At this point, we don't really need to know... you can just feel the dull, soulless emptiness #1535547

A ghost writer is haunting the English language

...the spectre, not of Communism but oo AI slop!

"AI prose is distinguishable by word and punctuation choice as well as sentence and paragraph structure."

AI writing is everywhere. It is in your inbox and on your LinkedIn feed. It is all over the internet, drafting more than a third of new websites by one count. Large language models (LLMs) are helping students write essays and probably helping scientists write papers. Some allege AI-generated prose won the Commonwealth Short Story prize this year, with judges praising its “quiet authority”. (The Commonwealth Foundation denied the claim.)
It is frightfully fast, churning out thousands of words a minute. (Hemingway rarely produced as many in a day, and required much more booze.) Wordsmiths are spooked.

em-dashes, words like "maximise" or "deep dive" (eeeh, oops #1535737) or “delve” into the “rich tapestry” of the world."

There are a few ways to identify LLM-generated text. One is to use detection algorithms that are trained to spot the texture of human or AI prose. Pangram, a leading firm, claims to have 99.98% accuracy. (It has partnered with Substack, a blogging platform, on such a tool.) Detectors, however, are black-box algorithms that can give false positives. They do not give reasons for why they reach their conclusions.

if you want to spot AI writing, look for bland, pretentious prose lavished with Latinate words—at least for now. With every update, our study shows, AI writing is becoming more similar to human prose.

...sooo let's put it to a test

The Economist turned to prose that we’re sure is human and that readers will recognise: our own. We designed a study to ask top LLMs—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok—to write versions of our articles without consulting the web. (As a prompt, we gave them the AI-generated summaries that we have experimentally added to some of our articles.)

This gave us a corpus of human and AI creations and we compared them across 55,940 sentences and 1.2m words. To make sure we were detecting AI quirks rather than our own, we also checked the AI texts against journalism from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Result? AI prose

• lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic.
• vocabulary: lots of "polysyllables" (significant, increasingly, consequences, interdependence -- I blame the wokies for this one -- parameter, methodology)
• punctuation: fewer commas or semicolons than humans (and no parentheses)

"Much of this language could be described as what George Orwell called “pretentious diction”"

He railed against writers who “dress up simple statements” with complicated words and jargon to sound clever. Such pontificating penmen, Orwell observed, also believe that “Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones”. (Bots agree: more Latinate suffixes crop up in their writing than in human texts.)

A better way to spot AI-generated writing would be to look for texts without much punctuation at all. LLMs are very Joycean about it: they use fewer commas and semicolons than humans (and hardly any parentheses). They use less punctuation in part because they write longer sentences—“and” is their most overused word—and in part because they do not quote experts.

Bots’ sentences tend to be long; paragraphs are rarely interrupted with short, punchy statements. How dull. When LLMs want to make their sentences more lively, they often reach for a rhetorical device. Their favourites include: “not X but Y”, “not only but also” and the “rule of three”.

FINALLY, on the unfairly hated em-dash:

Many believe LLMs stuff their prose with em-dashes, but that is not true after the most recent updates. Today only Claude uses more em-dashes than human writers, with ChatGPT using markedly fewer than any other writer in our study. Humans rejoice—and start using dashes again.

archive: https://archive.md/NOxbY