Comment by Jordan-117

Yes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not.

This is a problem, because you can easily get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. You feel strengthened in your convictions that you're good at ferreting out LLM-speak because you've found so much of it. And you find so much of it because you feel confident you're good at it. Nobody ever corrects you when you're wrong.

Combine that with general overconfidence and you get threads where every other post with correct grammar gets "called out" as AI generated. It's pretty boring.

There's a similar effect with contentious subject. You get reams and reams of posts calling the other side out for being part of a Russian/Israeli/Iranian/Chinese troll network. There's no independent falsification or verification for that, so people just get strengthened in their existing beliefs.

> borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious

That's how a trope starts. When a minority of writers are using a particular pattern, it's personalized style. When a majority of writers in a genre adopt the same personalized style, it's a trope.

We find AI tropes especially annoying because there are three frontier LLMs producing a sizable chunk of text we read (maybe even a majority of text, for some people) lately. It would also be annoying if a clique of three humans were producing most of the text we read; we'd start to find their personal styles annoying and overdone. Even before LLMs, that was a thing that happened in some "slop" fiction genres where a particularly active author would churn out dozens of novels per year in one style (often via ghostwriters, but still with a single style and repetitive plot pattern).

It also gets RHLFed into it by people who think the "better" sentence is the one with more puffery, and crucially it tries to cram the semantic patterns in whether appropriate or not because it's been trained to write in ways which aren't perceived as bland.

Puffery about "rich cultural heritage, a "tapestry" of sights "from the Colosseum to the Pantheon" and how they "serve as potent symbols" probably is better writing than "Rome is a city in the Lazio region of Italy with a population of 4m. It is the capital of Italy". Doesn't work quite so well when its trying to fit the pattern to the two competing diners of Bumfuck, Ohio and how the rich cultural heritage of its municipal library underscores its status as the third largest city in its county.

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That's definitely a pattern which I've seen in some LLM output, especially when users let a LLM "run away" with an idea and write a lot of text without supervision. The drive to coin names for things feels almost characteristic of self-help or lifestyle advice writing.