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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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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.