[foundry27]

Editorial comment: It’s a bit weird to see AI-written (at least partially; you can see the usual em-dashes, it’s-not-X-it’s-Y) blog posts like this detract from an author’s true writing style, which in this case I found significantly more pleasant to read. Read his first ever post, and compare it to this one and many of the other recent posts: https://www.seuros.com/blog/noflylist-how-noflylist-got-clea...

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I could imagine a blog post almost identical to this one being generated in response to a prompt like “write a first-person narrative about: a cloud provider abruptly deleting a decade-old account and all associated data without warning. Include a plot twist”.

I literally cannot tell if this story is something that really happened or not. It scares me a little, because if this was a real problem and I was in the author’s shoes, I would want people to believe me.

[seuros]

Not AI-generated. Not everyone is born writing flawless English.

If it sounds like an LLM, maybe it is because people like me had to learn how to write clearly from LLMs because English is not our first language.

I could’ve written in my native tongue, but then someone else will have complained that not how english is structured.

Also, the story is real. Just because it is well-structured doesn't mean it's fiction. Yes, i used AI to resort it, but i can assure you that no AI will generate the Piers Morgan reference.

[ageitgey]

I didn't get an AI vibe from this post. Grammar checkers add em dashes, too.

If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.

[foundry27]

It’s easy to be fooled, myself included it seems :)

For context, here’s a handful of the ChatGPT cues I see.

- “wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open‑source development” - “wasn’t standard AWS incompetence; this was something else entirely” - “you’re not being targeted; you’re being algorithmically categorized” - “isn’t a system failure; the architecture and promises are sound” - “This isn’t just about my account. It’s about what happens when […]” - “This wasn’t my production infrastructure […] it was my launch pad for updating other infrastructure” - “The cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business”

I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell. It’s got an average word count in each sentence of around ~11 (try to write with only 11 words in each sentence, and you’ll see why this is silly), and much of the article consists of brief, punchy sentences separated by periods or question marks, which is the classic ChatGPT prose style. For crying out loud, it even has a table with quippy one-word cell contents at the end of the article like what ChatGPT generates 9/10 times when asked for a comparison of two things.

It’s just disappointing. The author is undermining his own credibility for what would otherwise be a very real problem, and again, his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great.

[_caw]

I got the sense the author wrote the post in collaboration with LLMs as a way of processing the experience:

> I was alone. Nobody understood the weight of losing a decade of work. But I had ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to talk to

> To everyone who worked on these AIs, who contributed to their training data—thank you. Without you, this post might have been a very different kind of message.

It sounded like perhaps this post would have conveyed a message the author didn't think constructive if they wrote it entirely themselves

[CamperBob2]

It's not the case in this article, but we're starting to see a lot of comments and blog posts from people who have something worthwhile to contribute, but who aren't confident enough in their English proficiency to post their thoughts without running them through an LLM for cleanup.

IMHO that's a good thing, something that should be encouraged. Counting the em dashes is just an exercise in missing the forest for the trees. Accusing someone of posting AI slop without evidence should be treated no differently here than accusing them of shilling or sock-puppetry. In other words, it should be prohibited by the site guidelines.

[Ancapistani]

The author explicitly states that their communication style is frequently recognized as AI.

I use both em-dashes and semicolons extensively in my own writing.

Even if the article _were_ written by or in coordination with ChatGPT... why does it matter? The content is either honest or dishonest.

[dylnuge]

>I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell.

Dude, plenty of people write with em-dashes and semicolons; I personally use them constantly (and I don't use LLMs at all). Em-dashes are trivial to type on MacOS (Alt+Shift+Dash) and even on Windows—I used to have the alt code muscle memorized (Alt+0151) but now I just use the Mac version with an AutoHotkey script. I get being wary of LLM spam now that it's pretty much everywhere, but this is not the "tell" you think it is.

To be clear, you're free to dislike this writing style, but I'm 100% confident that it has been common since long before LLMs were in widespread usage.

> his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great.

You're doubling down on this not being "his real writing style" despite acknowledging you were wrong about this being written by ChatGPT?

[CRConrad]

Yeah, that bullshit has been debunked all over the net for quite a while now; there are lots of us old farts who write exactly like that, and none of us is an “AI”. Idunno, maybe on aggregate we're so prolific that the material they're training the LLMs on contains a disprodportionate amount of our style or something.

Anyway, your talk about the author “undermining his own credibility” for writing like many humans just because some simplistic fake “intelligences” also write like those humans is totally wrong. The solution is not for people to have to change their writing style, but for you gullibles to stop thinking this is “a tell” — because it isn't.

[cnst]

Isn't that part of AI, simply because that's how the patterns work, and how we're taught to write in the writing classes?

BTW, I actually use the em-dash symbols very frequently myself — on a Mac and on Android, it's very easy through the standard keyboard, with Option-Dash being the shortcut on the Mac.

[ritzaco]

Not sure why you're downvoted - this was exactly my thought reading it. I spend a significant portion of my time reading human-generated and AI-generated long-form writing and I can very easily see the AI stuff.

But maybe it doesn't matter any more? Most people can't.