Thank you, obvious human being, for writing this so clearly. I’m reminded of what my favorite high school creative writing teacher used to write at the bottom of our angst-ridden teenaged musings in fine green felt-tipped pen: Aye, Eye, I. “Aye” for yes, you successfully communicated your point. “Eye” for you made it vivid and real for me in my mind’s eye. And “I” for I can relate to what you’ve written. LLMs wouldn’t stand a chance in Mr. Barone’s class.
AI has been overtrained on Markdown because it’s a convenient interface for all this agentic slop. Anyone who’s written a lot of Markdown docs can see the pattern. Prose isn’t supposed to read like Obsidian notes or API docs.
Humans are excellent pattern recognition machines. We operate mostly on heuristics, not algorithms. I can’t describe the rule but I unironically know it when I see it.
The good news is, as we get inundated by this deluge of pseudo-markdown slop, and it gets fed back into these disgusting insatiable Rube Goldberg machines, they become inbred. These patterns will only grow more obvious over time. The models aren’t going to get better.
Agreed! The human-produced examples in this piece were so illustrative because they were good writing! As a former teacher, I have seen a lot of bad writing and it sounds much more like AI!
Last par: AI for sure. People tell me that AI images are descending into easily recognisable slop because they feed off other AI guff. Perhaps the same will happen with AI writing as it increasingly scrapes other artificial output.
The quickest test regarding the last paragraph was that I made it maybe one line in and got bored. Thanks for this essay, I'll be referring to it regularly I'm sure.
I am so very upset that you never used an em dash in the human writing. I got so excited to see one — a welcome contradiction to the common misconception that em dashes are a sign of AI writing — and then the disappointment hit as I kept reading the paragraph. AI detectors can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.
You captured perfectly why my son had an essay was incorrectly flagged as AI: there was no “there” there. He had lazily written a couple of paragraphs on a topic he barely understood and had not formed an opinion about. The writing was nonspecific because it was lazy. So in that instance he deserved to fail, just not for cheating. 😂
Interesting point about your son getting ‘caught’! I've been there too. It’s no coincidence that lazy, passionless writing is a false positive for “hyper-intelligent” AI. 😂 It is hard to force a kid to write at length about something he has little interest in. When you find the thing that ‘speaks to you’, you really do gain an eye for detailing the signified. That’s the whole point of good writing—it’s nuanced, it’s personal, and it’s spoken from a place of passion. Thank you for sharing this!
(PS: I too will fight by your side on that Em dash hill until the robots have enslaved us to the last.)
This is excellent. I have long noted the “it’s not x but y” rhetorical pattern. I have called several people on this on LinkedIn but the defense is usually one of post humanism—“to think that cognition is skull bound and not entangled with all elements of the world, including the technology we create is simply naive. And I get that. But what’s so great about your observation here is the focus on semiotics. Such a smart observation. A non-embodied intelligence will never be able to do what we do, and you have clearly defined the process at work there. Thank you.
Thanks for writing this! I am a new high school English teacher with very little personal experience with AI (i.e. I don't use it). So aside from running my future students' papers through another separate artificial plagiarism program, I have been concerned I would be bamboozled by these whippersnappers.
Yes, I was just a bit proud when I got to the last AI generated paragraph and had to read each sentence three times before getting any idea of what it meant before thinking, "This sounds an awful lot like AI!"
I then started doubting that you wrote any of the article without AI!! And THEN I read the final sentence.😄
The whole thing reminded me of CS Lewis's "That Hideous Strength". One of the characters, Wither, speaks like an LLM.
You've done some splendid analysis here. You do an especially good job of nailing down the float-y, seemingly-practical-yet-highly-abstract nature of so many AI locutions.
I'm running a seminar for university faculty next week on AI detection, and I hope you won't mind me quoting (with attribution) some of your examples.
Hello Hollis -- I held my seminar last week, and I believe it went well. I noted your examples of 'floaty' language, and those seemed to go over especially nicely.
Agree completely about the signifier signified thing. An LLM’s base reality is symbolic language. It has no direct experience or contact with physical reality. So it performs best in tasks where the problem exists at the language level (e.g. coding, proofreading, etc). This is one reason I believe humans and AI are ultimately complements, not substitutes.
The final paragraph reminds me of Chomsky’s grammatical nonsensicality: colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Presents as grammatical and sense-making yet is disconnected from reality. Seems that’s AI and LLMs: grammatical yet nonsensical.
Imageless. Lack of concreteness. Hedging rather than boosting terms. First year writing students commonly use boosting terms to take on expert identity when they lack mastery of subject content. More hedging when seniors. Yet I’ve seen more hedging and abstract noun phrases in the last year’s first-year essays than the previous 9 years of teaching…
That’s my take, too, as a writer for 40+ years. AI is great for brainstorming and refining ideas but not for the actual writing. Haven’t used it for proofreading, but that’s a good idea.
