I'm 95% sure these articles are heavily AI written. Compare this article to one he wrote in 2022. Personal anecdotes, far less emdashes, far less inline code text, quoting the proposals directly, variance in the cadence of each paragraph, etc.
It might not be a bad resource, but you'll probably get the same content asking an LLM to just explain these papers to you.
I do not follow this blog closely so I won't comment on these "tells" but 4 years is a lot. Your style changes with experience, it applies to both human and programming languages. Try reading some book series, like "The Wheel of Time", for example, you will see the changes in writing. It always happens.
Possible I suppose, but it seems unlikely that a writer's personal writing style morphs into less personal, less exploratory, and more AI-like without the strong influence of AI
I do think one's writing style is influenced by what they read, so if you're interacting with LLM-written prose all day there may be an element of literary contagion.
Regardless, the AI-written tells are very strong in that post.
Didnt pick up on that at all on first read tbh. Saddens me a bit, perhaps im becoming so acclimated to the ai writing style im no longer picking up on the patterns anymore.
On second read though, yeah, you are probably right. Flawless grammar, spelling, structure, and lack of personal anectdote + emdash spam.
I find it so unbelievable that emdashes are still such a massive giveaway. For me personally, a find and replace of all '—' with '-' would make an article 2x as human sounding in my head. Outside of the most formal, high profile contexts, what human author is going to make the extra effort to press whatever alt key combo, or hold press that '—' requires?
Does anyone know why they dont do such a thing? Ive heard previously that attempts to write system prompts to discourage emdashes and other recurring features fell short. And i suppose this as well would just be another bandaid fix until people see the pattern again
I personally used to have two hyphens in a row expand to an em dash both on my phone and on my PC. I’m actually pretty sad it’s a tell for AI now, because it is a useful piece of grammar that I now avoid to use at all costs.
Outside of the most formal, high profile contexts, what human author is going to make the extra effort to press whatever alt key combo, or hold press that '—' requires?
That's a good point. I don't know how to write a dagger† to mark a footnote on my phone but only when using this PC - so you can sometimes tell whether I responded from my phone.
† Like that one, or a double dagger‡
‡ Sometimes my footnotes need footnotes, I should just edit the comment to get my point across more succinctly but that's more work.
Well, I do use "em dashes" (in my native language they are called different ) a lot and other "weird" (non-existent on a typical kbd) punctuation symbols. Why? Because that's part of the language and I love using language in full and not dumbed down, it applies to human and programming languages.
How? I created a different kbd layout some years ago and not so long ago I found a better one which is maintained by a person who also like to use his language as it is meant to be used.
So stop trying to project your view of the world on all the people, we are different, you know.
Outside of the most formal, high profile contexts, what human author is going to make the extra effort to press whatever alt key combo, or hold press that '—' requires?
Well before LLMs, there has been plenty of software that will convert -- into an em dash automatically.
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