This is interesting because it is largely a set of good writing advice for people in general, and AI likely writes like this because these patterns are common.

Not least because a lot of these things are things that novice writers will have had drummed into them. E.g. clearly signposting a conclusion is not uncommon advice.

Not because it isn't hamfisted but because they're not yet good enough that the links advice ("Competent writing doesn't need to tell you it's concluding. The reader can feel it") applies, and it's better than it not being clear to the reader at all. And for more formal writing people will also be told to even more explicitly signpost it with headings.

The post says "AI signals its structural moves because it's following a template, not writing organically. But guess what? So do most human writers. Sometimes far more directly and explicitly than an AI.

To be clear, I don't think the advice is bad given to a sufficiently strong model - e.g. Opus is definitely capable of taking on writing rules with some coaxing (and a review pass), but I could imagine my teachers at school presenting this - stripped of the AI references - to get us to write better.

If anything, I suspect AI writes like this because it gets rewarded in RLHF because it reads like good writing to a lot of people on the surface.

EDIT: Funnily, enough https://tropes.fyi/vetter thinks the above is AI assisted. It absolutely is not. No AI has gone near this comment. That says it all about the trouble with these detectors.

These patterns overlap with formal writing advice because AI was trained overwhelmingly on academic papers, journals and professional writing so it inherited this style.

I completely understand - and do not intend to disparage - the use of these tropes. With the vetter and aidr tools I try to focus more on frequency analysis. I've tried to minimise false positives by tuning detection thresholds to match density rather than individual occurrences e.g. "it's not X, it's Y" is fine but 3x in one paragraph and suspicions flare.

But other tropes like lack of specificity and ESPECIALLY AIs tendency to converge to the mean (less risk, less emotion, FALSE vulnerability) are blatantly anti-human imo.