Comment by notnullorvoid
3 days ago
It didn't feel at all AI written to me. It's much better than the AI written junk that HN laps up without noticing.
3 days ago
It didn't feel at all AI written to me. It's much better than the AI written junk that HN laps up without noticing.
It is full of these short sentences that AI writing loves, sort of to feel "punchy". Normally you would copy-edit that stuff, join them up, have the writing have some rhythm. I agree with GP, the article is hard to read because it seems to have a lot of https://tropes.fyi/
Twitter is full of strung together short punchy sentences, and it spread to articles long before AI.
Not discounting the possibility that it's AI, but it didn't have the same repetition, contradiction, and inaccuracies I notice in other AI content. Though even that isn't exclusive to AI.
I love writing these short, punchy sentences. It makes the impact much better IMO. But maybe it’s just me.
Try for too much impact, and you end up browbeating the reader until they're little more than metaphorical pulp. A human writer might like using those types of sentences--or any of the obvious LLM writing tropes--in specific contexts, but they'll usually recognize the need to avoid overusing them.
LLMs don't, and so the tropes get repeated ad nauseam. It doesn't help that social media posts are a huge part of their training data, and there's a large body of research on how Twitter and social media in general have altered grammar and sentence construction towards patterns more commonly found in oral-based traditions as users sought out ways to make their voices heard.
It's easy to imagine a more polished version of a line like "It's not X. It's Y!" being tossed out during a speech precisely because it can be dramatic and punchy. When it's done in every other paragraph, however, it can become rather disconcerting.