4 ms·
This 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.
by ianferrel 10mo ago
This 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.