Comment by James_K
7 hours ago
There's also the classic “it's not just X, it's Y”, adjective overuse, rule of 3, total nonsense (manage memory with surgical precision? what does that mean?), etc. One of these is excusable, but text entirely comprised of AI indicators is either deliberately written to mimic AI style, or the product of AI.
"not just x but y" is definitely a tell tale AI marker. But, people can write that as well. Also our writing styles can be influenced as we've seen so much AI content.
Anyway, if someone says they didn't use AI, I would personally give them the benefit of the doubt for a while at least.
this construction is familiar to anyone who has taken a course on writing post middle or high school.
The formal version is "not only... but also" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/..., which I personally use regularly but I often write formally even in informal settings.
"not just... but" is just the less formal version.
Google ngrams shows the "not just ... but" construction has a sharp increase starting in 2000. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+just+*+but...
Same with "not only ... but also" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+only+*+but...
Like many scholarly linguistic construction, this is one many of us saw in latin class with non solum ... sed etium or non modo ... sed etium: https://issuu.com/uteplib/docs/latin_grammar/234. I didn't take ancient Greek, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a version there.
More info
- https://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/not-just-something-but-som...
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/not%20just
- https://www.grammarly.com/blog/writing-techniques/parallelis...
- https://www.crockford.com/style.html
- https://englishan.com/correlative-conjunctions-definition-ru...