It does for me too. Especially the short parts with headings, the bold sentences in their own paragraph and especially formulations like "X isn't just... it's Y".
In other words, this website uses headings for sections, doesn't ramble, and has a single line of emphasis where you'd expect it. I wonder what style we'll have to adopt soon to avoid LLM witchhunt - live stream of consciousness ranting with transcript and typos?
To me this kind of use of AI (generating the whole article) is equivalent to a low-effort post. I also personally don't like this kind of writing, regardless of whether or not an AI generated it.
Imagine being a person like me who has always been expressing himself like that. Using em dash, too.
LLMs didn’t randomly invent their own unique style, they learned it from books. This is just how people write when they get slightly more literate than nowadays texting-era kids.
And these suspicions are in vain even if happen to be right this one time. LLMs are champions of copying styles, there is no problem asking one to slap Gen Z slang all over and finish the post with the phrase “I literally can’t! <sad-smiley>”. “Detecting LLMs” doesn’t get you ahead of LLMs, it only gets you ahead of the person using them. Why not appreciate example of concise and on-point self-expression and focus on usefulness of content?
My comment was not really meant as a criticism (of AI) but more of an agreement that I am also confident in the fact that the post is AI-generated (while the parent comment does not seem to be so confident).
But to add a personal comment or criticism, I don't like this style of writing. If you like prompt your AI to write in a better style which is easier on the eyes (and it works) then please, go ahead.
The most jarring point that they mentioned, having sudden one-off boldfaced sentences in their own paragraphs, is not something I had ever seen before LLMs. It's possible that this could be a habit humans have picked up from them and started adding it the middle of other text that similarly evokes all of the other LLM tropes, but it doesn't seem particularly likely.
Your point about being able to prompt LLMs to sound different is valid, but I'd argue that it somewhat misses the point (although largely because the point isn't being made precisely). If an LLM-generated blog post was actually crafted with care and intent, it would certainly be possible to make less obvious, but what people are likely actually criticizing is content that's produced in I'll call "default ChatGPT" style that overuses the stylistic elements that get brought up. The extreme density of certain patterns is a signal that the content might have been generated and published without much attention to detail. There's was already a huge amount of content out there even before generating it with LLMs became mainstream, so people will necessarily use heuristics to figure out if something is worth their time. The heuristic "heavy use of default ChatGPT style" is useful if it correlates with the more fundamental issues that the top-level comment of this thread points out, and it's clear that there's a sizable contingent of people who have experienced that this is the case.
> although largely because the point isn't being made precisely
I agree. I wasn't really trying to make a point. But yes, what I am implying is that posts that you can immediately recognize as AI are low effort posts, which are not worth my time.
