It's Not Just X. It's Y

Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by chipotle_coyote on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:19PM (#48350780)

Except that the entire point of the article is that they're not AI idioms. They're not "watermarks for text." They're legitimate language constructions that LLMs tend to overuse, but that real humans also use. Real humans do, in fact, say "align with" all the time, just as often as "corresponds."

And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by Maxatar on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:24PM (#48350824)

The article is not God, just because it claims something doesn't mean we have to accept it.

For better or worse (and pretty much for worse), these usages have become AI idioms. Language evolves over time, things that used to be harmless become offensive, certain terms end up taking on the complete opposite meaning than their original meaning, and we are watching certain language patterns and idioms become watermarks for AI and while it sucks, it doesn't make it false.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by chipotle_coyote on Sunday May 31, 2026 @08:18PM (#48351224)

I'll just quote from the article, which no one claimed was God and that's really a weird way to dismiss it, but you do you:

"We create a culture of self-censorship and AI-detector-pressured rewriting and paraphrasing as people strive to avoid these witch hunts. That is the opposite of protecting human expression. We should resist normalizing a trust in any machine's ability to determine matters of guilt. If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought."

And, I'm sorry (I'm not), but I am not going to just roll over and shrug and say "welp, guess we all need to dumb our writing down to keep well-meaning idiots from screeching 'AI! AI! AI! WHOOP! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!' at us." That isn't the evolution of language. It's Idiocracy.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by thewebguyd on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:25PM (#48350833)

What's worse is neurodivergent writing, including my own, often resemble AI output. Now it feels like I'm having to alter my own voice in online discussions just to specifically avoid being accused of pasting an AI response.

The "AI Detection" tools employed by schools also regularly flag writing from those with Autism, ADHD, and non-native English speakers as being AI generated as well.

So, naturally, I can't stand the phrase "write like AI" when these things tend to come up because no, there are no humans that "write like AI" it's the models that have stolen the literary devices from us and now have poisoned them.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by SubiculumCode on Sunday May 31, 2026 @08:38PM (#48351374)

That is an empirical question. Do you have empirical sources you'd care to share?

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by StilesCrisis on Monday June 01, 2026 @07:55AM (#48355650)

It flags "non-native speakers" text as AI generated? Really? This beggars belief.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by thewebguyd on Monday June 01, 2026 @10:42AM (#48357492)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02819

> While the detectors were “near-perfect” in evaluating essays written by U.S.-born eighth-graders, they classified more than half of TOEFL essays (61.22%) written by non-native English students as AI-generated (TOEFL is an acronym for the Test of English as a Foreign Language).

> It gets worse. According to the study, all seven AI detectors unanimously identified 18 of the 91 TOEFL student essays (19%) as AI-generated and a remarkable 89 of the 91 TOEFL essays (97%) were flagged by at least one of the detectors.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by crooked-v on Sunday May 31, 2026 @08:08PM (#48351151)

Once upon a time, using em dashes—which hardly anyone knew how to conveniently invoke—was a fun writing quirk to have.

Now I'll have to find something else to overuse: maybe sentences structures around colons, or use of Japanese 「hook brackets」.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by ohyoutravel on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:22PM (#48350805)

Well reading between the lines I don’t think they’re saying all of those uses are AI. They’re legitimate constructs, like the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, all of which I used to use regularly. But now they’re AI tells so I use them sparingly.

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Re:It's Not Just X. It's Y by card_zero on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:29PM (#48350866)

Sociolinguistic register happened.

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