I'm going to ask the same questions I asked the lobsters community.
Define "AI generated".
Whole article generation? LLM draft with human finish? Human draft with LLM finish? Is proof reading OK? Or is it permanently tainted the second an LLM touches it?
well, that's kind of my implied criticism. which is why i checked what would happen if i removed all the em-dashes. it's not that much better. but i think the number of em-dashes also matters. check your article with and without em-dashes, see what difference it makes.
Imo the article is completely copy/pasted from Claude. The figures, which couldn't be copy/pasted verbatim, were screenshotted/pasted.
Quoting from the article.
> The Town of Atherton's lawsuit against Caltrain electrification is the clearest case study we have of how a tiny, wealthy minority can hijack a regional public project — and stick everyone else with the bill.
The unnecessary emdash-for-effect is a huge LLM-ism. No human I know uses such a device in writing.
> Here is the short version. In 2012, Caltrain budgeted its electrification project — the backbone of the Peninsula's transit future and a prerequisite for high-speed rail to ever reach San Francisco — at roughly $1.5 billion. By 2017 that number had ballooned to $1.9 billion. In between, the Town of Atherton sued.
"Here's the short version" along with the bolding of the numbers tells us something about the "author's" prompt. He prompted it for a short version, and told it to include those two numbers.
I challenge any commenter to name one time they began a paragraph with the meager "Here's the short version."
> One veto point, closed.
Why is the comma even there? Classic LLM melodrama.