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Comment by ianferrel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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".

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

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!

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