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.