I agree with what I read of the article before stopping because of how AI this reads.

The user's other blogs also have the same telltale em dash usage and usage of “” instead of "". Reading obviously AI generated text feels unpleasant. I don't know how much thought was put into this. Is this just "hey Claude write me a blog post about the death of the power user"? Maybe they just used AI for proofreading. I can't really know but it's hard to justify putting in effort to read this when there could have been zero effort put into writing it.

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dw_arthur 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Low information density is a big AI tell. Also sheer length is another AI tell. The LLM pukes out a bunch of text and the "author" either doesn't have the skills or energy to edit it.

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generalpf 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By default on a Mac, "smart quotes" is enabled that turns "" into “”. I don't think that's a sign of an LLM. I believe Microsoft Word on all platforms does this too.

	▲	igloopan 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting, did not know that. The writing feels undoubtedly LLM generated to me regardless, which is a trend in their other blogs too. https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/if-you-recognize-me-in-pu... is the worst offender.

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vincent-manis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I found the article tedious, even though I agree with its main point. However, the so-called “obvious” signs it was written by an AI—quotation marks and em-dashes—are within the ability of anyone with a Compose key (on Linux/BSD, ask your window manager or DE; on Mac, Karabiner; on Windows, WinCompose).

For the record, I am not an AI.

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surgical_fire 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was the whole time trying to figure out if it was AI.

I was ambivalent about it. The way the arguments are presented don't read as much like AI.

Perhaps it was indeed just for proofreading. Although I know that MS Word turns single dashes into em-dash. Maybe they used Word when writing the thing?

It's one of the reasons I am sort of abandoning dashes when writing and using instead semicolons.

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lapcat 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The user's other blogs also have the same telltale em dash usage and usage of “” instead of "".

Oh for fuck’s sake. Can we please stop with this nonsense? You must think my blog is LLM-generated too.

I’m so tired of the illiterate denying the humanity of the literate. How do you think LLMs were trained? On human writing.

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igloopan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe.

I have no idea what your long form writing looks like. But can you look at something like this https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/if-you-recognize-me-in-pu... and seriously come out of it not thinking it's AI slop?

> The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona.

> Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate. It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading.

Or perhaps the radically different stylistic decision of using emojis and using italics and boldface for emphasis in this older blog https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/hellcaptcha-accessibility... could be more convincing?

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lapcat 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe.

But it’s not justification. You made your argument worse, not better, by citing em dashes and quotes.

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igloopan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It is justification. AI writing has certain characteristics more frequently than non-AI writing. These in particular are easy to see and cite as justification. Others like the use of the "it's not X, it's Y" construction and the way that adjectives are used are noticable too but not as easy to point as justification because longer explanations are necessary.

Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AICURLY https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AIDASH

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lapcat 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing

From the same article:

“Do not rely too much on your own judgment.”

“human editors and writers often use em dashes”

	▲	igloopan an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed. People use em dashes. And curly quotation marks. And emojis in headers. And use boldface and italics to emphasize things. And overuse the "it's not X, it's Y" construction. People could also do all of these things at the same time. Or maybe do them sometimes and not other times for fun. It is obviously impossible to be able to tell with 100% certainty whether or not something is written using AI. But I think this most likely is. Could be that it's just copy edited with AI and not wholly AI slop. Who knows. Either way, it reads very much like AI to me.