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> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals. Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement
by ceroxylon 10mo ago
> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals.
Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice.
It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.
- ianferrel 10mo agoThis kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.
- 0_____0 10mo agoIt's ad copy style. Humans have been writing like that for decades but it's not naturalistic construction. Not sure who you talk to, but the 'It's Not Just X, It's Y' format doesn't show up in everyday speech (caveat, in my experience).
- ratelimitsteve 10mo agothis. marketing speak appears much more frequently in online text, which is what AI is trained on, than it does in normal everyday human speech that AI isn't able to capture and train on en masse yet.
- cess11 10mo agoI find it kind of common, used as a riff off of patterns in advertising and post-politics.
- lumost 10mo agoIt’s not universal - but it’s a compelling rhetorical device /s It just sounds like slop as it’s everywhere now. The pattern invites questions on the authenticity of the writer, and whether they’ve fallen victim to AI hallucinations and sycophant. I can quickly become offended when someone asks me to read their ChatGPT output without disclosing it was gpt output. Now when AI learns how to use parallelism I will be forced to learn a new style of writing to maintain credibility with the reader /s
- PlunderBunny 10mo agoAre you distinguishing between speech and writing? I'd agree on the former - that no-one talks that way.
- Sevii 10mo agoIt's not. Most people have never written anything using that format.
- wavemode 10mo agoI love how you tried to intentionally demonstrate that it's a normal speech pattern, but then your own sentence didn't even match the speech pattern. This AI speech pattern is not just an em dash—it's a trite and tonally awkward pairing of statements following the phrase "not just".
- everdrive 10mo agoIt's a very sad reflection that people can no longer reliably identify real vs. LLM-generated text.
- donmcronald 10mo agoI hate this. Writing skills used to be a way to show you're paying attention to detail and making an effort. Now everyone thinks I'm cheesing it out with AI. I also have a tougher time judging the reliability of others because you can get grammatically perfect, well organized emails from people that are incompetent. AI has significantly increased the signal to noise ratio for me.
- watwut 10mo agoIf you wrote like AI, you write badly. I mean it genuinely. AI writing is not good text. It is grammatically correct passable text.
- wvbdmp 10mo agoYeah, but the stuff people seem to obsess about are just bits of neat typography like dashes and rhetoric flourishes that should, or used to, signify good writing and worked for a reason. The AI just overuses them, it’s not that they’re bad per se. I suppose it’s a treadmill like anything else that gets too popular. We have to find something new to do the same thing (if possible!). And that sucks.
- Capricorn2481 10mo agoYou are correct. There's just a lot of societal pressure to know what good writing is, even amongst people who don't read outside of social media. They don't want to appear stupid, so they say dashes are "AI" because everybody does.
- watwut 10mo agoPeople cant verbalize good and bad writing. Being able to see it and being able to diagnoze are two different things. Fact is, AI writing is just bad. It checks all the elementary school writing boxes, but fails in a sense that it is a bad, overly verbose, just subtly but meaningfully incorrect text. People see that, cant put the issue into words and then look for other signs. Yes, ai is bad in a way someone who learns some rules about writing produces bad texts. And when human writes the same way, it is still bad.
- NewsaHackO 10mo agoThe thing is he used both the em dash and the "It's not just X it's Y" form in the same sentence.
- tensor 10mo agoOn the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash.
- ghaff 10mo agoThe em-dash has been standard at jobs I had over the past 20 years. Not necessarily a fan of lack of separation on both sides of the punctuation but it's the normal style.
- NewsaHackO 10mo ago>The em-dash has been standard at jobs I had over the past 20 years. What does this statement even mean?
- ghaff 10mo agoThat we commonly used em-dashes as a mark to set off parenthetical information. Yes, you can also use parentheses and they're somewhat interchangeable.
- NewsaHackO 10mo agoOK, makes sense. I thought you were implying there was a quota of em-dashes you had to use each quarter.
- palmotea 10mo ago> On the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash. It was always there, and used. It was just typically restricted to pretty formal, polished writing (I should know, I have coworkers who fuss over em and en spaces). I bet if you looked, you'd find regular use of em-dashes in Newsweek articles, going back decades. The things LLMs did was inject it into unsophisticated writing. It's really only an LLM tell if it's overused or used in an unexpected context (e.g. an 8th-grader's essay, an email message).
- 10mo ago
- gdulli 10mo agoThe population has been handed a shortcut machine and will give in to taking the path of least resistance in their tasks. It may be ironic but it's not surprising to see it used here.
- jibal 10mo agoIt's simply how literate people write.
- 0_____0 10mo agoYou write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?
- dmpk2k 10mo agoI suppose there are worse things than my scribblings sounding like a late-night kitchen gizmo ad. :)
- happytoexplain 10mo agoIt's how I've written my entire adult life - except I'm too lazy to type a real em-dash.
- ghaff 10mo agoI use them often enough that I know the Mac shortcut more or less automatically.
- jasode 10mo ago>write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad? I naturally wrote "it's not just X, it's Y" long before November 2022 ChatGPT. Probably because I picked up on it from many people. It's a common rhetorical template of a parallel form where the "X" is re-stating the obvious surface-level thing and then adding the "Y" that's not as obvious. E.g. examples of regular people writing that rhetorical device on HN for 15+ years that wasn't in the context of advertising gadgets: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22it%27s%20not%20just%22%20%22it%27s%20the%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... So AI-slop writes like that because a lot of us humans wrote like that and it copies the style. Today is the first time I've learned that the "It's not X, it's Y" really irritates many readers. Personally, I've always found it helpful when it reveals a "Y" that's non-obvious.
- mrob 10mo agoI'd give this the benefit of the doubt because the y section is more complex than I'd expect from AI. If it said "it's about the ubiquity of these tools", I'd agree it feels like AI slop, but "it's about what the ubiquity of these tools signals" has a deeper parse tree than I usually see in that negative parallelism structure.
- bgwalter 10mo agoIt's an age old rhetorical construct, the Antithesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis "AI" surely overuses it but this article didn't seem suspect to me. I agree that "AI" speak rubs off on heavy users though.
- lumost 10mo agoI’m quickly becoming convinced that humans adapt to ai content and quickly find it boring. It’s the same effect as walking through the renaissance section of an art museum or watching 10 action movies. You quickly become accustomed to the flavor of the content and move on. With human generated content, the process and limitations can be interesting - but there is no such depth to ai content. This is fine for topics that don’t need to be exciting, like back office automation, data analysis, programming etc. but leads me to believe most content made for human consumption will still need to be human generated. I’ve ceased using ai for writing assistance beyond spell check/accuracy/and as an automated reviewer. The core prose has to be human written to not sound like slop.
- Izkata 10mo agoI've expected this same thing for a long time, it's the exact same phenomena as tv/movie cgi special effects looking dated - many that were amazing when the were released just look bad now because we've gotten used to them and can see when something is being faked with the old methods.