say it -- hallucinated article. The image caption refers to "Augustin Ochsenreiter" but it seems he's just a general Ötzi researcher and his name is mentioned for the image credit.
This article from a German news service (I can trust this more than FamilyTreeDNA's marketing specialist) mentions that Ötzi has many relatives in Europe, but from the father's lineage: https://www.dw.com/de/viele-europ%C3%A4er-sind-mit-%C3%B6tzi...
While I understand you retracted your assumption that someone used AI to write their response, I feel the increasingly gratuitous leveling of "AI Ghostwriting" accusations is detrimental to HN and writing as a whole - plenty of humans can write write in cohesive passive tense (and in fact, plenty of us who did really well in our writing classes do so), and more critically, if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI?
And more fundamentally, ghostwriting has been the norm for decades, and something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.
This sounds more like a religious argument than a logical one, tbh
At what point does it turn into a cult?
> [...] having a polished appearance but lacking originality. None of the points it makes are novel and it doesn't connect them in novel ways either.
https://lobste.rs/c/qtolag
I don't think this post qualifies though. It's a press release, not an article from Quanta Magazine.
> [...] if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI?
> [...] something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.
I don't think AI-generated writing is at that level yet. But it's getting close.
"Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer": https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer
I'm probably the only person who thinks that this was written with an LLM (Claude). The code supporting it likely was too. The people who talk about "taste" being the last defense against AI aren't wrong and I think that that topic, along with a lot of others that are essentially of a philosophical import are beyond the ambit of what most people want to discuss when they criticize AI generated content. We can only wave them off for so long.
>> [...] having a polished appearance but lacking originality. None of the points it makes are novel and it doesn't connect them in novel ways either.
I have some bad news for you. Not every human is a Mozart or an Einstein. The long tail of human output has plenty of examples of the lack of originality, from bodice-rippers and pulp paperbacks and sloppy 'journalism' and 'style' magazines and articles, to carbon-copy soldiers, children in school uniforms, derivative music and film, the 5-minute Bruce Willis vehicles at the tail end of his career (though he clearly had a very good reason to make those), the cookie cutter quick-fab homes in American sub-divisions, cogs in human machines and systems of all sorts, the banality of life itself (at times) ...
Next time I will use phrases like "long winded", "too vague", "never seems to come to the point" rather than "This article seems like AI slop".
Maybe give it a rest, yeah?
Also, so what? If you have any evidence disputing the veracity or the content of the article, please present it.
If you go far enough back, I am also a relative of Otzi, through mitochondrial Eve. I can tell you this with absolute certainty without giving my DNA to some for-profit.