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Chinjut

Good lord, even the apology is AI generated: "That was not just careless—it was wrong."

https://pressanddemocracy.substack.com/p/i-am-admitting-my-m...

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I think his apology was actually written in Dutch so this might be a translation that was automated?

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peter-vandermeersch-a4381b30_...

It is a faithful translation of the original Dutch. Dutch is structurally very similar to English so this type of nuance carries over pretty much intact.

Dutch: “Dat was niet enkel onzorgvuldig, het was fout.”

English: “That was not just careless—it was wrong.”

I’d say the only difference is the em dash.

Whether you consider it proof of AI is up to y’all.

I'm not disagreeing it's a bad translation. Just saying that it's not the source

I mean that whatever signal you think you get from the sentence structure was not introduced by (potentially) automated translation. The sentence structure is precisely the same in the original Dutch.

His non-apology apology even follows a familiar pattern: I wrote it myself but just used AI for some help, and it inserted false quotes! Bad tech! But I have now learned my lesson!

Very similar to what a rector recently wrote when she got busted giving an AI-generated speech in her inaugural speech in her new university job.

None of it is true, of course. These people are just sorry they got caught.

Particularly given that the dreaded em-dash is not commonly used in Irish or UK English; it’s mostly a US English thing.

The original (?) apology in Dutch does not use em-dashes:

https://steady.page/en/journalistiekondervuur/posts/dd6e066f...

Oh, I had completely missed that he’d done this in a Dutch paper too. All I’d heard of it previously was that his articles had been pulled by the Irish Independent, so I was expecting the apology to be in English.

I’m tempted to agree, but this is a case where I think there’s more human than AI. Maybe he used LLMs for a bit, and changed parts of it. Maybe he is patient zero for LLM speak?

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