It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs.
replyLLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.
It's really not "good" for many people. It's the sort of high-persuasion marketing speak that used to be limited to the blogs of glossy but shallow startups. Now it's been sucked up by LLMs and it's everywhere.
replyIf you want good writing, go and read a New Yorker.
Not so sure about that. There are many distinct LLM "smells" in that comment, like "A is true, but it hides something: unrelated to A" and "It's not (just) C, it's hyperbole D".
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replyI personally love that phrasing even if it's a clear tell. Comparisons work well for me to grasp an idea. I also love bullet points.
replySo yeah, I guess I like LLM writing.
Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which have the same so called tells.
reply> Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which have the same so called tells.
replyNot with such a high frequency, though. We're looking at 1 tell per sentence!
You're absolutely right, that isn't just good writing — that's poetry! Do you need further assistance?
replyThere is such a thing as a distinct LLM writing style that is not just good structure. Anyone who's read more than five books can tell that.
replyAnd the comment itself seems completely LLM generated.
That's not just false. It's the antithesis of true.
replyIt's not just using rhetorical patterns humans also use which are in some contexts considered good writing. Its overusing them like a high schooler learning the pattern for the first time — and massively overdoing the em dashes and mixing the metaphors
LOL :-))
replyIt's true that LLMs have a distinct style, but it does not preclude humans from writing in a similar style. That's where the LLMs got it from, people and training. There's certainly some emergent style that given enough text, you would likely never see from a human. But in a short comment like this, it's really not enough data to be making good judgements.
replyContrastive parallelism is an effective rhetorical device if the goal is to persuade or engage. It's not good if your goal is more honest, like pedagogy, curious exploration, discovery. It flattens and shoves things into categorical labels, leading the discussion more towards definitions of words and other sidetracks.
replyIf it indicates, culturally in the current zeitgeist, that an AI wrote it, it becomes a bad structure.
replyThey trained the LLMs on people who think in LinkedIn posts.
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