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Comment by twosdai | Hacker News Reader

Like the emdash, whenever I read: "this isn't x it's y" my dumb monkey brain goes "THATS AI" regardless if it's true or not.

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For me it's the "why this matters", "why this works", etc

Ugh - yes. I’m seriously close to writing a chrome extension just to warn me or block pages that have that phrase…it’s irrational because there are so many legitimate uses, but they are dead to me.

I don't know man, I feel emboldened to keep using emdash exactly because I want to protest against people equating emdash with "AI reply" even though there are very legitimate uses for emdash.

Another common tell nowadays is the apostrophe type (’ vs ').

I don't know personally how to even type ’ on my keyboard. According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.

I suspect some word processors default to one or the other, but it's becoming all too common in places like Reddit and emails.

Word (you know, the most popular word processor out there) will do that substitution. And on macOS & iOS, it's baked into the standard text input widgets so it'll do that basically everywhere that is a rich text editor.

If you work with macOS or iOS users, you won’t be super surprised to see lots of “curly quotes”. They’re part of base macOS, no extra software required (I cannot remember if they need to be switched on or they’re on by default), and of course mass-market software like Word will create “smart” quotes on Mac and Windows.

I ended up implementing smart quotes on an internal blogging platform because I couldn’t bear "straight quotes". It’s just a few lines of code and makes my inner typography nerd twitch less.

> According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.

Browsers do a form of normalization in search. It's really useful, since it means "resume" will match résumé, unless of course you disable it (in Firefox, this is the "Match Diacritics" checkbox). (Also: itʼs, it's; if you want to see it in action on those two words.)

I’ve been using em-dashes since high school — publishing the school paper and everything. I remain slightly bemused by people discovering em-dashes for the first time thanks to LLMs.

Also, “em-dashes are something only LLMs use” comes perilously close to “huh, proper grammar, must’ve run this by a grammar checker”.

I started using them when I discovered the compose key and it became easy to type them, but I've genuinely considered stopping using for this reason.

the problem with this is that people are adapting their REAL SPEECH to this pattern, so people are actually saying this in real conversations

(we do this all the time; eg. a new popular saying lands in an episode of a tv show, and then other people start adopting it, even subconsciously)

it's the <<<<gold-standard>>>> for spotting LLMs in the wild

(that's what Gemini would say)

I can confirm Ryan is a real human :)

Is there a chance you could ask Ryan if he had an LLM write/rewrite large parts of this blog post? I don't mind at all if he did or didn't in itself, it's a good and informative post, but I strongly assumed the same while reading the article and if it's truly not LLM writing then it would serve as a super useful indicator about how often I'm wrongly making that assumption.

As someone that has a habit of maybe overusing em dashes to my detriment, often times, and just something that I try to be mindful of in general. This whole thing of assuming that it's AI generated now is a huge blow. It feels like a personal attack.

"—" has always seemed like an particularly weak/unreliable signal to me, if it makes you feel any better. Triply so in any content one would expect smart quotes or formatted lists, but even in general.

RIP anyone who had a penchant for "not just x, but y" though. It's not even a go-to wording for me and I feel the need to rewrite it any time I type it out of fear it'll sound like LLMs.

> RIP anyone who had a penchant for "not just x, but y" though

I felt that. They didn’t just kidnap my boy; they massacred him.

It’s about more than the emdash. The LLM writing falls into very specific repeated patterns that become extremely obvious tells. The first few paragraphs of this blog post could be used in a textbook as it exhibits most of them at once.

There are multiple signs of LLM-speak:

> Over the past year, we’ve seen a shift in what Deno Deploy customers are building: platforms where users generate code with LLMs and that code runs immediately without review

This isn't a canonical use of a colon (and the dependent clause isn't even grammatical)!

> This isn’t the traditional “run untrusted plugins” problem. It’s deeper: LLM-generated code, calling external APIs with real credentials, without human review.

Another colon-offset dependent paired with the classic, "This isn't X. It's Y," that we've all grown to recognize.

> Sandboxing the compute isn’t enough. You need to control network egress and protect secrets from exfiltration.

More of the latter—this sort of thing was quite rare outside of a specific rhetorical goal of getting your reader excited about what's to come. LLMs (mis)use it everywhere.

> Deno Sandbox provides both. And when the code is ready, you can deploy it directly to Deno Deploy without rebuilding.

Good writers vary sentence length, but it's also a rhetorical strategy that LLMs use indiscriminately with no dramatic goal or tension to relieve.

'And' at the beginning of sentences is another LLM-tell.

> It’s deeper: LLM-generated code, calling external APIs with real credentials, without human review.

This also follows the rule of 3s, which LLMs love, there ya go.

Yeah, I feel like this is really the smoking gun. Because it's not actually deeper? An LLM running untrusted code is not some additional level of security violation above a plugin running untrusted code. I feel like the most annoying part of "It's not X, it's Y" is that agents often say "It's not X, it's (slightly rephrased X)", lol, but it takes like 30 seconds to work that out.

It's not just different way of saying something, it's a whole new way to express an idea.

Can it be that after reading so many LLM texts we will just subconciously follow the style, because that's what we are used to? No idea how this works for native English speakers, but I know that I lack my own writing style and it is just a pseudo-llm mix of Reddit/irc/technical documentation, as those were the places where I learned written English

Yes, I think you're right—I have a hard time imagining how we avoid such an outcome. If it matters to you, my suggestion is to read as widely as you're able to. That way you can at least recognize which constructions are more/less associated with an LLM.

When I was first working toward this, I found the LA Review of Books and the London Review of Books to be helpful examples of longform, erudite writing. (edit - also recommend the old standards of The New Yorker and The Atlantic; I just wanted to highlight options with free articles).

I also recommend reading George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language.

Given that a lot of us actively try to avoid this style, and immediately disregard text that uses it as not worth reading (a very useful heuristic given the vast amount of LLM-generated garbage), I don't think that would make us more prone to write in this manner. In fact I've actively caught myself editing text I've written to avoid certain LLMisms.

It's unfortunate that, given the entire corpus of human writing, LLMs have seemingly been fine-tuned to reproduce terrible ad copy from old editions of National Geographic.

(Yes, I split the infinitive there, but I hate that rule.)

Great list. Another tell is pervasive use of second-person perspective: “We’ve all been there.” “Now you have what you need.”

As you say, this is cargo cult rhetorical style. No purpose other than to look purposeful.

couldnt agree more. It's frankly very fatiguing

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