[righthand]

It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it.

The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.

[tptacek]

Just so I'm clear, I'm saying I don't think the writing in this is coherent enough to be LLM product. It kind of meanders and there are some rough paragraphs.

(That's not a bad thing! I'm not saying it wasn't worth reading. Just that it had rough edges that in my experience LLMs polish off.)

[badlibrarian]

At a minimum, I do see a lot of AI-as-researcher tells here. You can get Claude to draft very similar essays (of surprisingly quality) if you feed it a target market/philosophy, a few articles for style, then ask it to dig up dirt on any published author in the humanities. It connects the dots and writes stuff that feels just like this article, right down to the meandering. The rough edges and sudden shifts in register is the author editing, then asking for a revised draft.

Claude says: "Verdict: Heavily assisted, possibly lightly edited from an LLM draft. The primary sources are real and the Kierkegaard scholarship is accurate, which suggests a human who knows the material. But the connective tissue and virtually all the 'writerly' prose is machine-generated."

[tptacek]

Yeah I don't believe Claude's take on these kinds of questions at all. I can get Claude to say that about posts I wrote 10 years ago.

[badlibrarian]

I've written essays in this exact format and I recognize specific tells. He's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Pro (now Adaptive) as a research assistant then tweaking the output. Know it, done it, smell it.

"The piece moves in a pattern that LLMs default to: historical episode, philosophical summary, contemporary relevance, theological application. Each section is self-contained, cleanly closed, and bridges to the next with a meta-sentence. A human essayist leaves more mess in the transitions."

Now that I've pointed it out, you'll see more stuff like this. It's everywhere.

[newer_vienna]

Absolutely spot on. Or maybe should I say, "You're absolutely right!"...

[pasquinelli]

> Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y”

i'm not even remotely convinced that's true.

[sekh60]

It's not true, it's false.