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Comment by ceroxylon | Hacker News Reader

> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals.

Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice.

It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.

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This kind of phrasing has been common in writing long before AI. There's a reason that AI picked it up—it's a natural human written speech pattern.

It's ad copy style. Humans have been writing like that for decades but it's not naturalistic construction.

Not sure who you talk to, but the 'It's Not Just X, It's Y' format doesn't show up in everyday speech (caveat, in my experience).

this. marketing speak appears much more frequently in online text, which is what AI is trained on, than it does in normal everyday human speech that AI isn't able to capture and train on en masse yet.

I find it kind of common, used as a riff off of patterns in advertising and post-politics.

It’s not universal - but it’s a compelling rhetorical device /s

It just sounds like slop as it’s everywhere now. The pattern invites questions on the authenticity of the writer, and whether they’ve fallen victim to AI hallucinations and sycophant. I can quickly become offended when someone asks me to read their ChatGPT output without disclosing it was gpt output.

Now when AI learns how to use parallelism I will be forced to learn a new style of writing to maintain credibility with the reader /s

Are you distinguishing between speech and writing? I'd agree on the former - that no-one talks that way.

It's not. Most people have never written anything using that format.

That's only because most people don't write.

that is exactly right!

I love how you tried to intentionally demonstrate that it's a normal speech pattern, but then your own sentence didn't even match the speech pattern.

This AI speech pattern is not just an em dash—it's a trite and tonally awkward pairing of statements following the phrase "not just".

It's a very sad reflection that people can no longer reliably identify real vs. LLM-generated text.

I hate this. Writing skills used to be a way to show you're paying attention to detail and making an effort. Now everyone thinks I'm cheesing it out with AI.

I also have a tougher time judging the reliability of others because you can get grammatically perfect, well organized emails from people that are incompetent. AI has significantly increased the signal to noise ratio for me.

If you wrote like AI, you write badly. I mean it genuinely. AI writing is not good text. It is grammatically correct passable text.

Yeah, but the stuff people seem to obsess about are just bits of neat typography like dashes and rhetoric flourishes that should, or used to, signify good writing and worked for a reason. The AI just overuses them, it’s not that they’re bad per se. I suppose it’s a treadmill like anything else that gets too popular. We have to find something new to do the same thing (if possible!). And that sucks.

You are correct. There's just a lot of societal pressure to know what good writing is, even amongst people who don't read outside of social media. They don't want to appear stupid, so they say dashes are "AI" because everybody does.

People cant verbalize good and bad writing. Being able to see it and being able to diagnoze are two different things.

Fact is, AI writing is just bad. It checks all the elementary school writing boxes, but fails in a sense that it is a bad, overly verbose, just subtly but meaningfully incorrect text. People see that, cant put the issue into words and then look for other signs.

Yes, ai is bad in a way someone who learns some rules about writing produces bad texts. And when human writes the same way, it is still bad.

Having an em dash is not "writing like AI." It's been around forever.

"The irony, of course, is that many of the people most convinced of the em dash’s inhumanity are least equipped to spot actual AI writing"

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/the-em-dash-conspiracy-h...

Having em dash is also does NOT show skill in the "Writing skills used to be a way to show you're paying attention to detail and making an effort."

Em dash was never attention to detail or effort. It is a way to construct sentence when you dont know how.

For some reason, my mind has gone to this in a few of the comments, not just yours:

  Ten Ways To Tell AI Listicles From Human Ones—You Won't Believe Number Seven

I think you mean it has decreased the SNR (by raising the noise floor).

The thing is he used both the em dash and the "It's not just X it's Y" form in the same sentence.

It's simply how literate people write.

You write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?

I suppose there are worse things than my scribblings sounding like a late-night kitchen gizmo ad. :)

It's how I've written my entire adult life - except I'm too lazy to type a real em-dash.

I use them often enough that I know the Mac shortcut more or less automatically.

>write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?

I naturally wrote "it's not just X, it's Y" long before November 2022 ChatGPT. Probably because I picked up on it from many people.

