Show HN: Prose or Con, can you detect AI writing?
A developer created a game called "Prose or Con" that challenges users to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text across various writing styles. The creator, who believed they could reliably detect AI writing, found the task more difficult than expected, especially with current frontier models.
Background
- This is a "Show HN" post — a project shared on Hacker News (HN), the tech/startup news forum run by Y Combinator, for community feedback.
- The author built a "guess if this is AI or human" game in response to an earlier HN debate about whether AI-written text is still detectable, even when polished by recent large language models (LLMs like GPT-4, Claude, Gemini).
- "Animated edit history" refers to tools that record and replay a document's keystrokes and revisions as proof of human effort — the author argues this can be gamed or bypassed, and claims stylistic tells remain.