> I wonder if reading so much LLM stuff lately has affected my idiolect and that I write (or worse, think) more machine-like than before...

Totally of topic ofc, but I always get triggered by the claim that llms are "machine-like". I'm aware it's a total pet peeve and a lil irrational, but "machine-like" would imply to me that it's thinking like a machine, which in turn implies machine intelligence - which in turn implies they're doing something which they aren't.

I'm not trying to undersell their capabilities. Used well they're able to do a lot of things. But the way they achieve it is by mimicking human dialogue and rhetoric processes to facilitate this process. That's in my opinion anything but machine intelligence. I struggle finding an applicable word for it though

I didn't see your reply until now but "AI" is correctly describing the phenomenon. Most definitions for "artifice" converge around the idea of deception or insincerity.

The term "machine learning" also distinguishes itself from the organic process by authentic intelligence.

In other words, inferring "machine intelligence" is less correct than "artificial intelligence". By definition LLMs are machines pretending to think and they do it well enough to have a writing style.