It's a common rhetorical template of a parallel form where the "X" is re-stating the obvious surface-level thing and then adding the "Y" that's not as obvious.

E.g. examples of regular people writing that rhetorical device on HN for 15+ years that wasn't in the context of advertising gadgets:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

So AI-slop writes like that because a lot of us humans wrote like that and it copies the style. Today is the first time I've learned that the "It's not X, it's Y" really irritates many readers. Personally, I've always found it helpful when it reveals a "Y" that's non-obvious.

1) None of those had an Em dash

2) Most of those, while they had the two statements, the statements were not in succession.

There are maybe 4 unique examples in the search over the past 15 years, which is why it is very telling when there is an explosion of the pattern seen today, and that is most likely due to LLMs.

>1) None of those had an Em dash

I was responding in particular to the "you write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?" ... which would be a speech pattern people hear. In the audio case, it doesn't matter what punctuation symbol separates the "it isn't/it's" pattern because the comma or em dash would be invisible.

E.g. a blog author also complains about "it isn't/it's" separated by a comma here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6...

>There are maybe 4 unique examples in the search over the past 15 years,

No, (1) the Algolia search engine HN uses is not exhaustive and always returns incomplete results, and (2) I couldn't construct a regex to capture all occurrences. It didn't capture the dozens of times I used it before 2022.

More pre-2022 examples that match the "it isn't/it's" pattern that the blog author is complaining about :

2012 It Isn't Just Buzz, It's About Relationships : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4567529

2019 It Isn’t the Kids. It’s the Cost of Raising Them : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19468214

2021 It isn't Facebook, it's us : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402146

2017 It isn't trig, or geometry, or analysis: it's maths : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310575

The same gp mentioned that it's also common in "ad copy". That's also true with the famous Navy's "It's not just a job. It's an adventure.". E.g. 1981 tv commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc9g2tagYms

That's a slogan people heard rather than read with an em dash. LLM engines picked up on a common phrasing used for decades.

I understand that there are multiple people in this conversation, but you are attempting to pick and choose points to discuss at the expense of your own internal consistency. If you were responding to "which would be a speech pattern people hear," why did you only quote written examples from the HN search and not provide video or audio clips?

>why did you only quote written examples from the HN search and not provide video or audio clips?

At the risk of stating the obvious, highlighting the HN _texts_ demonstrates in a very literal way the "write like" fragment in gp's question, "You write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?. The other fragment was the "late night kitchen gizmo ad" which is the audio comparison. The gp was making that comparison between the writing style and the speech style when asking the question. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165248)

Providing audio links would not show the "writes like". The gp (and you) already know what the "It isn't/It's" audio pattern sounds like. It's the written text the gp was wondering about.

The point is people really did write text like that (no em dashes required) before ChatGPT existed.

EDIT reply to: >He just said that it is traditionally associated with late-night ads, and that the explosion in use of the phrase (especially with the em-dash)

Actually, the gp (0_____0) I was responding to didn't mention the em dash in either of the 2 comments. Gp used a comma instead of em dash. Gp only mentioned the comparison to ad copy. The em dash wasn't relevant in the subthread we're in. That's something extra you brought up that's not related to gp's specific question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165237

EDIT reply to: >Quick HN tip: It is usually better to reply to a post instead of editing the original post.

I agree but the "reply" option was not available. This is a "cool down" mechanism HN uses to discourage flame wars. I don't know if it's 30 minutes or what the value is before the reply link shows up. It was just easier to reply in my post rather than wait an indeterminate time.

>This statement is incorrect, as the original post mentioned, "'it's not just x — it's y' format is the hallmark

Yes but that's not the ggp (ceroxylon) I was responding to. Instead, I was responding t gp (0_____0)'s question and the 2 times the writing was compared to ad copy with no mention of em dashes. Sorry for not making that clear.

>Showing fewer than a dozen uses of the phrase

Again, there are thousands of examples but the Algolia search engine will not show all of them.

>The point is people really did write text like that (no em dashes required) before ChatGPT existed.