I asked ChatGPT-5 to rewrite that last section in as human a way as possible (and I suggested a very specific human). You can test for yourself if the techniques suggested in this article work!
"Look, I'm from Lagos, and most days my head is stuck on sixty-four squares while the generator is shouting outside. Real play is never clean. Your hand shakes, sweat on the brow, you remember the stupid rook blunder from last week and your uncle’s voice saying, why you no just play safe, ehn? That is how human writing sounds to me, messy but alive. It trips, it fixes itself, it argues and still carries on, small scars on the page.
AI can copy rhythm, true, like Stockfish spitting lines on Lichess. But it does not feel the clock in your throat, or the heat in Yaba hall when NEPA takes light and we keep playing by phone torch. When I read a person, I hear gist, I hear fear, I hear someone trying to say it right and sometimes failing, which is fine. Failure has flavour. Machines no get that.
Anyway, I am not anti-tool. I use engines after games to check why my knight was just dancing anyhow. Use AI like that. Say when it helped, abeg. Argue about limits. Keep the board honest.
List of what matters, in no special order:
Voice, even when it wobbles.
Responsibility, small small.
Credit your helpers, human or silicon.
Don’t let it steal the fun.
If we hold that line, tech will sharpen our play without stealing our style. Let the bot suggest, let me decide. I will take the risk and the story. If I blunder, na my blunder."
Thank you, obvious human being, for writing this so clearly. I’m reminded of what my favorite high school creative writing teacher used to write at the bottom of our angst-ridden teenaged musings in fine green felt-tipped pen: Aye, Eye, I. “Aye” for yes, you successfully communicated your point. “Eye” for you made it vivid and real for me in my mind’s eye. And “I” for I can relate to what you’ve written. LLMs wouldn’t stand a chance in Mr. Barone’s class.
I love this thank you!!!!
“This article isn’t just brilliant—it’s brave.”
In all seriousness, this is so well said, Hollis. I’m writing something similar on what I call Telltale AI Tics. More soon!
As promised: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/telltale-ai-tics
omg so good -- subscribed and restacked! And great great great close.
Thank you so much. Inspired by the best :)
AI has been overtrained on Markdown because it’s a convenient interface for all this agentic slop. Anyone who’s written a lot of Markdown docs can see the pattern. Prose isn’t supposed to read like Obsidian notes or API docs.
Humans are excellent pattern recognition machines. We operate mostly on heuristics, not algorithms. I can’t describe the rule but I unironically know it when I see it.
The good news is, as we get inundated by this deluge of pseudo-markdown slop, and it gets fed back into these disgusting insatiable Rube Goldberg machines, they become inbred. These patterns will only grow more obvious over time. The models aren’t going to get better.
LOL, I skimmed half and then skipped that penultimate paragraph, without even realizing why I was doing it.
:)
It’s important to note that it’s essential to recognize that’s it’s crucial to realize that it’s critical to understand that…
Yesssssssss!
“Rather than focusing on obstacles, we should embrace transformative opportunities”
Cripes. Our leaders in the corporate world have been communicating like this for decades.
Implication? They couldn’t care less what the product, service, or even what their function actually is.
I'm going to assume you've known that for a long time even without needing AI to show you.
"So here’s a handy rule: if you can’t see anything, if nothing springs to mind, it’s probably AI."
I've been coaching young writers for a few decades. The biggest problem with bad human writing is that...it brings nothing to mind.
The problem, really, is that AI is indistinguishable from terrible human writing.
Yes, exactly. AI poetry is indistinguishable from meh human poetry. It's the hill I'll die on (though I don't want to picture that.)
Agreed! The human-produced examples in this piece were so illustrative because they were good writing! As a former teacher, I have seen a lot of bad writing and it sounds much more like AI!
Didn’t you just describe corporate speak?
Last par: AI for sure. People tell me that AI images are descending into easily recognisable slop because they feed off other AI guff. Perhaps the same will happen with AI writing as it increasingly scrapes other artificial output.
The quickest test regarding the last paragraph was that I made it maybe one line in and got bored. Thanks for this essay, I'll be referring to it regularly I'm sure.
I am so very upset that you never used an em dash in the human writing. I got so excited to see one — a welcome contradiction to the common misconception that em dashes are a sign of AI writing — and then the disappointment hit as I kept reading the paragraph. AI detectors can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.
You captured perfectly why my son had an essay was incorrectly flagged as AI: there was no “there” there. He had lazily written a couple of paragraphs on a topic he barely understood and had not formed an opinion about. The writing was nonspecific because it was lazy. So in that instance he deserved to fail, just not for cheating. 😂
Interesting point about your son getting ‘caught’! I've been there too. It’s no coincidence that lazy, passionless writing is a false positive for “hyper-intelligent” AI. 😂 It is hard to force a kid to write at length about something he has little interest in. When you find the thing that ‘speaks to you’, you really do gain an eye for detailing the signified. That’s the whole point of good writing—it’s nuanced, it’s personal, and it’s spoken from a place of passion. Thank you for sharing this!
