This style of writing isnt human. Its AI.

^^ These dramatic statements are almost always AI influenced, I seem to always see them in people's emails now as well. "we didnt reinvent the wheel. we are the wheel."

You are absolutely right. It’s not X that’s the give away, it’s A, and B — moreover it’s C that is the clincher.

AI is popularizing a writing style that has been common in advertising for quite some time. For example, Apple uses it a lot. Now everyone can imitate advertising copy.

It's not that it didn't exist before. It's that it wasn't overused.

Heh.

Neurodivergent people tend to write like this too, there was a study about it.

Yeah, I know, I just feel like at this point it's useless to call that out.

We can learn useful rhetorical techniques from AI that can help us clearly communicate. We should separate those babies from the bathwater.

So far, any "useful rhetorical technique" one could've learned from AI has become a dead giveaway of AI slop (lazy writing and lazy thinking).

Seriously: what tool do you want to use that's immediately available to the absolute lowest common denominator "writers" on the Internet?

"It's not X, it's Y" literally makes my stomach churn from seeing so much of it on LinkedIn.

Rhetorical techniques that are so easily identifiable as AI now.

You can also just find a book on writing. I recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Dense and quite informative.

And the scripts of most recent YouTube videos, and the dialogue in Stranger Things Season 5 (the last 3 episodes specifically).

Others, please chime in, I want to take a sort of poll here:

I usually grimace at "GPT smell". The lines you quoted stood out to me as well, but I interpreted them as "early career blogger smell". It's similar, but it didn't come off as AI. I think because it avoided grandiose words, and because it reused the exact same phrase format (like a human tic) rather than randomly sampling the format category (like an AI). This is what human text looks like when it's coming from someone who is earnestly trying to have a punchy, intentional writing style, but who has not yet developed an editor's eye (or asked others to proofread), which would help smooth out behaviors that seem additive in isolation but amateur in aggregate.

Did others share the impression that it's a human doing the same classic tricks that AI is trained to copy, or does anything in this category immediately betray AI usage?

This post felt AI-touched to me, but the usage falls on a spectrum. You can write the whole post yourself, have an LLM write the whole post, or - what I suspect is the case here - have the LLM "polish" your first draft.

Many weaker or non-native writers might use AI for that "editor's eye" without realizing that they are being driven to sound identical to every other blog post these days. And while I'm certainly growing tired of constantly reading the same LLM style, it's hard to fault someone for wanting to polish what they publish.

I feel ya but it didn't get me on this one for some reason. But it gets me a lot on Linkedin - due to which I lost control and blasted off a post yesterday.

I think it some kind of value - vibe dynamics that play in making the brain conscious about it being written with AI or otherwise.