I got the overarching sense of an LLM making drama out of confusing or insignificant things. Some specific LLMisms that irritated me—beyond the creepy soulless AI cartoons—included:
> Fifty minutes. In the cold. Night after night, for seven years.
> Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes.
> No university, no lab, no funding. He pulled down the dataset, wrote his own code from scratch, and ran every test independently.
> one telescope, one mountain, one drawer of plates.
> Different telescope. Different continent. Same signature.
> Signed and numbered. Just 150 copies. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
> […]the wider corpus this comic was built from. The science holds because the receipts hold.
> The Palomar Lights — a story told in data, glass, and light.
I just read a pre-LLM thriller written almost exactly like this. This is dialed up to eleven, but this is a fairly common writing style.
It switches my brain into skimming mode very quickly, as it reads quite padded.
le mediocrity machine is inevitably a hack
Maybe it's me not being a native speaker, but that seems okish?
It's not technically wrong but the super-short abrupt sentence format of "A. B. C."[0] is weird if you repeat it.
You can get away with it once or twice as a kind of rhetorical flourish but if you keep doing it, it starts to sound like a one-trick pony (or a clanker.)
(IMHO, obvs., I'm not the King of English.)
[0] e.g. "Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes."