Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.
I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.
That falls into the general category of 'authority groping' (yes, I coin my own terms) where a prediction engine without real reasoning, must apply numerous tricks to convey confidence, authority and substance where there may be less or none. Similar to the constant negative-propositions or "not" statement, where usually one to three things that do not apply are articulated, which has the result of credibility accumulation, I suppose, by showing "hey, I am right about not just one thing, but four!" hence the saturated styles we tend to see.
Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me.
Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.
Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary.
There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (
One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years.
Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.
You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.
More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.
Indeed. That's one of the reasons why the "Before Present" time scale (that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch) is sometimes called "Before Physics" (another one being that 1950 is less and less "present", of course)!
"Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."
That quote, from the AI generated article, simply asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.
The wikipedia article says "While animals have lived in the cave for 5.5 million years, not all of them arrived simultaneously. One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years."
Pangram isn't useful for single documents. Too many false positives. It only gives something approaching actionable results if you use it on an entire corpus.
That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...
Add to this that life in darkness sustained by microbes consuming a rock surface will be rather slow. Because any fast processes would just flash out after a boom/bust cycle or two. And presumably not just slow in terms of no cheetah vs antelope racing, but also much slower than out in the sun in generational turnover.
I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.
We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!
Biology is quite arbitrary. For instance the dingo is basically just a wild dog, looks like a dog, can breed and create fertile offspring with dogs, yet is considered its own species.
So I prefer things that are more visceral in nature. There are lots of dogs that look a lot like wolves, but going from a wolf to a chihuahua is just kind of mind boggling in terms of the degree of change over such a small window of time. There's one extremely disappointed great great great ... grandfather wolf somewhere. 'Kids these days.'
Yes, but an alternative would be that if an organism is perfectly fit for its static environment (that hasn't changed in 5 million years) then there is no benefit to evolving novel features.
More likely a dynamic environment is most important for intelligence.
There’s residual and radioactive heating from the Earth itself that can provide energy for an ecosystem. We expect Jupiter’s moons to provide similar environments because of tidal deformations (which provide enough energy for Io’s vulcanism).
> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia.
So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.
>Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s).
where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
> Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s
This already happened in the past: they found a cave totally sealed since so long that spiders still had eyes, but non-functioning ones (for they were totally in the dark for generations and generations, eyes didn't make sense anymore).
Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.
Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.
The title alone gives it away. Sentences like this also trigger my daily annoyance:
"Researchers found an elegant way to test it, and the timing was almost too convenient."
Me: "Almost too convenient is expressing an opinion. Rewrite this to be straight forward, succinct information"
Claude: "You're right, and I was wrong. That's the second time you've had to correct me this session. Let me update my memory to adjust for this"
Eye twitch
> Let me ...
As if Claude actually needed the human user's permission or cooperation to do so.
like the summarization tools based on those models except it's the opposite, it was fluffed up into a long article
There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )All they proved is that nothing had entered since the Chernobyl accident.
Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.
More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.
- TBH I'd be surprised if it's still "lost" - not further reported on because [ XXXredactedXXX ] is more likely.
I guess we can say this is when humankind reached adulthood, became able to drink and got a driver’s license. And a gun.
so probably a cheap openai model
I bet you can find pre-AI articles that sound like slop too.
There's probably a good reason for that.
Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.
I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.
Also canines seem to hybridize well, suggesting they aren't truly differentiated anyways.
So I prefer things that are more visceral in nature. There are lots of dogs that look a lot like wolves, but going from a wolf to a chihuahua is just kind of mind boggling in terms of the degree of change over such a small window of time. There's one extremely disappointed great great great ... grandfather wolf somewhere. 'Kids these days.'
More likely a dynamic environment is most important for intelligence.
So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.
where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/
Oh, so that's why my neighbour, Vasile, drills day and night. He hopes to discover a new life form. /s
Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.