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Comment by evanelias

1 month ago

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.

> 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.

It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking here. It's a blog post, not a book.

Look at the last line of the article: "No permission granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)." The author has also written several previous articles that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/

So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the article was written by AI.

  • It's a difference of opinion and that's fine. But I'll just say, notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them.

    • > notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout, while this article has nine occurrences of them.

      The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..." headers.

      Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style, or lack of style.

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