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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

I'm sick of hearing about AI, but I'm significantly more sick of anyone who knows how to write English prose at a level higher than "typical rural American" being accused of using AI to write.

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Agreed. Feels like I see this accusation made on every other post on this site nowadays. And maybe it's even true.

But if it's not, it's insulting to the poster, and if it is, then who cares if people are engaging with the post.

Well that's the world we live in now.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

It has the typical patterns: em dashes, "it's not A, it's B" constructions. Also relatively new, low karma account, and its other comments are similarly LLM-ish.

Em dashes are—hear me out—easy for anyone who knows how to type a hyphen twice.

Guilty as charged. As a non-native speaker, I used an LLM to compile my original thoughts into fluent English.

But notice the irony: I used AI exactly as I advocate. It handled the horizontal spread (syntax), while I rigorously enforced the vertical depth (the architectural logic). The 'taste' is entirely mine.

Thank you to Arainach and cableshaft for engaging with the actual substance. Dismissing a core argument because you pattern-matched an 'em-dash' is exactly the shallow thinking this post warns about.

Implicit in "this post looks like AI"—at least the vast majority of the time—is that it is a wordy ramble with no real value because it says nothing novel or substantive—so I would not call it an hominem attack, but rather an honest criticism of the actual (lack of) content.

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