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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27931 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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This looks like your words. Please tell me it was all your words and not GPT-enhanced. I don't want to be taken in. The writing is good, but bloated, which is why I am still narrowing my eyes a little.

This sounds a lot like Claude. I've been keeping a list of Claude-isms so I don't accidentally start repeating its favourite phrases (possibly common to other LLMs as well), and I notice too many of them here to be a coincidence. My current list:

  • "not just X, but Y" (or similar)
  • "that tracks"
  • "sit with" things
  • "is X wearing a Y suit (X dressed up as Y, this wearing that, X with better Y, or similar)"
  • em-dash, obviously
  • "it costs something"
  • "clear-eyed" about a thing
  • "two (or both) things are true"
  • "bones" of something. "has good bones"
  • the correct possessive apostrophe and correct angled quotation marks, “” instead of ""
  • some virtue "curdled" into some vice
  • "a rounding error"
  • "in real time"
  • "quietly"
  • "But here's the thing"
  • "gently push back"

Edit: a few more

  • "the kicker", "here's the kicker"
  • "the X is the point"
  • "he/she is going to be fine"

and more I haven't jotted down yet. A lot of them are just common expressions or phrases, but enough of them together, and I start to wonder..

@self_made_human , sorry if I'm mistaken about this, but I think you would want to know if they're slipping into your writing voice.

At the moment, "not just X, but Y" is a really good tell. Not sure where the LLMs got it but they use it all the time in "persuasive" writing, and I don't see that particular formula organically much. Most of the others are less good. Many steeped in the culture war are likely to use "X wearing a Y suit", for instance. I'm a fan of the em-dash and have been since before transformers were a gleam in Kaiser's eye. And "rounding error", "in real time", "the kicker", "the X is the point" (also very culture war), etc are all common, so only weak tells. (on the other hand, "But here's the thing" seems to be either AI slop or human marketing slop)

Funnily enough, I maintain my own list of Claudisms to avoid, which partially overlaps with yours. The issue is that a lot of "Claude" voice overlaps with mine. Quoting myself from reddit:

I've been quietly using "quietly" for years now, and "load-bearing" is a load-bearing element for many of my sentences. I think it's unfair to expect structural engineers to change their nomenclature.

"Rounding error"? "In real time"? I use those all the time! I have before GPT-3 came out.

My fear is that trying to avoid LLM-isms is just going to be another pointless euphemism treadmill of sorts. Writers will start finding non-LLM-y voices, and then in 6 months when the newest LoRA is rolled out the LLMs trained on that batch of writing will start talking that way and the writers will have to adapt again.

Part of me almost wants to stand on principle and just refuse the start of the treadmill. I was here first. Obviously, I don't want people to think my human-made writing is actually LLM writing and dismiss it without actually engaging with the content, but I've already had my human-made writing dismissed this way on Reddit and in that very thread most of the comments agreed that I didn't actually have much of an LLM voice. Might as well just write how I write, and perhaps if everyone else does the treadmill my writing will start sounding human again without me having to change.

My fear is that trying to avoid LLM-isms is just going to be another pointless euphemism treadmill of sorts. Writers will start finding non-LLM-y voices, and then in 6 months when the newest LoRA is rolled out the LLMs trained on that batch of writing will start talking that way and the writers will have to adapt again.

Isn't this just how style has always developed? Every expression we now consider clichéd was once a surprising and evocative turn of phrase.

Sure, but the speed was almost certainly slower and easier to keep up with without making it your full time job. My concern is that the speed at which LLMs can ape us will make it a losing proposition to try and avoid all "LLM tells" in human writing in the long term.

Don't get me wrong. People are anti-AI enough that there are going to be lots of people trying to make their writing sound as un-LLM-like as possible. I just don't want to play that game.

You are 100% correct it's so futile. Also the false-positive rate on detecting AI writing is going to keep rising as people unintentionally adopt LLM-isms the more they read LLM output

My main issue with LLM writing is that it's overly verbose. The biggest sign I'm reading AI is when I subconsciously start skimming, and even after skipping entire paragraphs, feel like I haven't skipped anything important.

If AI could write concisely, I'd see no issue with it in technical documents and news articles. If AI could write in someone's voice given a sample of their previous text, I'd see no issue with it at all. Maybe even in the former scenario, like how practically nobody cares that most writing is no longer hand-written; the "writer's voice" would shift to the subject and focused details.

You can do these things. There was a funny little bit about telling one of the coding LLMs to write like a caveman, and it's mostly noteworthy because it actually did save money through token brevity. It's pretty easy to produce style transfer from one writing genre to another, although the results can get pretty comedic pretty fast (caveat: I have no idea if this is good advice).

For local LLMs, LoRA aren't popular and they tend to have weird side effects, but they do let you get style transfer without the context overhead.

Your style transfer example has the obvious AI tells (frequent em-dashes, ends with “it’s not X it’s Y”) and scores 100% on GPTZero. I cant read the attachment, does it really reflect the style?

LLMs can be extremely succinct, often debilitatingly so. Try out the GPT 5.4 Thinking model, it is trained to hand out tokens in such a miserly manner that you'd think it costs it money. Which, to be fair, is something OAI pays for.

Yeah. It can go to some very weird places quick. you start writing in a fake lowercase ultracasual unpunctuated extrawordified mess to show off how not ai your prose is

There's also just the fact that language spreads organically, so it may not even be that a given person is getting it direct from the LLM. They might be getting it third-hand through their social circle or influencers.

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