alt Hacker News> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.
> [...]
> I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.
> [...]
> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind.
> [...]
> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.
It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading.
And, I mean, none of these is even bad in isolation, but it sure feels like we’re due either a backlash where these patterns become underused even when appropriate, or them becoming so common they lose their power (is syntax subject to semantic bleaching?). Or perhaps both. Socioliguists are going to have a blast.
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LLMs don't "own" this writing style. By definition they can't - they were trained on human writing after all! People wrote like this before and that's fine. You might not like the style, but saying it's because LLM writing has infested their brain is wrong, dismissive and dehumanising.
> “…there’s this record-scratch feeling…”
The op is a blog post. You’re talking about blog post writing. Maybe you just don’t like their style?
It’s also true llm second drafts are a thing.
And it’s true both can ‘record scratch’ you right out of attention.
As well as the now present trend as readers to be impatient and quickly bored.
And this criticism of writing style (for my take this article is perfectly readable)—what is the aim? Call for writers to perform some kind of disclosure? Because without a goal, it sounds like complaining you don’t like the soup.
None of that feels like AI smell to me despite the "it's not X it's Y" framing. I can't really explain why though.
None of those 4 look like AI slop to me. They lack the strange non-sequitur nature these contrasting statements generally have when made by AI. The version of the third example I would expect from a clanker would be more like
> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about novelty of talking to a machine
Which of course doesn't connect to the rest of the article contents, because the AI doesn't have any intention in its writing.
Have courage and trust your own instincts. Unless one is extremely disagreeable it's very tempting to hedge and avoid outright saying "this is AI" just in case you're wrong, but if you're literate and regularly exposed to AI outputs your instincts are likely quite accurate.
In this particular case the linked article is definitely AI generated.