Article is full of AI tells. "The two men shared surface-level similarities.", "Not X but Y", and em-dashes everywhere. I wish that people would write articles themselves, with their own style, if they expect people to read it.
I wish people would stop keying in on em-dashes. They might be a tell on message boards and Twitter, but lots of writers use them heavily and have for decades.
I haven't found a satisfactory explanation, but whatever the explanation is, it is undoubtedly true that LLMs use them to an almost absurd extent compared to the vast majority of human writers. Anyone who reads a lot of prose can see that.
And they don't have a sense of stylistic restraint, so they often go overboard with one or more of the above.
I don't know about the structures you mention specifically but if you compare an article on humanities or social matters against the style that's common in science and technical writing, chances are it's going to look more verbose in any case.
I don't necessarily have the best AI-dar but TFA didn't ring any LLM bells to me.
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch06/to...
The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.
(That's not a bad thing! I'm not saying it wasn't worth reading. Just that it had rough edges that in my experience LLMs polish off.)
Claude says: "Verdict: Heavily assisted, possibly lightly edited from an LLM draft. The primary sources are real and the Kierkegaard scholarship is accurate, which suggests a human who knows the material. But the connective tissue and virtually all the 'writerly' prose is machine-generated."
"The piece moves in a pattern that LLMs default to: historical episode, philosophical summary, contemporary relevance, theological application. Each section is self-contained, cleanly closed, and bridges to the next with a meta-sentence. A human essayist leaves more mess in the transitions."
Now that I've pointed it out, you'll see more stuff like this. It's everywhere.
i'm not even remotely convinced that's true.
Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.
The irony of this comment can even be found in the post itself:
> ...the magazine’s fortunes soared by exploiting the public’s appetite for outrage. Articles frequently relied on exaggerated – and at times outright false – stories... Accuracy and integrity were secondary to the relentless churn of opinions. The formula worked.
I've heard people say they want a human connection with the author but there was never one anyway. It's 1-way (parasocial), repeatedly edited (not natural human thought), formulaic (effectively AI writing rules implemented by a human), sometimes written by multiple separate people, and you have no other interactions with the same individual(s) so you can't build any kind of relationship or coherent understanding of them.
Consider me. You've probably never interacted with me before and probably never will again. I might be two separate people. I might be an AI. This might be a copy-paste of something I already wrote to 10 other people. Will knowing any of that stuff make a difference to you?
Read through Borges' Library of Babylon, it's brief and follows the readers in the infinite library of seemingly random text. I read the lesson to be this: The protagonist will not find meaning even if he finds a coherent book that walks through a philosophy of existence, rather it is by coming to terms with the design of the architects of the library that any hope at conversation can be had.
I'm really struggling to understand that. Are you defining the meaning of the word "communication"? Does "either" mean "both" or "at least one"? Does reading a blog post count as communication? It it just a fancy way of saying "words are only useful when they convey meaning"? How does any of that relate to AI? AI can also learn from communication. Do you exclude AI because you hold the controversial belief that it's not to be capable of understanding or perhaps not to be capable of working towards any goal? And how about humans who intentionally write nonsense?
I also don't see how the story of that library is relevant. This text is not seemingly random, so it's more like walking through an actual library.
LLMs at their root are next-word predictors. If there's any communicative value in what they produce, it is due only to the data they were trained on and the intentions of the prompt-director and publisher. I have no problem in saying that I would rather interact with the words from the source than with the machine-generated resultant text.
Do you mean you'd rather read the prompt than the output? That's tantalizing but it's only possible because they used AI. I think regular journalists and bloggers effectively have a secret prompt in their head and generate an article to respond to it. Don't you feel the same way about that? It's not AI vs human, but seeing behind the scenes vs seeing the product of the work. Also, you probably don't want to see how the sausage is made. It might look like "here's a bunch of dense technical PDFs about resource use permits and lab reports. Write an article that makes Tesla look like they did something wrong". That might be the exact same secret prompt a human journalist uses, so why do you value the human's output more than the AI's? The human certainly isn't trying to gain any understanding - they're trying to rile up their readers.
Yes, I'd rather read the prompt than the output. The problem you bring up with journalists and bloggers is exactly why provocative content is not worth reading. Kierkegaard brings up this point exactly! One of his most famous quotes is precisely this, "The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist.'". The problem is exactly their motives and the distortion of truth.
My point is that it's not AI-vs-human that matters. AI makes provocative content easier to write but it also makes helpful technical documentation easier to write.