Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.

This is the title of an article that came across my feed on my phone; a story with the following sections:

An instrument built for something else

The hiss that would not go away

What the noise turned out to be

Why the noise mattered

This already reads as AI-generated, if you're used to working with any of the currently popular large language models; you'll encounter "why [something] matters" a lot, for instance.

But, there's a much more obvious tell within the article itself.

This is something that is happening more and more as AI-assisted writing becomes more inescapable: the author seems to have left in a note from their AI assistant. It was meant for them (actually, a suggestion to reconsider their proposed opening, it seems).

In the old world, the equivalent may have been leaving in a curt note from your email thread with the editor while your piece was in approval.

Here it is, below. It was nestled directly after the opening paragraph in which is detailed how one of the things these astronomers did to attempt to remove the unexpected hiss was to scrape pigeon excrement from the telescope's surface.

Let me know what you think; is this a line from a chat model that the author or editor missed before clicking publish?

The one thing worth adjusting is the emphasis. The pigeons make a good anecdote, but they were one item on a list of things ruled out, not the heart of the work.

By the way, the article is about a rather interesting story either way:
In the '60s, some scientists thought something was interfering with their antenna signal, but it turns out they were picking up ambient noise that is an artifact teasing the origins of the universe—several hundred thousand years in!

Finally, the article ends with this:

What is worth keeping from the Holmdel story is less the pigeons than the method. Penzias and Wilson were not looking for the origin of the universe. They were doing the unglamorous work of characterising their instrument properly, and they declined to dismiss a small residual signal as someone else’s problem. The discovery came out of refusing to round the noise down to zero.

Is that another chat artifact left in by mistake?

For what it's worth, the site acknowledges:

Editorial process

Space Daily articles are produced with AI assistance and reviewed by editorial staff before publication. See our editorial standards and masthead.