Comment by dofm
18 hours ago
My own feeling is that this signal will perhaps never fully go away. Not in months; most likely not in a couple of years.
Not least because it’s getting worse rather than better. But also because as AI gets better at writing like humans, humans will change how they communicate to avoid being confused with it.
Which will get a lot easier once human writing is nearly extinct. Now that could happen in two years.
Yeah, I swear AI writing is worse than it was. Part of my big model release tests has always been asking it to write a few chapters in different styles, and I swear they have slowly gone from really bad, to boring and plain (I remember Gemini 3 being peak of this), to now over-complicated and quite bad. My guess is that they were initially being trained on writing quality but that has taken a backseat since it's not really a profit generator.
I think the signals also show up in different ways to different people.
For example, I don't dislike the way Gemma 4 writes so much.
But I am British and Deepmind's output somehow seems more compatible with the way British people communicate (it's a very multinational team, I suspect that is an influence).
Other people pick up on Gemma's AI writing tells a little more readily than I do. I have a greater tolerance for Gemma (and Muse Glimmer) than ChatGPT or Claude (or Qwen).
They're still heavily RL'd on response formatting/clarity, and against common LLM-isms. Long form prose quality is expensive to RL so I expect this to languish for a while until other low hanging fruit has been picked.