It sounds like an LLM because LLMs were designed to sound like people. I get it, there’s a lot of tells and “quirks” that clearly mark out LLMs. But what makes an LLM obnoxious is not that it uses the same cliches we use all the time, but that it uses the same ones repetitively and sometimes in places where it doesn’t make sense.

But start paying attention to how you talk and write and you’ll realize you’re using those same cliches all the time. Heck I just did the “it’s not foo, it’s bar” cliche in the previous paragraph because it’s a useful language construct and it appears often in writing. An LLM writes like a budding author that learned “never use ‘blank said’” as a writing rule and goes to tortuous lengths to come up with more “clever” ways to say someone said something. But those clever ways are used all the time by very good writers too because they’re effective phrases. LLMs and hyper vigilance for their writing just means we’re more aware of the cliches we use