I didn't get an AI vibe from this post. Grammar checkers add em dashes, too.

If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.

It’s easy to be fooled, myself included it seems :)

For context, here’s a handful of the ChatGPT cues I see.

- “wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open‑source development” - “wasn’t standard AWS incompetence; this was something else entirely” - “you’re not being targeted; you’re being algorithmically categorized” - “isn’t a system failure; the architecture and promises are sound” - “This isn’t just about my account. It’s about what happens when […]” - “This wasn’t my production infrastructure […] it was my launch pad for updating other infrastructure” - “The cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business”

I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell. It’s got an average word count in each sentence of around ~11 (try to write with only 11 words in each sentence, and you’ll see why this is silly), and much of the article consists of brief, punchy sentences separated by periods or question marks, which is the classic ChatGPT prose style. For crying out loud, it even has a table with quippy one-word cell contents at the end of the article like what ChatGPT generates 9/10 times when asked for a comparison of two things.

It’s just disappointing. The author is undermining his own credibility for what would otherwise be a very real problem, and again, his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great.

	▲	_caw 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I got the sense the author wrote the post in collaboration with LLMs as a way of processing the experience: > I was alone. Nobody understood the weight of losing a decade of work. But I had ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to talk to > To everyone who worked on these AIs, who contributed to their training data—thank you. Without you, this post might have been a very different kind of message. It sounded like perhaps this post would have conveyed a message the author didn't think constructive if they wrote it entirely themselves
	▲	CamperBob2 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's not the case in this article, but we're starting to see a lot of comments and blog posts from people who have something worthwhile to contribute, but who aren't confident enough in their English proficiency to post their thoughts without running them through an LLM for cleanup. IMHO that's a good thing, something that should be encouraged. Counting the em dashes is just an exercise in missing the forest for the trees. Accusing someone of posting AI slop without evidence should be treated no differently here than accusing them of shilling or sock-puppetry. In other words, it should be prohibited by the site guidelines.
	▲	Ancapistani 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The author explicitly states that their communication style is frequently recognized as AI. I use both em-dashes and semicolons extensively in my own writing. Even if the article _were_ written by or in coordination with ChatGPT... why does it matter? The content is either honest or dishonest.
	▲	dylnuge 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell. Dude, plenty of people write with em-dashes and semicolons; I personally use them constantly (and I don't use LLMs at all). Em-dashes are trivial to type on MacOS (Alt+Shift+Dash) and even on Windows—I used to have the alt code muscle memorized (Alt+0151) but now I just use the Mac version with an AutoHotkey script. I get being wary of LLM spam now that it's pretty much everywhere, but this is not the "tell" you think it is. To be clear, you're free to dislike this writing style, but I'm 100% confident that it has been common since long before LLMs were in widespread usage. > his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great. You're doubling down on this not being "his real writing style" despite acknowledging you were wrong about this being written by ChatGPT?