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As someone who doesn't know most of the tells but genuinely wants to know, what are some of the things that tells you it's AI-generated?

There's the punctuation and word choice tells. And the overall voice. But let's set that aside because some human writing shows similar traits, or perhaps a human used an LLM to "fix the grammar". So I'll point out another tell that this article is pure slop:

This article is overflowing with links, numbers, and graphs. When a human writes that densely, it takes effort to incorporate all those details. So the human only does that if each detail contributes to their argument. In this article it's mostly irrelevant. It's LLM filler to pad out an article that really has nothing to say beyond its (also LLM-scented) title.

Interesting! Thanks for explaining!

It reads like absolute dogshit.

The blog's About page says Max "writes" about transportation, but I'm skeptical he's even read his own slop here, or he would have presumably fixed some of the worst nonsense sentences before posting it. I doubt he even had the courtesy to ask Claude to run a fact-check on its output. Curse anyone who wastes my reading time like this.

It could have been an interesting article