alt Hacker NewsOTOH I’ve had blog posts I wrote two decades ago vehemently called out as AI generated. AI generated style unfortunately means writing that tested positively in human A/B testing, now over represented in a style used largely by AI.
So if you write in a way that engages the reader, you’re going to struggle not to use em dashes and the occasional a/b contrast, because those are challenging the reader to engage… but when overused, they not only don’t have the intended effect ( to break the reader out of passivity) , they also constitute a new kind of sin.
So no, don’t “trust your gut”. Trust the math. Is it too much? Or is it just trying to jar you out of not engaging with the prose?
But yeah, I’d say this article is likely written primarily with AI. Which doesn’t mean it’s not guided with intention and potentially important, it just means the article was probably commissioned and edited by a human, not written by one.
It's kind of funny when I open some books nowadays and the writing style and formatting just immediately scream LLM sometimes. Not because the book was AI-generated, most are too old, but because LLMs were simply trained on these exact books and are now reproducing their style, which I guess was either popular or selected during training.
Anyways, really hard to push through and I need to remind myself to judge the text by its meaning. But if it's some random blog, my "tolerance" is lower and I don't want to spend my time reading nonsense, I just can't stand the writing style anymore either.