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Comment by ThinkingGuy | Hacker News Reader

The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer.

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It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?

>how do people copy edit this and not notice?

I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.

Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.

Because you need to show something that executives can parse and people that only want to eat slop writing to read. People literally took marketing material as gospel before. They still do now.

$0.10 for a marketing blurb isn’t exactly throwing away tokens, and if it conforms to society’s expectations then probably worth the spend.

SEO, basically. Same as before

Conformity. Demands for it are everywhere if you choose to see it.

Nice try, but it's generated slop all the way down, Mr. Feynman.

The tech specs aren't safe either. Last year the official Google Store had some laughable AI translations in the specs for their Pixel phones. Eg. "Rear video" was translated to "Rückansicht" ("Rear view"). That nonsensical translation for an audience of 80 million persisted for months. In 2025 blessed vibe-translation of formerly reputable sites really stood out to me.

Nobody gives a fuck about anything anymore.

how do people copy edit this and not notice?

If they wanted to pay trained copy editors, they wouldn't use A.I.

Where do copy editors train?

At communication school, there are degrees and stuff.

(to the sibling comment's point)

Professional Editor and Proofreading Course - https://careertraining.uwp.edu/training-programs/professiona...

> Professional editing is both an art and a discipline of diagnosing what a text needs and applying the right level of editorial intervention without flattening voice or intent. This skillset requires language mastery, analysis, and workflow efficiency that many aspiring editors lack. This editing and proofreading course closes that gap by treating editing as a structured profession with repeatable methods. You will discover editing style systems to help you perfect your skillset, while covering specialized domains, ethical considerations, tools and technology, as well as business operations that will help you succeed in your career as a professional editor.

> You will progress through 10 sequential modules and build real-world editor workflows, such as style sheets, author queries, consistency systems, and professional deliverables. You will also strengthen your editorial judgment across various genres and contexts. This online proofreading training program culminates in a capstone editing project that produces industry-standard artifacts, including a marked-up manuscript, editorial letter, style sheet, author queries, and reflective analysis, that will help you demonstrate your competence to prospective employers and clients.

---

https://www.uww.edu/cls/academics/professional-writing-publi...

https://uww-public.courseleaf.com/undergraduate/letters-scie...

    PWP 330   COPYEDITING   3 Units
    Apply and further develop skills needed to work with authors and prepare a manuscript for publication. Focus is on the procedures of editing a manuscript, particularly editing for correctness and style, following the conventions of The Chicago Manual of Style.
    PREREQ: (PWP 230 AND PWP 310) OR INSTRUCTOR CONSENT

I agree that it's marketing mumbo jumbo, but it's saying "we haven't added more features because more is better, we added them because they actually improve the longevity of the product."

If anything, that sentence tells me that they are insecure of their features being perceived as bullshit.

It's phrased poorly for that point, though. "Unlike the competition, we aren't just adding these features to pad out a spec sheet. Each change we've made for the plus model this year will pay off in improved lifespan and better functionality for you."

Or something in that vein. Like this isn't very hard to write?

12 GB RAM instead of 8 and Snapdragon 7s Gen4 vs Gen3.

For an MSRP increase from 599€ to 649€ that seems like a decent deal to me.

it sounds profound to the person that generated it

level 1 AI psychosis, really mild symptoms

IMO it all comes down to the desire to have too my "copy" without enough to say. the people who generate it don't value their own output enough to try, which is a great way of intuiting that they have had the requirement to create copy delegated to them without them expecting that copy to be useful in any way.

In other words, "doneness" is the metric of quality for most of this stuff.

Right? As opposed to all those unintentional improvements they usually put in their products.

The root problem is that all marketing copy is like this, generated by meat sacks or weight arrays. It’s all borderline nonsense.

The sloppiness in the AI comes from the human sloppiness on this topic. This seems like a variant of what I've seen called the "fake because", which is the idea that people don't generally analyze whether or not a given reason actually makes sense. For example, the common advertising "You need to buy this beer because it'll get you the girls". It is obvious to conscious examination by pretty much everyone that this is obviously false... the problem is getting it up to that conscious examination in the first place.

I've also noticed several times the deployment of "It's not about the X, {because} it's actually about the Y" where the connection between the X and the Y has no real logic in it upon examination. That can often be translated to "I want to change the topic to Y" without much loss. I think this is one of the primary ways that AI writing can be really exhausting to work through logically and it gets people who are for whatever reason thinking sloppily, including just the sheer exhaustion of the amount of thinking navigating the modern world takes even for someone who nominally understands how to penetrate this sort of sloppy thinking, into so much trouble when they just trust the torrent of words going by. AIs can very easily hallucinate "fake becauses" at a rate no human could possibly keep up with.

This has it backwards, it is the AI that writes like cliched AD copy. Feast your eyes on this quote from a whiskey CEO, supposedly written in 2016:

> ‘When you bring people in from overseas [to Scotland], you’re working on their mindsets,’ he says. ‘You make them get a feeling for Scotch. It’s not about an advert, it’s about this magical industry with its rich heritage and this history.

> ‘It’s not about kilts and drums, but it’s about the Highlands, the water, the peat, the stories, and I call it softness – it’s very gentle marketing. A lot of what you’ve got to do is to win the hearts and minds.’

The waybackmachine has it first in 2019, but that's early enough to know this is 100% human trite bullshit. https://web.archive.org/web/20190823030911/https://scotchwhi...

This is something that frustrates me a lot when I see people jumping on a piece of writing as AI generated, these AI-isms didn't show up in a vacuum. Yes, AI commonly overuses some patterns, but it got those patterns from it's training data because real people wrote (and continue to write) that way. A few matching sentences here or there is not the smoking gun people make it out to be.

This is only true if you consider those who write corporate press releases and post on LinkedIn to be real people. /s

Personally I find writing of this type grating whether the source was AI or the amalgamated output of a committee of humans in a PR department.

To be fair to committees, the above quote is explicitly from a single person and I expect that is true of most AD copy simply because having one person write it is cheaper.

Committees are more about stamping out flavour by making what exists more bland, rather than adding endlessly regurgitated idioms.

> This is only true if you consider those who write corporate press releases and post on LinkedIn to be real people.

You make a fair point. Objection withdrawn your honor.

The other thing that is characteristic of AI text is messing up the underlying meaning or fine details of what it's saying. It's not just that it's imitating people who write bad contrasting clauses, it also can't write good ones reliably.

edit: Ironically that last sentence is not super clear (but hey writing is hard and I'm constantly exposed to slop). My point is the nature of AI makes its writing worse than its training data, it's not all bad training data.

> but that's early enough to know this is 100% human trite bullshit

It's also lacking the toaster dash. Clear bio-signature of the unaffected hearts and minds.

I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters

I’m not. I’m tired of trying to parse this crap.

I mean, AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set. Honestly AI producing it so much is much more likely to make humans avoid it.

> AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set

I don't think this is true. Someone probably had to write like this, but a base model has to be able to write like anyone. The specific mannerisms of AI appear in post training, either as things that are rewarded or as mode collapse artifacts. ChatGPT didn't get obsessed with goblins because that's incredibly common among humans.

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