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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11442 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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The article itself says, "The strongest version of this thesis is not “Trump is playing 4D chess.” It is that the administration holds more options than anyone realizes, and the insurance mechanism, not the Navy, is the real lever of power."

Am I being paranoid in thinking this quote smells strongly of AI?

This article is so AI slop. He didn't even try to hide the ChatGPT style all over it.

I also found it annoyingly hard to parse as a result, the thesis is pretty slippery.

Everything Konrad publishes sounds like AI. Even things that I'm 100% certain cannot be AI, like this article.

Edit: or this one published before Generative AI: https://gcaptain.com/what-the-sea-has-taught-me-about-covid-19/

Though I would not be surprised in the least if he writes a few paragraphs and asks AI to expand it and make it snappy.

My pessimistic hypothesis is that people use AI much more rarely, and less intensely, than paranoiacs think. I'm sometimes accused of AI use for allowing something of a purple prose aspect to my writing, and strongly suspect that the general tastelessness of AI and specific quirks like "it's not A — it's B" is downstream of cocksure, overwrought, incisive, journalistic op-ed prose having been used for RLHF as positive examples, because somewhere in 2022-23 someone a) had built a reranker for High Quality Data and b) had commissioned a lot of "powerful persuasive essays to make you think"/"dashing intelligent opinions" on MTurk/Fiverr. See this debate between two South Asians. They both write "like AI". I'm pretty sure that Human's posts at this point are an amalgamation of human text, AI text and human-interiorized AI-patterns, and Count even describes his workflow. Not being native speakers nor bearers of layman Anglophone culture, they know not what they do; and they never saw the issue with this manner of unnatural writing before the widespread hatred for "AI". And Konrad, well, Konrad is a dramatic Internet personality, he writes to persuade and to show off, he is another source of this pattern rot.

That said, to an extent it's just good, product-grade writing. Less abrasive than most human work on contentious topics (imagine the hissy fit Claude would throw over an offhand appeal to "South Asians" here), well-proportioned, avoiding too-rare words and concepts that readers might stumble upon, and almost too perfect, devoid of glaring ESLisms or identifying personal blemishes.

human-interiorized AI-patterns,

I can feel LLM-isms creeping into my 100% OG human writing.

The "LLM style" is still very (I think) detectable, but that signal is going to decrease, even if LLM writing doesn't change styles, as humans start to unintentionally mimic the LLM text they constantly read.

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