OTOH I’ve had blog posts I wrote two decades ago vehemently called out as AI generated. AI generated style unfortunately means writing that tested positively in human A/B testing, now over represented in a style used largely by AI.

So if you write in a way that engages the reader, you’re going to struggle not to use em dashes and the occasional a/b contrast, because those are challenging the reader to engage… but when overused, they not only don’t have the intended effect ( to break the reader out of passivity) , they also constitute a new kind of sin.

So no, don’t “trust your gut”. Trust the math. Is it too much? Or is it just trying to jar you out of not engaging with the prose?

But yeah, I’d say this article is likely written primarily with AI. Which doesn’t mean it’s not guided with intention and potentially important, it just means the article was probably commissioned and edited by a human, not written by one.

Indeed, consider these two posts linked below also from this blog. They look the same, they maintain the same impersonal writing style. There's no humanity to it at all.

They maintain such a consistent paragraph length that they're either a professional copyeditor or, as is clearly the case, are an LLM.

Humans deviate a lot more than this, they use run on sentences or lose the thread in their writing.

This blog however reads like every-other post on LinkedIn. Semi-professional tone, with a strong "You, Me" hook to most posts.

I encourage everyone to make an LLM-generated blog, don't post the articles anywhere, but generate one, to get a feeling for how these things write.

Because this is unmistakably LLM. I'd even go so far as to identify the model of these particular posts as ChatGPT.

Yet when we point this out, we're told it is "unmistakably human" and that we're rude for pointing it out.

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-joy-of-a-simple-life-wi...

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/finding_flow_in_code.md

I started off hedging but by the end of the comment came to think that AI use—or lack thereof—was actually beside the point. I have feelings with regards to the situation where “the situation” includes some largely irrelevant-to-writing things like the mainframization and the “feelings” are not nearly coherent enough to graduate to thoughts. Thus (unlike some others) I don’t think that calling out writers or warning readers about AI is all that useful (or for that matter courageous). With respect to writers who use AI due to a lack of confidence, it’s probably even harmful. (Saying that as a person who manages to absolutely suck in embarrassing ways in multiple foreign languages. And also in English but less obviously. And likely in my native language too due to lack of use.) Meanwhile, TFA makes a decent point, and I am in no position to criticize people for being wordy.

The thing is, by now it doesn’t actually matter if AI or not AI or partly AI or whatever, because the record scratch is still there and still breaks my immersion. I could be oversensitive (I definitely am to some other English-language things, and also feel that others are to yet other things like em dashes), but it feels like there’s a new language/social-signalling thing now, and you may have to avoid it even if you’re not an LLM.