alt Hacker NewsWhy is writing "it's not X, it's Y" a bad thing? Other than it happens to be used a lot by LLM's, it seems like a fine language construct. It's not like it's new; it was used plenty before the time of LLMs too. In my opinion, we shouldn't let the LLM companies claim parts of the English language for themselves, and make it effectively unusable by everyone else. That's what is happening because of this pervasive hatred for anything remotely associated with AI.
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It only happens twice in this article and they're both fairly reasonable. There are many other tells that I find a lot worse. In particular, "The Setup" is an awful choice for the first h2-level heading, especially when the description is that short. Better not to have a separate heading for the teaser at all.
(Also better not to lead with a 1.6 MB hero image that's completely irrelevant to the topic, for less than a thousand words of text that are still probably at least twice as many as merited; but that's probably not the LLM's fault, it's just how people do web stuff nowadays.)
It has simply become a "marker" for LLM style, so I'd argue authors caring about their text will now just use a different structure to get the meaning across. That's just part of being a writer. You can choose to write it, and it'll be correct, readers (including me) will just conclude its most likely an LLM and often stop reading.
The "not X, it's Y" creates dramatic tension, "It wasn't a pimple, it was a tumor", but fucking AI overuses it for everything like they're doing a fucking TED-talk, despite being vapid, e.g. "This isn't a plan to spend half a day in New York, this is an itinerary for the best of what the city's history and culture has to offer."
Also: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaQwB1IOdhx/
Not that most TED talks aren't vapid: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-nee...