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Begrudging congratulations to @self_made_human for producing a book review entry that's good enough to make it as a finalist of Scott's Book Review Contest, yet AI-sloppy enough to make the comments section focus almost exclusively on the (un)acceptability of undisclosed use of AI.
This reminds me of a video I stumbled on the other day. It's a 12-minute "documentary-style" video essay telling the story of a rescue dog that gets dropped off at a shelter without any documentation. It's a cute, healthy dog that should be eminently adoptable except for his utter refusal to engage with anyone. Five months in, the dog's time at the shelter is up, and he is scheduled for transfer to doggy prison (or whatever, the point is that it's the end of trying to get him adopted). But a woman brings in her small, shy six-year-old deaf girl, and amazingly the dog responds to the child alone, and knows all the hand-sign commands. Turns out the dog was raised by a deaf old man, who then had a stroke. That's the gist, though the video packs a whole lot more dramatic beats, twists, and turns.
It's a real tear-jerker... if it describes a true story. Unless it's made up. Which, come to think of it (I say to myself as I review my reaction to the video), it probably is. Because how can there possibly be a dog smart enough to learn sign commands, yet so dumb that it couldn't possibly figure out any other forms of human-dog communication. Yeah, I smell bullshit.
But OK, maybe it's like a video short fiction, it's not supposed to be real, no more than any other kind of fiction. Then I can judge the video on this fictional-short-film kind of merit, and not worry about thinking critically on the veracity of facts. Damn it, they really should have specified that this is fiction. Then I can enjoy it as such. It has good plot beats. The actors are cute and relatable. Especially the dog.
Unless it's AI-generated. Posted March 2026. Possible. Fuck.
When I read something that, presumably, is the human author's thoughts, only for it to turn out to be LLM's output, I feel a similar betrayal of trust as when I read something purportedly factual that turns out to be fictional, even if not actively meant to deceive. This is definitely true if the entire output is LLM-produced, and remains partially true if LLM is used for editing that inserts LLM-created phrases. Like this zinger from the review:
I hope this forum preserves the norm of humans writing for humans by humans, even as I know that the overall tide is flowing the other way.
What is the biggest AI tell?
Em dashes are huge. They barely showed up in most writing before the advent of AI and are now massively overrepresented. The 'slam sentence' and 'it's not x, it's y' come up a ton as well. Also lack of typos.
t. never read print before
They barely showed up in low effort online comments. But it would be a challenge for me to find something on my (English) bookshelf that doesn't extensively use them. Let alone doesn't use them at all.
More interesting is that this is also true of the fomulation clichés like "not a X; a Y". The reason LLMs reach for these formulations is because of how extensively they are used in their trainingset. And it sounds grating because they have little sense of measure, so it feels like talking to an HR rep or a shitty journalist. But pick up almost any prose and you'll see the clichés in there.
Yes that's the point. Em-dashes got snuck into the AI corpus through transcribed books. All of these major operations pilfered shadow archives like anna's and the various libgens. I could have lived my entire life without seeing an em-dash in digital form without any problem. And the people who claim they've always loved to use em-dashes before can go suckstart a shotgun.
That's a very harsh statement. I have been using em dashes on Reddit and on this website ever since I realized that Markdown allows users to type the HTML named character reference "&m dash;" (without the space) rather than forcing them to copy-and-paste the character from an external program.
There are always a few in every forum, don't know where you guys were 15 years ago.
I didn't start participating on Reddit until 12 years ago.
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