About whether AI-written prose will soon be indistinguishable from human writing.
Has this happened?
Yes 23 (21%)Not sure 61 (56%)No 25 (23%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI-written prose will soon be indistinguishable from human writing.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I have started beating the hell out of Claude with stylometric analyses of writers I admire; usually technical writers like Terry Winograd, Leslie Lamport, Rodney Brooks. Then the “no or minimal rhetorical flourishes” rule; no British em-dashes, and minimize the negative phrase thesis-antithesis fun”. It helps.
I think you are right that in a year or two LLMs will be able to do a good impression of many technical styles. But not Nabokov, Kundera, or Kafka for subtlety.
If one manages to channel Edsger W. Dijkstra I will be impressed and rank it high on my leaderboard.