They phrased it poorly, but from context it seems clear they intend the LLM as a less biased third-party measure of the tone which agrees with their own assessment.

Reality check. The confirmation that the author is not alone in having this particular feeling by using an LLM as a proxy.

I guess they use an LLM to work out the tone of prose they read. These are strange times.

Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article:

  The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic.