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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it. It's the house magazine of a a Christian sect (the Bruderhof Anabaptists), and it also needs a firmer editor. There were sections that stuck out to me as I read it where I was like "Claude would have caught that".

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.

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By itself it's not a tell but combined with all else it's hard to pass by. Author's other article from 2025 has less than half the dashes and it's the same length

So we're actually witnessing in real time that he was slowly learning where to use emdashes? That's sort of hilarious.

How would the rise of dash usage in LLMs have arised if a significant portion of non-LLM writers weren't inclined to take them up and make them more common? The only explanation I see is that they are common in training materials we don't as commonly consume as website visitors.

I have often wondered this myself, especially because the same stylistic quirks are found across models from different labs.

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.

It all falls into one overarching category: style over substance, quantity over quality. Em-dashes are a simple way to sound important, same for generic throat-clearing phrases like “It’s important to note that…” plus they puff up the text without saying anything, same for overly symmetrical structure like neat triplets parallel clauses, and balanced pros/cons even when the topic does not naturally call for them, etc.

And they don't have a sense of stylistic restraint, so they often go overboard with one or more of the above.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, a verbose and elaborate writing style is also traditionally more common in humanities whereas scientific or technical writing favours a rather more terse and matter-of-fact style.

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.

to your point, a book i had as a kid in chicago suburbia has a section on hyphens and dashes

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch06/to...

It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it.

The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.

Just so I'm clear, I'm saying I don't think the writing in this is coherent enough to be LLM product. It kind of meanders and there are some rough paragraphs.

(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.)

At a minimum, I do see a lot of AI-as-researcher tells here. You can get Claude to draft very similar essays (of surprisingly quality) if you feed it a target market/philosophy, a few articles for style, then ask it to dig up dirt on any published author in the humanities. It connects the dots and writes stuff that feels just like this article, right down to the meandering. The rough edges and sudden shifts in register is the author editing, then asking for a revised draft.

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."

Yeah I don't believe Claude's take on these kinds of questions at all. I can get Claude to say that about posts I wrote 10 years ago.

I've written essays in this exact format and I recognize specific tells. He's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Pro (now Adaptive) as a research assistant then tweaking the output. Know it, done it, smell it.

"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.

Absolutely spot on. Or maybe should I say, "You're absolutely right!"...

> Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y”

i'm not even remotely convinced that's true.

It's not true, it's false.

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