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Comment by 512akHaf

3 hours ago

It is LLM with a clever prompt that avoids the most egregious tells (though "load-bearing" appears).

The number of times the article goes on complete tangents, introducing new irrelevant names and the general useless level of detail, all in perfect verbose English points to an LLM. So does the upbeat and persuasive style.

If you write that level of detail, use a historian's style and footnotes. Do not use the synthetic LLM voice that is optimized for rhetoric.

Where the heck did LLMs (Claude in particular) pick up the "load-bearing" tic I wonder? I'm over a half century old and read a lot, and I don't think I've ever seen load-bearing used so much before I noticed Claude using it all the time a few months back.

I don't really think there's a tangential detail that is related to the message. Which one are you referring to?

Also, the upbeat and persuasive style ... is my style kek, is it me being too pushy or?

The thought occurs that some day we'll be nostalgic for the quaint LLM speak of yore.

  • I've thought that a lot of present LLM-speak is a distant descendant of the heyday of the "Now See This", Buzzfeed, et al clickbait that was en vogue about a decade or dozen years ago. A sort of chirpy contrarian provocation to drive reader engagement. "You won't believe how this X" begets "this isn't just Y -- it's Z." So it will be a style that eventually leaves as new models are trained on other writing.