| ▲ | tptacek 5 hours ago |
| I doubt it. It's the house magazine of a a Christian sect (the Bruderhof Anabaptists), and it also needs a firmer editor. There were sections that stuck out to me as I read it where I was like "Claude would have caught that". I wish people would stop keying in on em-dashes. They might be a tell on message boards and Twitter, but lots of writers use them heavily and have for decades. |
|
| ▲ | newer_vienna 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| By itself it's not a tell but combined with all else it's hard to pass by. Author's other article from 2025 has less than half the dashes and it's the same length |
| |
| ▲ | panflute 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How would the rise of dash usage in LLMs have arised if a significant portion of non-LLM writers weren't inclined to take them up and make them more common? The only explanation I see is that they are common in training materials we don't as commonly consume as website visitors. | | |
| ▲ | phainopepla2 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I have often wondered this myself, especially because the same stylistic quirks are found across models from different labs. I haven't found a satisfactory explanation, but whatever the explanation is, it is undoubtedly true that LLMs use them to an almost absurd extent compared to the vast majority of human writers. Anyone who reads a lot of prose can see that. |
| |
| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So we're actually witnessing in real time that he was slowly learning where to use emdashes? That's sort of hilarious. |
|
|
| ▲ | jjtheblunt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| to your point, a book i had as a kid in chicago suburbia has a section on hyphens and dashes https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch06/to... |
|
| ▲ | righthand 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it. The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on. |
| |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Just so I'm clear, I'm saying I don't think the writing in this is coherent enough to be LLM product. It kind of meanders and there are some rough paragraphs. (That's not a bad thing! I'm not saying it wasn't worth reading. Just that it had rough edges that in my experience LLMs polish off.) | | |
| ▲ | badlibrarian 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | At a minimum, I do see a lot of AI-as-researcher tells here. You can get Claude to draft very similar essays (of surprisingly quality) if you feed it a target market/philosophy, a few articles for style, then ask it to dig up dirt on any published author in the humanities. It connects the dots and writes stuff that feels just like this article, right down to the meandering. The rough edges and sudden shifts in register is the author editing, then asking for a revised draft. Claude says: "Verdict: Heavily assisted, possibly lightly edited from an LLM draft. The primary sources are real and the Kierkegaard scholarship is accurate, which suggests a human who knows the material. But the connective tissue and virtually all the 'writerly' prose is machine-generated." | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah I don't believe Claude's take on these kinds of questions at all. I can get Claude to say that about posts I wrote 10 years ago. | | |
| ▲ | badlibrarian 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I've written essays in this exact format and I recognize specific tells. He's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Pro (now Adaptive) as a research assistant then tweaking the output. Know it, done it, smell it. "The piece moves in a pattern that LLMs default to: historical episode, philosophical summary, contemporary relevance, theological application. Each section is self-contained, cleanly closed, and bridges to the next with a meta-sentence. A human essayist leaves more mess in the transitions." Now that I've pointed it out, you'll see more stuff like this. It's everywhere. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | pasquinelli 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” i'm not even remotely convinced that's true. | | |
|
