alt Hacker NewsIt seems that TechCrunch, not a strong source of news since around 2014/15, is now just sending out AI text:
First the title: "Medicare's new payment model is built for AI. Most of the tech world has no idea", classic AI tell. The by-line is by the editor-in-chief.
Em-dashes everywhere, including in this quote, somewhat unusually: “The best solution wins, which, in regulated industries like healthcare — that’s not been the case.”
Oddly-short paragraphs: "That payment structure is the real news."
Rule of threes: "Pair Team launched in 2019 with a specific kind of patient in mind: people managing chronic conditions who were also dealing with unstable housing, too little food, or lack of transportation"
This whole paragraph: "There are real risks. Participants are feeding extraordinarily sensitive patient data — intimate conversations about housing and diseases and mental illness — into a federal infrastructure with a documented history of breaches, including exposed Social Security numbers. For the vulnerable populations ACCESS is designed to serve, that's not an impractical concern."
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I haven't opened a TC article in years and I think I'll return to that practice.
I think there's an ongoing conversation about whether we should accept all LLM-generated text without commentary.
I write this comment because I have some sympathy for a Show HN with AI-assisted writing, but I will not spend time enriching TechCrunch's use of machine-generated text anymore than I would scroll through an ad block at the end of any other article.
(Just for the sake of comparison, here's something by the same writer from a few years ago - https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/16/boompop-gains-traction-by-...
You can see more examples here, too https://techcrunch.com/author/connie-loizos/page/16/ )
Replies
Isn't the first em dash taken from an interview that the writer did with the subject over Zoom? I think using an em dash to punctuate a broken or partial sentence like that is pretty standard journalistic practice when you don't want to modify the original quotation (e.g, denote a paraphrase with brackets), and definitely not an AI tell.
The other uses are honestly pretty standard rhetorical patterns; they do not seem especially AI-flavored to me.
I got an LLM to analyse all of my messages and e-mails from the launch of gmail to work out my writing style, it says I heavily favour em-dash's. I used to work in the industry of type settings and press and publishing. I even use — in HTML when I have to write it nowadays. em-dash is not a LLM thing. It's just most people don't know how to use it. It also said I'm wry. Go figure.
Language is leaky, it gets just about everywhere. Some LLM goes and spills a bunch of emdashes and subordinate clauses all over a billion folks’ browsers and a bunch of them— especially those that may come into contact with a lot of language for a living— writers, for example— and they soak up a bit of it themselves and smear it all around.
Put another way, search out the great vowel shift. That happened over more time but then again the contact with different speakers wasn’t as constant as every day on the internet. It’s just what happens, how things spread. No different and maybe to a further degree than typical memes.
Very obviously LLM written to anyone who's spent any time using them.
Also "X is the real Y" is another tell. Surprised it didn't double down with "X—that's the real Y."
These are also the markers of human journalists who write daily. Journalism is the reason AI acquired these habits. Gemini says this article is probably not generated by AI, particularly because it has original quotes.
https://gemini.google.com/share/ba48849a15a9