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.
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.
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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-family-link-that-reac...
That man is a direct descendant. The man in the article is not.
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.
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...
> use AI to write this article
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.
How do people define what is slop and what isn't?
Just because you can't tell that a cup of coffee is exactly at 157F doesn't mean that you can't tell if it's too hot.
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".
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.