(PS: I too will fight by your side on that Em dash hill until the robots have enslaved us to the last.)
This is excellent. I have long noted the “it’s not x but y” rhetorical pattern. I have called several people on this on LinkedIn but the defense is usually one of post humanism—“to think that cognition is skull bound and not entangled with all elements of the world, including the technology we create is simply naive. And I get that. But what’s so great about your observation here is the focus on semiotics. Such a smart observation. A non-embodied intelligence will never be able to do what we do, and you have clearly defined the process at work there. Thank you.
Thank you! There are many charlatans on LinkedIn. No selling or open to work here
"Final test: is that paragraph my voice or AI’s?"
My alarms were going off as I was reading, but since you bookended with the challenge, I'm almost sure human wit is playing a role.
Loved the piece, even with the frustrating tease. Please tell us.
Yes! 100%
I had Google Gemini write it and had Claude revise it!
And ChatGPT correctly called it out, using your suggested test.
Thanks for writing this! I am a new high school English teacher with very little personal experience with AI (i.e. I don't use it). So aside from running my future students' papers through another separate artificial plagiarism program, I have been concerned I would be bamboozled by these whippersnappers.
Yes, I was just a bit proud when I got to the last AI generated paragraph and had to read each sentence three times before getting any idea of what it meant before thinking, "This sounds an awful lot like AI!"
I then started doubting that you wrote any of the article without AI!! And THEN I read the final sentence.😄
The whole thing reminded me of CS Lewis's "That Hideous Strength". One of the characters, Wither, speaks like an LLM.
Brava.
You're right! C. S. Lewis nailed it with his Withers character. Not the only time Lewis was prescient about our time.
I am so glad it is helpful thank you!
You've done some splendid analysis here. You do an especially good job of nailing down the float-y, seemingly-practical-yet-highly-abstract nature of so many AI locutions.
I'm running a seminar for university faculty next week on AI detection, and I hope you won't mind me quoting (with attribution) some of your examples.
Thank you let me know how it goes!
Hello Hollis -- I held my seminar last week, and I believe it went well. I noted your examples of 'floaty' language, and those seemed to go over especially nicely.
Thanks again for your work.
Thank you!
Will do!
Agree completely about the signifier signified thing. An LLM’s base reality is symbolic language. It has no direct experience or contact with physical reality. So it performs best in tasks where the problem exists at the language level (e.g. coding, proofreading, etc). This is one reason I believe humans and AI are ultimately complements, not substitutes.
The final paragraph reminds me of Chomsky’s grammatical nonsensicality: colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Presents as grammatical and sense-making yet is disconnected from reality. Seems that’s AI and LLMs: grammatical yet nonsensical.
Imageless. Lack of concreteness. Hedging rather than boosting terms. First year writing students commonly use boosting terms to take on expert identity when they lack mastery of subject content. More hedging when seniors. Yet I’ve seen more hedging and abstract noun phrases in the last year’s first-year essays than the previous 9 years of teaching…
That’s my take, too, as a writer for 40+ years. AI is great for brainstorming and refining ideas but not for the actual writing. Haven’t used it for proofreading, but that’s a good idea.
I asked ChatGPT-5 to rewrite that last section in as human a way as possible (and I suggested a very specific human). You can test for yourself if the techniques suggested in this article work!
"Look, I'm from Lagos, and most days my head is stuck on sixty-four squares while the generator is shouting outside. Real play is never clean. Your hand shakes, sweat on the brow, you remember the stupid rook blunder from last week and your uncle’s voice saying, why you no just play safe, ehn? That is how human writing sounds to me, messy but alive. It trips, it fixes itself, it argues and still carries on, small scars on the page.
AI can copy rhythm, true, like Stockfish spitting lines on Lichess. But it does not feel the clock in your throat, or the heat in Yaba hall when NEPA takes light and we keep playing by phone torch. When I read a person, I hear gist, I hear fear, I hear someone trying to say it right and sometimes failing, which is fine. Failure has flavour. Machines no get that.
Anyway, I am not anti-tool. I use engines after games to check why my knight was just dancing anyhow. Use AI like that. Say when it helped, abeg. Argue about limits. Keep the board honest.
List of what matters, in no special order:
Voice, even when it wobbles.
Responsibility, small small.
Credit your helpers, human or silicon.
Don’t let it steal the fun.
If we hold that line, tech will sharpen our play without stealing our style. Let the bot suggest, let me decide. I will take the risk and the story. If I blunder, na my blunder."