[ssivark]

From the article (mistakes highlighted):

> Human news writers regularly point out that AIs tend to lack nuance and a _flare_ for language in the stories they churn out. That’s probably a _fare_ criticism [...]

Maybe they used speech-to-text transcription for this, given that the mistakes are homophones? It seems very unlikely that either a human typing this, or a computerized system would make these mistakes (if it learns word associations from a corpus).

PS: the article also claims to be human generated:

> This story was not generated by an AI, but to be fair, I haven’t had my coffee yet.

EDIT: Oops, I might have misunderstood which article you were referring to, since the reference was not placed next to "this".

[dozzie]

> It seems very unlikely that either a human typing this, or a computerized system would make these mistakes (if it learns word associations from a corpus).

You underestimate people's ability to make language errors, including spelling ones. Every time I see somebody I suspect is a native English speaher using "it's" for "its", I grind my teeth. (Another instance is somebody using phrase like "as a programmer, the data bus should be written..." to mean "I, as a programmer, think that..."; this phrasing makes me simply furious.) With those errors they make reading my second language so much harder, and I can't even point their bad spelling or writing style out, because I'm seen as being nitpicking or something.

[bshimmin]

and I can't even point their bad spelling or writing style out

There is a certain delicious irony that you managed to contrive such a perfect example of a dangling preposition in the very next sentence after your complaint about a dangling modifier.

Skitt's Law in effect once again!

[dozzie]

I believe you overlooked the "out" word at the end of the sentence ("[...] I can't even point [it] out"). Or am I mistaken and you meant something else? How should I have written the sentence?

Remember that English is not my native language, and having an already established carreer, I don't have many opportunities to learn the grammar more. I'm bound to make errors and not even know about them, because there's nobody who would point them out.

[bshimmin]

It should be "I can't even point out their bad spelling or writing style". When the preposition gets separated from its object, it's referred to as "dangling". There's a famous (probably apocryphal) example where Winston Churchill humorously wrote, "This is a situation up with which I will not put." - the humour being, of course, that the arguably more grammatical phrasing sounds absurdly unidiomatic.

If you cc me on all your work correspondence, I'll be happy to point out any grammatical errors I find (for a fee, obviously).

[dozzie]

OK, Wikipedia has a nice article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_stranding

Though my sentence was grammatically and semantically correct, but the sentence I was complaining about was semantically invalid, so it was a little too much from you to point that out (stranding here fully intended).

> If you cc me on all your work correspondence, I'll be happy to point out any grammatical errors I find (for a fee, obviously).

A "nice" offer, but I'll pass. First, I'm not in a position to copy my work correspondence to a random dude from the internets. Second, my work correspondence is mainly in my native language.

[bshimmin]

Your sentence was unidiomatic to this native English speaker - "point" and "out" always belong together in a construct like that.

My offer was a joke, but never mind.

[andai]

Not with that attitude!

[saurik]

FWIW, I absolutely believe that a human would make those kinds of typos while typing... I myself didn't realize "flair for criticism" was spelled like that (and the top hit searching on Google for that, without quotes, is actually a book title using the other spelling, though it may very well have been a purposeful pun...). It would be one thing if those weren't themselves "correctly spelled words" (and so a text editor might catch it), but both "flare" and "fare" could easily slip by unnoticed. I will often even make much more interesting typos, where the word just "sounds sort of like the other word but no one would ever confuse the two", as I tend to speak to myself in my head as I type (and as I read) and I swear all language in my brain is at some point represented as audio... I'm not coming up with any examples right now, but trust me that when they come up they are incredibly strange.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Only slightly tangential, have you come across the term eggcorn[1] before?

I always get a chuckle out of thinking about it.

1. In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn