5 ms·

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent. On another note though: "This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience." I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.

nemomarx 1y ago
Yeah, I also kind of wish he published the blog in his own words instead of using what seems to be LLM polishing. It seems ironically like the same defensiveness and lack of transparency he wants to avoid?
- JohnBooty 1y ago
  I don't mind AI polishing any more than I mind somebody using a spellchecker. The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    It's definitely not slop, but there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? At least in my opinion. It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something.
    - erikerikson 1y ago
      Hah. Indeed and also this person was posting to the, on average, uncharitable Internet.
    - JohnBooty 1y ago
      There's a very large range of situations (many highly personal) for which I'd consider an AI writing assist to be super valid. They may have dyslexia. English may not be their first language. They may have brilliant ideas but otherwise struggle with writing. They may simply be highly invested in making sure they are expressing themselves clearly. They may be too physically or mentally tired to polish their writing "manually." They may be under unfortunate time constraints. Maybe the guy has kids to take care of, or just needed to finish his blog post by a certain time so he could get a good night's sleep. The list of possible reasons is so vast and varied that I coalesce this down into essentially "I don't care and I don't need to know. As long as the end result is an honest representation of the author's intent, i.e. is not AI slop" It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something. I'm being pedantic but as a good comparison. A friend DM'ing you is explicitly asking you to spend your time reading the message. Additionally you and your friend have preexisting context and rapport. If they don't express themselves in anal-retentive detail clearly in the DM, you can fill in the gaps with your shared context, a luxury that a person writing for the public doesn't have. (again, pedantic on my part, I know!)
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      > there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? There is! But it of course follows the content, which is about how the author's emotions have caused him professional harm. Someone who's been through that would be shy about sharing their raw words.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  As someone who is autistic and bipolar, I've been told my words often come across as unnecessarily aggressive even though I mean them in a neutral way, so I sometimes use LLMs to try and mediate my tone when I'm talking to an unknown audience. I suspect the author has been told he is acerbic and might be self-conscious of using his own words.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    I would definitely believe that, yeah. I just think that reflects something sad about the culture we're in, especially in an essay about struggling with transparency. I would like to get more of a sense of his emotions and writing style, but maybe that would have consequences in a public post and he's more guarded about that.
squigz 1y ago
Maybe everyone is just learning to be overly paranoid about the source of writing
bradstewart 1y ago
What specifically is the LLM verbiage you're seeing here? That reads like a normal sentence to me.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell" Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.
  - dpoloncsak 1y ago
    pops up multiple times, too. One or two, sure maybe it's just a reflection of using LLMs often, but this many suggests that the article was (atleast) re-written by an LLM I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway. > This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. > This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. > The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder: > These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill) > The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic. > The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.
  - evanelias 1y ago
    Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future." It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even be bothered to have a hired PR person write their vacuous statements, let alone writing them personally on their own. A vision for the future indeed...
jasonlotito 1y ago
"This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent." I can't stop seeing this LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  I think an llm would have put a comma in the middle of that? I wonder why no one's tuned their model to make minor errors that way or leave a few things uncapitalized to fake a human touch
  - freehorse 1y ago
    You can do it after, remove all commas and newlines. Make it all a huge continuous blob of text that is hard to read. Definitely not LLM written. A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not interact much with llms lately, but it does not seem that to me.
    - nemomarx 1y ago
      It's more like 4 or 5 uses of it, and some of the phrasing choices also have that vibe. Everyone's threshold for the smell will be different, of course. It seems to me like it's more effort to write something and then have an llm clean it up instead of just posting it so I mostly don't understand the behavior to start with. Why are we going through this new effort?
      - freehorse 1y ago
        Until around a year or so ago, I could see and experience that I give some text of mine to an LLM and instantly it may often (not always) feel more structured and well written. I would think that using LLMs for "improving" my style made my text better. I no longer think it actually does. For one, the feeling that everything has the same style is unnerving. And we are getting more sensitive in distinguishing this kind of style, and together with the parts of it that are not actually as nice, or they are too much like polite "corpo" speech, and these stand out much more. Who would have thought that losing individual styles would make us feel so bored.
jorvi 1y ago
> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023. It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking Wikipedia" because I tend to always have a fact or trick or trivia in my back pocket. These days more often than not, I get told "okay and now for a non-AI ass answer". I completely understand why people have that reflexive response to it, but it also feels really vile. For what it's worth, I do also notice it. Especially on Reddit, you'll start reading a comment and halfway through your gut feel tells you it's likely written by an LLM.
- morleytj 1y ago
  I do also get that pretty often. Also because I've always liked using hyphens and emdashes, so I get that as well. I don't know if I'd call it "vile" to notice a common pattern like the above though. But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.
  - jorvi 1y ago
    Ah, I should have perhaps formulated it better. What I meant with vile is the sensation of having put effort in to write pleasantly only to then have the effort misattributed to a machine and to be seen like a hack. It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"
    - morleytj 1y ago
      Ah, yeah, I understand that feeling, the sensation is very unfortunate. I feel the same!
- JohnBooty 1y ago
  If you write concise but with some panache, people *will* think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023 Nobody's ever accused me, but I am definitely conscious (paranoid) about the possibility. I have found myself editing my words to look "less LLM-like" What a world!
Alex3917 1y ago
> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.
- morleytj 1y ago
  I also use emdashes a lot. I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.
  - Alex3917 1y ago
    > I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure. But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed: https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/ https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/
- nemomarx 1y ago
  Out of curiosity, why em dashes and not en dashes? Is one easier to type in a particular keyboard layout or the default in some editor?
  - Alex3917 1y ago
    em dashes are for denoting emphasis, whereas en dashes are for connecting compound words or phrases.
JohnBooty 1y ago
I thought the same exact thing. The "proper" em dash (or is that an en dash) as opposed to two dashes "--" is a typical giveaway, it seems to me. However, the article in general certainly reads like it is coming from the author's own voice. Painfully so, even, because this guy is clearly suffering.
- morleytj 1y ago
  Yeah, it's clear he's going through a lot of pain. Even just going through that many job changes outside of the other events sounds painful and difficult to deal with.
- noident 1y ago
  The em dash existed long before LLMs. The fact that 95% of people don't use dashes properly doesn't mean that every single person who uses an em dash is relying on an LLM.

nemomarx 1y ago

Yeah, I also kind of wish he published the blog in his own words instead of using what seems to be LLM polishing. It seems ironically like the same defensiveness and lack of transparency he wants to avoid?

JohnBooty 1y ago
I don't mind AI polishing any more than I mind somebody using a spellchecker. The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  It's definitely not slop, but there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? At least in my opinion. It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something.
  - erikerikson 1y ago
    Hah. Indeed and also this person was posting to the, on average, uncharitable Internet.
  - JohnBooty 1y ago
    There's a very large range of situations (many highly personal) for which I'd consider an AI writing assist to be super valid. They may have dyslexia. English may not be their first language. They may have brilliant ideas but otherwise struggle with writing. They may simply be highly invested in making sure they are expressing themselves clearly. They may be too physically or mentally tired to polish their writing "manually." They may be under unfortunate time constraints. Maybe the guy has kids to take care of, or just needed to finish his blog post by a certain time so he could get a good night's sleep. The list of possible reasons is so vast and varied that I coalesce this down into essentially "I don't care and I don't need to know. As long as the end result is an honest representation of the author's intent, i.e. is not AI slop" It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something. I'm being pedantic but as a good comparison. A friend DM'ing you is explicitly asking you to spend your time reading the message. Additionally you and your friend have preexisting context and rapport. If they don't express themselves in anal-retentive detail clearly in the DM, you can fill in the gaps with your shared context, a luxury that a person writing for the public doesn't have. (again, pedantic on my part, I know!)
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    > there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? There is! But it of course follows the content, which is about how the author's emotions have caused him professional harm. Someone who's been through that would be shy about sharing their raw words.
ModernMech 1y ago
As someone who is autistic and bipolar, I've been told my words often come across as unnecessarily aggressive even though I mean them in a neutral way, so I sometimes use LLMs to try and mediate my tone when I'm talking to an unknown audience. I suspect the author has been told he is acerbic and might be self-conscious of using his own words.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  I would definitely believe that, yeah. I just think that reflects something sad about the culture we're in, especially in an essay about struggling with transparency. I would like to get more of a sense of his emotions and writing style, but maybe that would have consequences in a public post and he's more guarded about that.

