As a writer myself, I find this rather depressing. I use parallel sentence structure, group things in threes, use unusual-but-accurate words, and come up with my own metaphors because those are good ways to make your point. I'm also inclined to restate and overclarify things to minimize the chance of being misunderstood. I hate the idea of my writing being mistaken for AI slop. At least I type my em-dashes as --, which LLMs don't do.

Fuck — as an designer and typography nerd I just love them em-dashes.

I thought it would be the semicolon, judging from the thumbnail. Now that would piss me off; I love semicolons, it would be unfair if they become the hallmark of LLMs.

I also appreciate the long dash but on mobile keyboard it's so awkward to find that nobody uses it for comments anymore.

Please don't give this any credit. Nonsense like this is already being used to filter web form submissions for things like job applications.

Source: I applied for a role at a medium-sized company a couple weeks ago and was auto-rejected because my cover letter appeared to be AI-generated. I clicked "back", removed an em-dash, and the form was accepted.

TIL I'm an LLM.

Welp, TIL that I’m a LLM. I frequently use at like 75% of those in my creative writing. I learned to use all of these by reading books.

For me the most obvious tell is using 16 paragraphs to say something that could have been said with 16 words.

literally any tell will be fed back into the models to make them harder to detect, I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being automated

I'm not going to stop using em dashes. Find a different indicator!

Repeating the same content with different wording later in the text. For instance: saying the same statement you did earlier a little differently

• Including anecdotes
• Written in the first person
• Tangents and nonlinear storytelling

It's like they read a Vonnegut book and said, "That right there is peak human!" And I'd agree!

Good luck, the next rounds of training will iron these out and the line will continue blurring. These tips will flag a lot of false positives from educated people, and those comments are valuable. Maybe if you look for human-style mistakes you will have hope determining if comment was made by a human, like capitalisation, autocomplete issues, and typos.

It's much easier spotting AI in photos, videos and probably audio.

TIL that following many decades of carefully observed writing best practices makes you an AI.

This stuff can also pip up if AI was merely used to spellcheck.

This list would be wrong way too often dude

Weird analogies and similes

Well, guess I'm half AI or, to put it another way, I'm similar to a machine that's being frequently affected by cosmic rays when doing calculations

meanwhile here i am with the silly three-em dash⸻too long to be used in most cases, so it's rarely used when training ai⸻and the two-em dash⸺not quite as absurd, but still pretty rare⸺and i keep on looking for weird characters to use regularly

Although I wonder how long these signs would be that effective for, since they seem really model-specific.

• Including anecdotes
• Written in the first person
• Tangents and nonlinear storytelling

Weird that AI can't handle talking in the first person. Why just the other day I, a human, was saying to my sister, who is also human, about how strange AI is. See, she was grew up in another home with her mother where they didnt use as much technology. We shared a father who fought in Desert Storm. His favorite color was blue, like the kind you see in very thick ice. See most people think ice is just clear, but that is only becuase you need a lot of ice to properly refract light into its true blue color. Refraction works because colors come from different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, and those wavelengths bend at different angles when refracted by passing through transparent materials.... what was I saying? Oh yeah, AI is strange.

Useful alternative not using a AI detector.