By default on a Mac, "smart quotes" is enabled that turns "" into “”. I don't think that's a sign of an LLM. I believe Microsoft Word on all platforms does this too.
I found the article tedious, even though I agree with its main point. However, the so-called “obvious” signs it was written by an AI—quotation marks and em-dashes—are within the ability of anyone with a Compose key (on Linux/BSD, ask your window manager or DE; on Mac, Karabiner; on Windows, WinCompose).
For what it's worth, Pangram (generally very accurate) rates this as 100% "We are confident that this document is fully AI-generated". The few paragraphs I looked at felt solidly AI to me too.
Low information density is a big AI tell. Also sheer length is another AI tell. The LLM pukes out a bunch of text and the "author" either doesn't have the skills or energy to edit it.
I was the whole time trying to figure out if it was AI.
I was ambivalent about it. The way the arguments are presented don't read as much like AI.
Perhaps it was indeed just for proofreading. Although I know that MS Word turns single dashes into em-dash. Maybe they used Word when writing the thing?
It's one of the reasons I am sort of abandoning dashes when writing and using instead semicolons.
> The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona.
> Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate.
It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading.
generalpf|5 days ago
igloopan|5 days ago
vincent-manis|5 days ago
For the record, I am not an AI.
Yenrabbit|4 days ago
dw_arthur|5 days ago
surgical_fire|5 days ago
I was ambivalent about it. The way the arguments are presented don't read as much like AI.
Perhaps it was indeed just for proofreading. Although I know that MS Word turns single dashes into em-dash. Maybe they used Word when writing the thing?
It's one of the reasons I am sort of abandoning dashes when writing and using instead semicolons.
lapcat|5 days ago
Oh for fuck’s sake. Can we please stop with this nonsense? You must think my blog is LLM-generated too.
I’m so tired of the illiterate denying the humanity of the literate. How do you think LLMs were trained? On human writing.
igloopan|5 days ago
I have no idea what your long form writing looks like. But can you look at something like this https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/if-you-recognize-me-in-pu... and seriously come out of it not thinking it's AI slop?
> The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona.
> Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate. It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading.
Or perhaps the radically different stylistic decision of using emojis and using italics and boldface for emphasis in this older blog https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/hellcaptcha-accessibility... could be more convincing?