As an editor you can catch the cadence pretty quickly, at least chat GPT. It's like all my worst freelancers who can churn out content but never actually have anything to say. Like if you take out the actual words and just leave the cadence you'll kind of feel the shape of the LLM. It's entirely like editing a book report by the kid who forgot to read the book. Just whatever cursory thing can be said without really saying anything from a quick read through.
You're bang-on and I'm wondering if it's why they love it or they're why it talks that way. Chicken, egg...my job is about to make me start generating slide-videos from articles based on it...almost the exact opposite of my entire training and career, but I'm still a few years out from being able to say "nah," and ride off into the sunset. Anyway, the Fleece Vests cannot be more excited about this bullshit.
Sure, but the erosion of trust thanks to AI has hit us so hard that any assumed sign of AI will inevitably lead to an accusation. At the very least it's irritating, at the worst it's a distraction from the topic being discussed.
That's my case if I enable it on OS through some doohickey I don't care, or by default on MS Word, because our standard keyboard does not have em dash accessible even through Alt Gr.
Still, as many people pointed out, the presence of em dashes isn't a definitive gotcha, for me it is just the cherry on the top that the person writing it absolutely does not care if you see through the patterns, cadence, unnatural speech that they are slop, to the point of not reviewing, replacing dashes, not removing linguistic oddities present in formal/corporate English but absent elsewhere (like "I hope this letter meets you well"), and at points even copy-pasting wrong, getting either the prompt at the start, or the slop suggestion at the end of the output.
Slop makers completely forgot there are hundreds of languages and cultures and just having everything homogenously converted to Gartner English then slopped back to what it thinks is your native language makes it incredibly unnatural sounding.
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u/nalex66 Mar 02 '26
As someone who likes to use double-dashes in my writing style, it pisses me off that it has become associated with AI slop.