Usually the smell is when it sounds profound or insightful but then you realize it's word salad and not really saying anything. LLMs also try to make the most mundane thing sound revolutionary or write about it in an alarmist way like 'increasing x by 1% is a ground breaking innovation' or something.
There's no concept of what truly is important with the writing itself since there's no actual thinking going on. The opinion of the supposed writer, which colors how they structure the writing and the language they use, is often all over the place since an LLM has no real opinions.
It's the cadence and the density of cliches. I've seen Opus produce very similar output. That's not to say it's 100% that this was written by an LLM. They had to learn this style from human writing in the training data. It's just a very condensed form of bad writing.
"Density of cliches" is a great way of putting it. It's exhausting to write that way and unpleasant to read back in the edit process which is why that kind of thing doesn't happen (often) in human-led pieces. LLMs don't get exhausted.
I think whenever a blog post begins to sound like a marketing campaign from versace - it's always a great sign that it may be LLM generated.
This isn't just a comment. It's a an experience. A shared cognition between parties -- To collaborate & exchange ideas. It's not procrastination, it's culture. Culture is what builds civilization.
There's no concept of what truly is important with the writing itself since there's no actual thinking going on. The opinion of the supposed writer, which colors how they structure the writing and the language they use, is often all over the place since an LLM has no real opinions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing