[doodpants]

The flaw in trying to detect AI by its use of particular idioms is that it would have learned these idioms from its training corpus, which consists of writings from actual human beings.

In other words, some people actually write like this.

[johnmwilkinson]

It’s not that people don’t write like this, it’s the over-usage and general tone.

[alex_young]

It's not that “I can detect AI” posts sound more templated than the writing they’re critiquing, it's the clankers are learning from it and adapting.

[lbrito]

You're absolutely right!

I have a friend that has used ems all his professional life and is livid that they're now a telltale for AI. So yeah, false positives.

[FarmerPotato]

Include the Gen Xers who read The Mac Is Not A Typewriter in the 90s or were merely into fonts.

Heck, anyone used to a word processor that automatically changes dash dash into em-dash.

There’s a lot of us that knew how to use em-dash.

[lionkor]

Its not just a telltale sign. Its a fact.

[therobots927]

Key word here being “some” people. Not nearly at high enough frequency that this way of talking was noticeable before. AI uses this pattern CONSTANTLY and it’s very fucking irritating.

[achenet]

Have you ever met human beings that constantly reuse a certain idiom/figure of speech/linguistic pattern?

The valley girl using "like" every other word, for example?

Or I had a colleague who would use the expression "we can say" (in French, because we were speaking in French) basically every couple sentences for a bit.

Humans also repeat speech/linguistic patterns, therefore "repetition of the same pattern" is not sufficient to mark text as produced by AI :)