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Comment by bradstewart | Hacker News Reader

What specifically is the LLM verbiage you're seeing here? That reads like a normal sentence to me.

Slight variations on "This isn't X—it's Y." have been popping up all over the place, almost definitely because it's a pattern that ChatGPT has been tuned to (over-) use.

em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell"

Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.

pops up multiple times, too. One or two, sure maybe it's just a reflection of using LLMs often, but this many suggests that the article was (atleast) re-written by an LLM

I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway.

> This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. > This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. > The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder: > These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill) > The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic. > The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.

Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future."

It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even be bothered to have a hired PR person write their vacuous statements, let alone writing them personally on their own. A vision for the future indeed...

It’s pretty common to use a dash in that context. It’s weird that you’d be analyzing punctuation so closely in vacuous press releases.

It's not just the dash, it's the specific construct that's an AI smell, as directly mentioned upthread in the comment I was responding to:

> em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing

Literally all of the sibling comments in this subthread are about this specific phrasing, which AI overuses to an absurd degree, especially when combined with hyperbole.

It's very common to see the particular syntactic structure of restating a point in the following general manner from Claude/ChatGPT in my experience and that of others:

"It's not X -- it's Y." or "This isn't just X -- It's actually Y."

Usually with an emdash there as well for the separation. As I said it's very plausibly becoming more common among people not using LLM-assisted writing too, just from seeing the stylistic approach used more often and having it spread naturally, but I do have been seeing it spread with dramatic speed over the last couple years. I even catch myself using other phrasing more often from reading it more. I think it's just part of how language spreads, honestly.

Interesting, thanks. I've always been a fairly "heavy" (vs other people) user of the emdash after a high school english teacher made us use one in every paper to learn how they worked (along with a colon), and I've been a fan ever sense.

The "it's not ... it's" phrasing though definitely stands out as a bit odd when repeated.

Yeah, I also tend to have heavier usage of them. I'm not exactly sure why I do though, I don't have a particular incident like yours in high school. I think I just read too many blog posts as a teenager, haha.

It is a bit of an odd repetition, right? I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

>I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

This just hit the front page of HN for like an hour or two today. Not that exact construction (It's not just x, -it's y) but this suggests that (English) speakers are starting to use 'AI Buzzwords' in speech. (Words like delve, intricate, etc.)

I think it's safe to extrapolate that the construction would also start to appear more often in human-written and spoken content as well, but I'm sure there's other factors at play.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045500 Relevant article: https://news.fsu.edu/news/education-society/2025/08/26/on-sc... Relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00238

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