Comment by lapcat
1 month ago
> That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks.
The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/
LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes.
It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI.
I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment!
If this isn't AI writing, why say "The “New Account” Trap" with then further sub-headers "The Legal Catch", "The Technical Trap", "The Developer Risk"... I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
> humans simply didn’t write this way prior to recent years.
Aren’t LLMs evidence that humans did write this way? They’re literally trained to copy humans on vast swaths of human written content. What evidence do you have to back up your claim?
Decades of reading experience of blog posts and newspaper articles. They simply never contained this many section headers or bolded phrases after bullet points, and especially not of the "The [awkward noun phrase]" format heavily favored by LLMs.
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You’re pointlessly derailing a conversation with a claim you can’t support that isn’t relevant even if true.
Regardless of whether AI wrote that line he published it and we can safely assume it is what he thinks.
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LLMs learned from human writing. They might amplify the frequency of some particular affectations, but they didn't come up with those affectations themselves. They write like that because some people write like that.
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> I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment!
I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI.
> I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
What would you have written instead?
Most of those section headers and bolded bullet-point summary phrases should simply be removed. That's why I described them as superfluous.
In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in the case of what AI commonly spews out).
This is fairly basic writing advice!
To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. For me, it reduces the trustworthiness of the claims in the article, especially combined with the key missing detail of why/how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased.
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> I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI.
The difference is that using em dashes is good, whereas the cringe headings should die in a fire whether they’re written by an LLM or a human.
Heuristics are nice but must be reviewed when confronted with actual counterexamples.
If this is a published author known to write books before LLMs, why automatically decide "humans don't write like this". He's human and he does write like this!
The author is reputable, just look at the rest of their website.
Your accusation on the other hand is based on far-fetched speculation.
My writing from 5+ years ago was accused of being AI generated by laymen because I used Markdown, emojis and dared to use headers for different sections in my articles.
It's kind of weird realizing you write like generic ChatGPT. I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now.
> I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now.
Don't give in to the nitwits!