[schrodinger]

Truly enjoyed this article, but hate to admit one thing: I'm so burned by AI slop that once I noticed this seems to have been "assisted" by an LLM, I got irrationally angry because I felt tricked.

It hit me at the end, when I read this:

> The idea behind Ambiance is simple: the model's priors [...] Everything else here is just in service of that.

I've noticed "in service of" take off similar to "load-bearing" with LLMs, and the whole structure just pattern matched to Claude for me.

I went back and scanned it over again, and noticed several other tells:

* "Think of U/L [Unix / Linux] as a motivating analogy rather than a direct comparison." * "Priors" _and_ "a priori" used in the same article. * "A real kernel […]. The Ambiance Kernel […]. The Kernel […]." — LLMs love this pattern.

To be abundantly clear, *I'm not calling this AI SLOP*; it's obvious that a human put a lot of thought into this, gives a shit about the topic, and shared interesting ideas leading to a productive discussion. I really did like it.

There's just something empty or hollow about the LLM style; paraphrasing Joni Mitchell "there's something lost and some thing gained" [1] when using AI. Your writing, your code is more consistent, more structured, more planned out — generally better but in a way that loses the character behind human writing.

[1]: From "Both Sides Now", a great song about looking something from two perspectives: youthful innocence, and jaded cynicism. Listen to the original 1969 version first, and then the 2000 remake as you can tell she's singing from the respective perspectives. Deeply meaningful song!

[yetanotherjosh]

I experience this too, but the danger is is making assumptions based on "tells" which might just be how the user wrote the post. It's a situation now where if someone authentically writes something, but happens to rub up against some arbitrary "tell," they flip a bit in the reader and get their work rejected. For example, I used em dashes fairly regularly in my writing before AI started convincing everyone that the mere presence of an em dash is the AI tell, so I actually stopped using them, just to avoid this backlash.

[schrodinger]

I hear you. Coincidentally, I was actually called out just last night for a message with em dashes:

“Are you AI-ing me? Em dash giving you away”

It’s a pretty load-bearing (lol) example, yet it was clear in context it wasn’t serious. I’m beginning to notice people getting pretty good at detecting AI content, which I find reassuring.

It makes sense: AI-written prose is basically the homogenization of all styles of writing into a single voice, so it’ll stand out against the unique personalities we are used to seeing. It is just taking a minute for the average person to gain literacy — but it seems to be happening rather quickly, again unsurprising since we’re such social monkeys with a lot of our 15 watt brains dedicated to socialization and identity recognition.

Use your em-dash proudly!