You can't just say that a linguistic style "proves" or even "suggests" AI. Remember, AI is just spitting out things its seen before elsewhere. There's plenty of other texts I've seen with this sort of writing style, written long before AI was around.

Can I also ask: so what if it is or it isn't?

While AI slop is infuriating, and the bubble hype is maddening, I'm not sure every time somebody sees some content they don't like the style of we just call out it "must" be AI, and debate if it is or it isn't is not at least as maddening. It feels like all content published now gets debated like this, and I'm definitely not enjoying it.

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maxbond 14 hours ago | parent [-]

You can be skeptical of anything but I think it's silly to say that these "Not just A, but B" constructions don't strongly suggest that it's generated text.

As to why it matters, doesn't it matter when people lie? Aren't you worried about the veracity of the text if it's not only generated but was presented otherwise? That wouldn't erode your trust that the author reviewed the text and corrected any hallucinations even by an iota?

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geysersam 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> but I think it's silly to say that these "Not just A, but B" constructions don't strongly suggest ai generated text

Why? Didn't people use such constructions frequently before AI? Some authors probably overused them the same frequency AI does.

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maxbond 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think there was very much abuse of "not just A, but B" before ChatGPT. I think that's more of a product of RLHF than the initial training. Very few people wrote with the incredibly overwrought and flowery style of AI, and the English speaking Internet where most of the (English language) training data was sourced from is largely casual, everyday language. I imagine other language communities on the Internet are similar but I wouldn't know.

Don't we all remember 5 years ago? Did you regularly encounter people who write like every followup question was absolutely brilliant and every document was life changing?

I think about why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby [1], a book explicitly about how learning to program is a beautiful experience. And the language is still pedestrian compared to the language in this book. Because most people find writing like that saccharin, and so don't write that way. Even when they're writing poetically.

Regardless, some people born in England can speak French with a French accent. If someone speaks French to you with a French accent, where are you going to guess they were born?

[1] https://poignant.guide/book/chapter-1.html

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PaulRobinson 12 hours ago | parent [-]

It's been alleged that a major source of training data for many LLMs was libgen and SciHub - hardly casual.

	▲	maxbond 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Even if that were comparable in size to the conversational Internet, how many novels and academic papers have you read that used multiple "not just A, but B" constructions in a single chapter/paper (that were not written by/about AI)?