alt Hacker News"The "It's not X -- it's Y" pattern, often with an em dash. The single most commonly identified AI writing tell. Man I f*cking hate it. AI uses this to create false profundity by framing everything as a surprising reframe. One in a piece can be effective; ten in a blog post is a genuine insult to the reader. Before LLMs, people simply did not write like this at scale."
This one hit home... the first time I ever saw Claude do it I really liked it. It's amazing how quickly it became the #1 most aggravating thing it does just through sheer overuse. And of course now it's rampant in writing everywhere.
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If you sound like a car ad from Road & Track, I'm going to flag you as bot.
"No rough handling. No struggles to accelerate. Just pure performance. The new Toyota GT. It's not just a car—it's a revolution."
Most of the tropes listed on this page give text a more "car ad" (or sometimes "movie trailer") quality. I wonder if magazine scans and press releases unduly weighted the training set.
Weird to care about a harmless construction along with punctuation.
I would say that the constant attempt to create false profundity (as you call it), itself, is more of a tell than any of the rhetorical constructs used to do it.