One of the early selling points of LLMs was their ability to mimic styles. I haven't heard about that for a while though. Wouldn't that at least obscure the classic tells, if not eliminate them? I think the reason most (obvious) AI output is obvious is because people don't bother to hide it.

"(It’s famously not well capable of sounding human)"

Rather than a binary, I prefer to measure the question of "how much text does it take to be reasonably sure that it's an AI?"

By that metric, it is getting better at a reasonable pace. People are also getting better at prompting their AIs to write in something other than the default LLM style. If you think you're good at picking up that style, you probably are. But it's a lot harder to pick up AIs when they're fed a style sample. You wrote in the default AI style, and yeah, most of us have twigged to that by the end of your couple of short sentences. But feed the AI a style sample and it can definitely make it two sentences without every one realizing it's AI.

Right. Reviewers still have the advantage of being able to spot AI text because it's often overtly different. I just meant to say that, if you prompt ai "what would a human be proud of having written this code" you'll get an answer. They're not categorically incapable of fabricating an "opinion", they're just trained not to express one by default.

This could easily be circumvented by having the AI generate an explanation of the chosen portion of code and have the human rewrite it in their own words. It is much easier, imo, to swap clauses and put synonyms in place of other words within existing writing then it is to synthesise new text.