[foundry27]

Editorial comment: It’s a bit weird to see AI-written (at least partially; you can see the usual em-dashes, it’s-not-X-it’s-Y) blog posts like this detract from an author’s true writing style, which in this case I found significantly more pleasant to read. Read his first ever post, and compare it to this one and many of the other recent posts: https://www.seuros.com/blog/noflylist-how-noflylist-got-clea...

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I could imagine a blog post almost identical to this one being generated in response to a prompt like “write a first-person narrative about: a cloud provider abruptly deleting a decade-old account and all associated data without warning. Include a plot twist”.

I literally cannot tell if this story is something that really happened or not. It scares me a little, because if this was a real problem and I was in the author’s shoes, I would want people to believe me.

[seuros]

Not AI-generated. Not everyone is born writing flawless English.

If it sounds like an LLM, maybe it is because people like me had to learn how to write clearly from LLMs because English is not our first language.

I could’ve written in my native tongue, but then someone else will have complained that not how english is structured.

Also, the story is real. Just because it is well-structured doesn't mean it's fiction. Yes, i used AI to resort it, but i can assure you that no AI will generate the Piers Morgan reference.

[ageitgey]

I didn't get an AI vibe from this post. Grammar checkers add em dashes, too.

If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.

[foundry27]

It’s easy to be fooled, myself included it seems :)

For context, here’s a handful of the ChatGPT cues I see.

- “wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open‑source development” - “wasn’t standard AWS incompetence; this was something else entirely” - “you’re not being targeted; you’re being algorithmically categorized” - “isn’t a system failure; the architecture and promises are sound” - “This isn’t just about my account. It’s about what happens when […]” - “This wasn’t my production infrastructure […] it was my launch pad for updating other infrastructure” - “The cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business”

I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell. It’s got an average word count in each sentence of around ~11 (try to write with only 11 words in each sentence, and you’ll see why this is silly), and much of the article consists of brief, punchy sentences separated by periods or question marks, which is the classic ChatGPT prose style. For crying out loud, it even has a table with quippy one-word cell contents at the end of the article like what ChatGPT generates 9/10 times when asked for a comparison of two things.

It’s just disappointing. The author is undermining his own credibility for what would otherwise be a very real problem, and again, his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great.

[cnst]

Isn't that part of AI, simply because that's how the patterns work, and how we're taught to write in the writing classes?

BTW, I actually use the em-dash symbols very frequently myself — on a Mac and on Android, it's very easy through the standard keyboard, with Option-Dash being the shortcut on the Mac.

[ritzaco]

Not sure why you're downvoted - this was exactly my thought reading it. I spend a significant portion of my time reading human-generated and AI-generated long-form writing and I can very easily see the AI stuff.

But maybe it doesn't matter any more? Most people can't.