squigz 1y ago

Maybe everyone is just learning to be overly paranoid about the source of writing

bradstewart 1y ago

What specifically is the LLM verbiage you're seeing here? That reads like a normal sentence to me.

nemomarx 1y ago
em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell" Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.
- dpoloncsak 1y ago
  pops up multiple times, too. One or two, sure maybe it's just a reflection of using LLMs often, but this many suggests that the article was (atleast) re-written by an LLM I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway. > This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. > This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. > The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder: > These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill) > The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic. > The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.
- evanelias 1y ago
  Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future." It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even be bothered to have a hired PR person write their vacuous statements, let alone writing them personally on their own. A vision for the future indeed...

jasonlotito 1y ago

"This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent." I can't stop seeing this LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.

nemomarx 1y ago
I think an llm would have put a comma in the middle of that? I wonder why no one's tuned their model to make minor errors that way or leave a few things uncapitalized to fake a human touch
- freehorse 1y ago
  You can do it after, remove all commas and newlines. Make it all a huge continuous blob of text that is hard to read. Definitely not LLM written. A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not interact much with llms lately, but it does not seem that to me.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    It's more like 4 or 5 uses of it, and some of the phrasing choices also have that vibe. Everyone's threshold for the smell will be different, of course. It seems to me like it's more effort to write something and then have an llm clean it up instead of just posting it so I mostly don't understand the behavior to start with. Why are we going through this new effort?
    - freehorse 1y ago
      Until around a year or so ago, I could see and experience that I give some text of mine to an LLM and instantly it may often (not always) feel more structured and well written. I would think that using LLMs for "improving" my style made my text better. I no longer think it actually does. For one, the feeling that everything has the same style is unnerving. And we are getting more sensitive in distinguishing this kind of style, and together with the parts of it that are not actually as nice, or they are too much like polite "corpo" speech, and these stand out much more. Who would have thought that losing individual styles would make us feel so bored.

jorvi 1y ago

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023. It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking Wikipedia" because I tend to always have a fact or trick or trivia in my back pocket. These days more often than not, I get told "okay and now for a non-AI ass answer". I completely understand why people have that reflexive response to it, but it also feels really vile. For what it's worth, I do also notice it. Especially on Reddit, you'll start reading a comment and halfway through your gut feel tells you it's likely written by an LLM.

morleytj 1y ago
I do also get that pretty often. Also because I've always liked using hyphens and emdashes, so I get that as well. I don't know if I'd call it "vile" to notice a common pattern like the above though. But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.
- jorvi 1y ago
  Ah, I should have perhaps formulated it better. What I meant with vile is the sensation of having put effort in to write pleasantly only to then have the effort misattributed to a machine and to be seen like a hack. It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"
  - morleytj 1y ago
    Ah, yeah, I understand that feeling, the sensation is very unfortunate. I feel the same!
JohnBooty 1y ago
If you write concise but with some panache, people *will* think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023 Nobody's ever accused me, but I am definitely conscious (paranoid) about the possibility. I have found myself editing my words to look "less LLM-like" What a world!

Alex3917 1y ago

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.

morleytj 1y ago
I also use emdashes a lot. I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.
- Alex3917 1y ago
  > I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure. But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed: https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/ https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/
nemomarx 1y ago
Out of curiosity, why em dashes and not en dashes? Is one easier to type in a particular keyboard layout or the default in some editor?
- Alex3917 1y ago
  em dashes are for denoting emphasis, whereas en dashes are for connecting compound words or phrases.

JohnBooty 1y ago

I thought the same exact thing. The "proper" em dash (or is that an en dash) as opposed to two dashes "--" is a typical giveaway, it seems to me. However, the article in general certainly reads like it is coming from the author's own voice. Painfully so, even, because this guy is clearly suffering.

morleytj 1y ago
Yeah, it's clear he's going through a lot of pain. Even just going through that many job changes outside of the other events sounds painful and difficult to deal with.
noident 1y ago
The em dash existed long before LLMs. The fact that 95% of people don't use dashes properly doesn't mean that every single person who uses an em dash is relying on an LLM.