It's funny, negative parallelisms used to be a favorite gimmick of mine, back in the before-times. Nowadays, every time I see "it isn't just..." I feel disappointment and revulsion.

The really funny thing is, I'll probably miss that tell when it's gone, as every AI company eventually scrubs away obvious blemishes like that from their flagship models.

Very similar here. I wouldn't use it myself but I'd definitely have liked to read such "punchy" text. The interesting thing is that I'm now much more consciously noticing how many em dashes and other similar phrases say an Agatha Christie used to use... which makes the source of such LLM data even more obvious hehe.

Interestingly, there are still many other good literary devices that are not yet used by AI - for example, sentences of varying lengths. There is still scope for a good human editor to easily outdo LLMs... but how many will notice? Especially when one of the editorial coloumns in the NYT (or Atlantic, forgot exactly) is merrily using LLMs in the heartfelt advice coloumn. It's really ironic, isn't it? ;)

I use em dashes in my regular writing — mostly because I consider them good/correct typography — and now I have to contend with being accused of using LLMs or being a bot. I think this societal development is damaging.

Could this be a symptom of the free tier of ChatGPT, but not all LLMs? I’ve recently been a heavy user of Anthropic’s Claude and I don’t believe I’ve seen too many of these in my chats. Though this may be because I haven’t asked Claude to write Wikipedia articles.

LLMs are also great at following style, not via criteria but via examples. So this is something that’s easily overcome.

I discovered this when I made an error in a creative writing tool I was working on. I told it to follow the writing style of existing story text, but it ended up making the system messages follow the same style. It was quite amusing to see tool messages and updates written in an increasingly enthusiastic Shakespearean/etc prose (so I left it unfixed!)

I am dismayed by the implication that humans are now no longer able to use certain tropes or rhetorical devices or stylistic choices without immediately being discounted as LLMs and having their entire writing work discredited.