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by aionwikipedia 62 days ago
This is a myth. At least one study (Juzek/Ward) has shown that these stylistic patterns do not appear nearly as often either in well-known datasets of English language -- including datasets restricted to specific dialects of English. They don't even appear as often in text generated by raw language models. When they start showing up is after the model has undergone RLHF. Think of the Fermi paradox: if there are all these people who write like AI, then where are they?

AI writing also tends to show these indicators over and over, consistently, over passages of text. It is very hard for humans, even if they are really familiar with AI writing, to be that consistent, and almost impossible for them to be that consistent for more than a sentence or two. Writing a long blog post by hand that is believably "AI-written" takes the amount of purposeful skill you'd need to forge an entire painting or ancient document.

The problem is that people either look for the wrong things, look for obsolete things ("delve" is dead and modern LLMs have killed it), or extrapolate things from indicators that are extremely narrow and specific.