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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> That was concrete justification for the underlying vibe.

But it’s not justification. You made your argument worse, not better, by citing em dashes and quotes.

It is justification. AI writing has certain characteristics more frequently than non-AI writing. These in particular are easy to see and cite as justification. Others like the use of the "it's not X, it's Y" construction and the way that adjectives are used are noticable too but not as easy to point as justification because longer explanations are necessary.

Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AICURLY https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:AIDASH

> Wikipedia uses these, among other characteristics, as potential signs of AI writing

From the same article:

“Do not rely too much on your own judgment.”

“human editors and writers often use em dashes”

Indeed. People use em dashes. And curly quotation marks. And emojis in headers. And use boldface and italics to emphasize things. And overuse the "it's not X, it's Y" construction. People could also do all of these things at the same time. Or maybe do them sometimes and not other times for fun.

It is obviously impossible to be able to tell with 100% certainty whether or not something is written using AI. But I think this most likely is. Could be that it's just copy edited with AI and not wholly AI slop. Who knows. Either way, it reads very much like AI to me.

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