I spent more than an hour writing the above comment, with my own two human hands, spending real thinking time on inventing some (AFAIK) entirely-novel educational metaphors to contribute something unique to the discussion. And you're going to ignore it out-of-hand because, what, you think "long writing" is now something only AIs do?

Kindly look at my commenting history on HN (or on Reddit, same username), where I've been writing with exactly this long and rambling overly-detailed "should have been a blog post" style going on 15+ years now.

Then, once you're convinced that I'm human, maybe you'll take this advice:

A much more useful heuristic for noticing textual AI slop than "it's long and wordy" (or "it contains em-dashes"), is that, no matter how you prompt them, LLMs are constitutionally incapable of writing run-on sentences (like this one!)

Basically every LLM base model at this point, has been RLHFed by feedback from a (not necessarily native-English-speaking, not necessarily highly literate) userbase. And that has pushed the models toward a specific kind of "writing for readability", that aims for a very low lowest-common-denominator writing style... but in terms of grammar/syntax, rather than vocabulary. These base models (or anything fine-tuned from them) will consistently spew out these endless little atomic top-level sentences — one thought per sentence, or sometimes even several itty-bitty sentences per thought (i.e. the "Not x. Not y. Just z." thing) — that can each be digested individually, with no mental state-keeping required.

It's a very inhuman style of writing. No real human being writes like LLMs do, because it doesn't match the way human beings speak or think. (You can edit prose after-the-fact to look like an LLM wrote it, but I dare you to try writing that way on your first draft. It's next to impossible.)

Note how the way LLMs write, is exactly the opposite of the way I write. My writing requires a high level of fluency with English-language grammar and syntax to understand! Which makes it actually rather shitty as general-purpose prose. Luckily I'm writing here on HN for an audience that skews somewhat older and more educated than the general public. But it's still not a style I would subject anyone to if I bothered to spend any time editing what I write after I write it. My writing epitomizes the aphorism "I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have the time to write you a short one." (It's why these are just HN comments in the first place; if I had the time to clean them up, then I'd make them into blog posts!)