That's the thing: even if you don't use AI, if most of what you read is AI, soon this is what you'll sound like, just because it's so much of the training data your own brain's model has.
Using AI to write blogs doesn’t bother me in principle, but I hate the prose that gets left in. Even if it’s not AI writing, being human doesn’t give you a pass for writing like a self-help guru. This sort of grammar is straight out of Claude:
> A human on a VPN sees one CAPTCHA and passes, but a headless browser fleet sees a wall.
I do wish we’d stop complaining about em dashes though, that’s lazy criticism. The sentence structure is far worse, and a big tell is subheadings that are all variants of “The <adjective> <noun phrase>”.
Using a global agent rule with something like the following makes agent output much more tolerable for me:
"Use only ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English when communicating with me or writing documents, comments, and other communications intended for humans."
As a result, I've never seen Claude or Codex use it's weird terms like "load-bearing".
Well, I definitely never saw nearly as many emdashes a few years ago. I didn't even realize it wasn't just a typeface quirk as I'd used hyphens a lot. I don't even know how to type an emdash on my devices and would have to copy/paste it from somewhere.
Oh yeah, emdashes are absolutely a tell, but I argue that they're nowhere near as abhorrent to read than the awkward phrasing that the frontier models like to use.
As odd as this sounds, and as odd as the world gets, I still find a small comfort in the fact that there is enough stability in this world that I can count on one thing: someone always accusing a blog post on HN as being AI generated.
Because the ubermensch on HN can detect AI text from 10 miles away with 100% accuracy... like that time they called documents from 2015 AI written.
I'm just beyond thrilled that it's actually starting to be a public embarrassment to cough up a glob of AI text.
Not the OP, but because it appears structured just like AI output?
(This isn't a condemnation. AI can often do a better job of representing thoughts than humans.)
Examples:
- The article organization
- The general language flow
- The bullet points with a bolded gist, a colon, and then elaboration (and bonus with details stats).
- The images are almost certainly AI generated. They look AI generated.
That's the thing: even if you don't use AI, if most of what you read is AI, soon this is what you'll sound like, just because it's so much of the training data your own brain's model has.
Using it slowly sucks the uniqueness out of you.
Using AI to write blogs doesn’t bother me in principle, but I hate the prose that gets left in. Even if it’s not AI writing, being human doesn’t give you a pass for writing like a self-help guru. This sort of grammar is straight out of Claude:
> A human on a VPN sees one CAPTCHA and passes, but a headless browser fleet sees a wall.
I do wish we’d stop complaining about em dashes though, that’s lazy criticism. The sentence structure is far worse, and a big tell is subheadings that are all variants of “The <adjective> <noun phrase>”.
Using a global agent rule with something like the following makes agent output much more tolerable for me:
"Use only ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English when communicating with me or writing documents, comments, and other communications intended for humans."
As a result, I've never seen Claude or Codex use it's weird terms like "load-bearing".
Well, I definitely never saw nearly as many emdashes a few years ago. I didn't even realize it wasn't just a typeface quirk as I'd used hyphens a lot. I don't even know how to type an emdash on my devices and would have to copy/paste it from somewhere.
But yes your other points are absolutely right
Oh yeah, emdashes are absolutely a tell, but I argue that they're nowhere near as abhorrent to read than the awkward phrasing that the frontier models like to use.
Take a look at the dashes. It's all there.
(i skimmed the whole post, there are none)
I knew it... Wuthering Heights was written by AI and Lucy Maud Montgomery, Edgar Allan Poe, et. al. were AI bots churning out content!
Or maybe -- just maybe -- using dashes isn't a sign of content being AI written, just a style it picked up from the training data.
As odd as this sounds, and as odd as the world gets, I still find a small comfort in the fact that there is enough stability in this world that I can count on one thing: someone always accusing a blog post on HN as being AI generated.
Never fails.
The OCD part of me can now go about my day.
I didn't read the article, but the AI illustrations were off-putting enough to close the tab.