Top all-time · #16967
Mark Lawrence
Personal blog · mark---lawrence.blogspot.comwritingai
Mark Lawrence's personal blog at mark---lawrence.blogspot.com covers writing and ai. Since 2025, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mark Lawrence's blog for a test of ten flash stories, half AI-written and half human-written, asking readers to tell which is which. Commenters use it to discuss how to spot AI fiction.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
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Most-linked posts?
- /2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-18
What Hacker News says?
I'm very surprised according to results people struggled with identifying [3] and [4] as AI. IMO both are simply bad and both contain usual telltales in spades (continuity problems, failed or trite metaphors/analogies, semantic failures, overall feeling of 'wtf is even being attempted here'). I'm not so surprised that people struggled with identifying [1] as human - the confounding factor is that this flash story is…
Comment linking /2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html
on “AI vs. Professional Authors Results”Submitted AI vs. Professional Authors Results as a story · 94 points
HN discussionMy personal litmus test that works fairly effectively with these AI generated stories is this - if someone asked you "What was the story about?" - could you reply with anything more substantial than the prompt that was given to generate the story to begin with? Have a read through the 10 dragon stories where the prompt was "Meeting a dragon" and you'll see what I mean. https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so…
Comment linking /2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html
on “AI vs. Professional Authors Results”Submitted Differentiating between AI and a human author using flash fiction as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSpeaking at least in regards to fiction writing - there was an article on Mark Lawrence's blog [1] a few years back where he posted 10 short fantasy stories with the theme “meeting a dragon.” with an even mixture of AI and human written ones, and the challenge was to see if you could tell which were which. Rather than relying on simple regex matches for words like “delve” or checking for em dashes , the heuristic I…
Comment linking /2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html
on “Ask HN: How can you instantly tell something was written by AI?”Results, please attempt the test before checking the results: https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-ai-vs-autho...
Comment linking /2025/08/the-ai-vs-authors-results-part-2.html
on “Differentiating between AI and a human author using flash fiction”