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.