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Heh, I was using emdashes and tricolons long before LLMs appropriated the style but I did let the agent handle some of the details on this. Honestly, it really is just easier sometimes... Especially for blogs posts like this when I've also got a book I'm writing, code to maintain etc. Use tools available to make life easier.

by dilap8 hours ago|

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I think you'd be much better served by writing something rough that maintains your own voice!

by silisili8 hours ago|

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I'm not sure any emdash use at all is what people are calling out typically(maybe it is?), more the sheer number of them typical in LLM written stuff.

Just ctrl-f'ing through previous public posts, I think there were a total of 7 used across about that many posts. This one for example had 57. I'm not good enough in proper English to know what the normal number is supposed to be, just pointing that out.

by hackrmn2 hours ago|

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Just want to raise my hand and say I too have been using em dashes for considerably longer than LLM has been on every hacker's lips. It's obviously not great being accused of being an AI just because one has a particular style of writing...

by n_e8 hours ago|

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I found your article both interesting and readable.

It doesn't really matter what tools are used if the result is good

by eis8 hours ago|

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People are understandably a bit sensitized and sceptical after the last AI generated blog post (and code slop!) by Cloudflare blew up. Personally I'm fine with using AI to help write stuff as long as everything is proof-read and actually represents the authors thoughts. I would have opted to be a bit more careful and not use AI for a few blog posts after the last incident though if I was working at Cloudflare...

by azangru9 hours ago|

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What was it specifically about the style that stood out as incongruous, or that hindered comprehension? What was it that made you stumble and start paying close attention to the style rather than to the message? I am looking at the two examples, and I can't see anything wrong with them, especially in the context of the article. They both employ the same rhetorical technique of antithesis, a juxtaposition of contrasting ideas. Surely people wrote like this before? Surely no-one complained?

by jsheard8 hours ago|

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The problem is less with the style itself and more that it's strongly associated with low-effort content which is going to waste the readers time. It would be nice to be able to give everything the benefit of the doubt, but humans have finite time and LLMs have infinite capacity for producing trite or inaccurate drivel, so readers end up reflexively using LLM tells as a litmus test for (lack of) quality in order to cut through the noise.

You might say well, it's on the Cloudflare blog so it must have some merit, but after the Matrix incident...

by guntars6 hours ago|

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These AI signals will die out soon. The models are overusing actual human writing patterns, the humans are noticing and changing how they write, the models are updated, new patterns emerge, etc, etc. The best signal for the quality of writing will always be the source, even if they are "just" prompting the model. I think we can let one incident slide, but they are on notice.

by azangru7 hours ago|

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> You might say well, it's on the Cloudflare blog so it must have some merit

I would instead say that it is written by James Snell, who is one of the central figures in the Node community; and therefore it must have some merit.

by nebezb9 hours ago|

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The idea is well articulated and comes across clear. What’s the issue? Taking a magnifying glass to the whole article to find sentence structure you think is “LLM-slop” is an odd way to dismiss the article entirely.

I’ve read my fair share of LLM slop. This doesn’t qualify.

by jitl9 hours ago|

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cloudflare does seem to love ai written everything

by lapcat9 hours ago|

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You’ve got it backwards: LLMs were trained on human writing and appropriated our style.

by have_faith9 hours ago|

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Partially true. They've been trained and then aligned towards a preferred style. They don't use em-dashes because they are over-represented in the training material (majority of people don't use them).

by lapcat8 hours ago|

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It seems likely that with the written word, as with most things, a minority of people produce the majority of content. Most people publish relatively few words compared to professional writers.

Possibly the LLM vendors could bias the models more toward nonprofessional content, but then the quality and utility of the output would suffer. Skip the scientific articles and books, focus on rando internet comments, and you’ll end up with a lot more crap than you already get.