OK, I think I can see your point, but at best it is irrelevant. At no point did the original poster imply that ChatGPT created the phrase, or that it wasn’t in spoken or written language before then. He just said that it is traditionally associated with late-night ads, and that the explosion in use of the phrase (especially with the em-dash) is most likely attributed to increased LLM use.

Quick HN tip: It is usually better to reply to a post instead of editing the original post.

>Actually, the GP (0_____0) I was responding to didn't mention the em dash in either of the two comments. GP used a comma instead of an em dash. GP only mentioned the comparison to ad copy. The em dash wasn't relevant in the subthread we're in. That's something you brought up.

This statement is incorrect, as the original post mentioned, "'it's not just x — it's y' format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written/edited by AI." (note the quotes in the first post), and the next post said, "It's simply how literate people write."

All of this is beside the point, however, because your statement, "The point is people really did write text like that (no em dashes required) before ChatGPT existed," was never contended in this thread, and I do not think anyone has ever thought that ChatGPT created that phrase, so it just doesn't add to the discussion. Showing fewer than a dozen uses of the phrase (with or without the em dash) in a 15-year period just further proves that it was not a common written turn of phrase before ChatGPT.

You're wasting your time on that person.

It's an age old rhetorical construct, the Antithesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis

"AI" surely overuses it but this article didn't seem suspect to me. I agree that "AI" speak rubs off on heavy users though.

I'd give this the benefit of the doubt because the y section is more complex than I'd expect from AI. If it said "it's about the ubiquity of these tools", I'd agree it feels like AI slop, but "it's about what the ubiquity of these tools signals" has a deeper parse tree than I usually see in that negative parallelism structure.

On the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash.

The em-dash has been standard at jobs I had over the past 20 years. Not necessarily a fan of lack of separation on both sides of the punctuation but it's the normal style.

>The em-dash has been standard at jobs I had over the past 20 years.

What does this statement even mean?

That we commonly used em-dashes as a mark to set off parenthetical information. Yes, you can also use parentheses and they're somewhat interchangeable.

OK, makes sense. I thought you were implying there was a quota of em-dashes you had to use each quarter.

> On the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash.

It was always there, and used. It was just typically restricted to pretty formal, polished writing (I should know, I have coworkers who fuss over em and en spaces). I bet if you looked, you'd find regular use of em-dashes in Newsweek articles, going back decades.

The things LLMs did was inject it into unsophisticated writing. It's really only an LLM tell if it's overused or used in an unexpected context (e.g. an 8th-grader's essay, an email message).

I always found it a bit amusing how we have three kinds of dashes/hyphens while we have double quotes that serve 3 or 4 different purposes :-)

I mostly just use a double hyphen in casual/lazy writing like emails (or HN comments :-)) but use an em-dash in anything more formal. En-dashes just seem pedantic and I don't really use them in general.

I suspect em-dashes are particularly American.

I tend to insert space before and after on the very rare occasion I might use one . . . However I'm from the colonies and I've just learnt my preference is likely due to British influence.

Yes, there were always common in academic writing and such, but you rarely saw them in casual text.

I’m quickly becoming convinced that humans adapt to ai content and quickly find it boring. It’s the same effect as walking through the renaissance section of an art museum or watching 10 action movies. You quickly become accustomed to the flavor of the content and move on. With human generated content, the process and limitations can be interesting - but there is no such depth to ai content.

This is fine for topics that don’t need to be exciting, like back office automation, data analysis, programming etc. but leads me to believe most content made for human consumption will still need to be human generated.

I’ve ceased using ai for writing assistance beyond spell check/accuracy/and as an automated reviewer. The core prose has to be human written to not sound like slop.

I've expected this same thing for a long time, it's the exact same phenomena as tv/movie cgi special effects looking dated - many that were amazing when the were released just look bad now because we've gotten used to them and can see when something is being faked with the old methods.

The population has been handed a shortcut machine and will give in to taking the path of least resistance in their tasks. It may be ironic but it's not surprising to see it used here.

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