Comment by wafflemaker
4 hours ago
I wouldn't be able to tell. No load bearing or is not x, it's y.
I actually don't mind if it's good enough, informative and not overly long.
Haven't really read anything super well written (in terms of language and form) lately, other than a really fun hn comment summarizing Trump's War.
But I just haven't read that much lately.
The tell here is the "One ..., then ... <negative>". This is "not X, it's Y" with the clauses reordered.
For some reason the current crop of LLMs are really insistent on generating contrast between two things in every statement.
The problem is that the "it's not X it's Y" construction is very useful, and shows up a lot in human-written text.
>The tell here
Is this AI written? It has "this is the smoking gun" vibes, just rewritten.
I don't know precisely what to call it, but there is something about AI's word choice and phrasing that really stands out to me.
It's like it chooses "simple" words, but uses them in unclear or fuzzy or slightly abnormal ways that make the overall meaning more difficult to parse. On its own, each instance is defensible, but the aggregate result when it happens many times over is very tiring to read. It reminds me of XKCD's "Up Goer Five": https://xkcd.com/1133/
Like this:
> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.
It reads as though it started with a straightforward idea, and then was forced to express it with words of only one syllable.