The interesting part is not the intro about a literary conflict inside mid-19th-century Danish literary circles, but the quotes from Kirkegaard that seem to apply to our modern situation, and to social media, which did not and could not exist in 1840s, but the dynamics of which was already visible in the literary society. The crowd of opinion without much substance, with the desire to stand out, but also a desire to deride anything that does not align with their notion of proper. Nothing very new, but amplified by the power of the printed word.
> Where earlier generations had to risk everything on decisive choices (good or bad), the reflective age thrives only in appearance – reacting, commenting, and circulating impressions in an endless loop.
> What Kierkegaard sees as missing in the modern age is passion – not mere intensity of feeling, but a single, unifying purpose that gathers and orders a person’s whole life. Without such passion, existence breaks apart into disconnected fragments, each governed by its own narrow concerns. The virtues no longer form a coherent character; they wander separately, untethered from any central commitment. In this condition, even the possibility of true, wholehearted virtue – or even genuine sin – fades away, replaced by a confusion of contradictions, postures, and incompatible “principles.”4 Moral noise only increases, as each fragment insists on its own limited standard of right and wrong, with nothing higher to integrate them. As Kierkegaard remarks, “There is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason, people gossip all the more.”
> Out of this fragmentation arises something new – the public, a hollow substitute for genuine judgment. Where inward conviction falters, collective opinion steps in to bind the pieces together. But the bond it forges is thin and corrosive. Public opinion, Kierkegaard suggests, functions like an acidic pool: every act and thought which enters it is dissolved into a uniform solution. What emerges is a flat, standardized output where nuance is reduced to metrics and authority is measured by the size of the count. What remains is not genuine collective life, but a mass of unreal individuals “held together as a whole,” yet “never united in any actual situation.”
> For Kierkegaard, the despotism of “the public” represents not democracy’s realization but its grotesque fulfillment: a leveling power that smooths out real differences in the name of equality and replaces personal responsibility with the mere illusion of engagement. Committees, petitions, surveys – these are less tools of participation than props in a play where everyone can feel involved. “Now everyone can have an opinion,” Kierkegaard quips, “but they have to band together numerically in order to have one. Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion.”
> What holds this abstraction together is envy, the “negative unifying principle” of modern life.8 Envy does not look upward; it glances sideways, measuring its own worth by comparison, punishing excellence for the discomfort it causes. Yet even as it resents distinction, it cannot help but crave it. The result is a paradox of modern identity: in seeking to assert ourselves, we demand validation from a phantom audience. “That is the leveling process at its lowest” Kierkegaard warns, “for it always equates itself to the divisor by means of which everyone is reduced to a common denominator.”
I disagree, I found the story to be the interesting part. It's inspiring to me when people have the moral conviction to put themselves out there in a big way at great risk to their personal lives and mental health. And it was gratifying that he succeeded in swaying someone from the dark to the light.
History is rife with examples of "what's old is new again." Human nature and our psychological and social issues are basically constant throughout history. Good examples like this are always worth noting but, as you note, it's nothing very new, I'm sure one of the Greeks said something similar.
As more and more of the world becomes less comprehensible, we revert to a childlike understanding of the world, where things are vast and incomprehensible and filled with wonder. When our cargo cult like understanding of it all fails to give us what we want, we find attachment figures, like substitute parents to guide us and shape our understanding, and even our desires. Those attachment figures might be faking it too and often are, but it's better than despair at the incomprehensibility of reality.
> more of the world becomes less comprehensible, we revert to a childlike understanding of the world, where things are vast and incomprehensible and filled with wonder.
When has the world ever been comprehensible? The vast majority of people thought that lighting was gods fighting and where looking to sacrifice some person if they thought it would buy them favor with said gods.
i’m convinced a significant number of that majority just thought it’d be cool as hell if lightning was in fact gods fighting, which i can respect. at that time: what’re they supposed to do with knowledge of lightning and electricity? might as well prefer the better story.
Highly recommend reading Kierkegaard's Journals where he writes about what he called the evils of the "daily press" and also his relationship to Regina and his attempts the befriend the Bishop Mynster.
"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control"
He saw that pure focus on Fact is empty without a framework of meaning behind it. He does not mean falsehood when he says degeneration! But purpose must transcend and direct the truth from fact.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
or
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
Mencken's cynicism and mockery were arguably the type of thing Kierkegaard lamented, and perhaps in a sense were more a cause of social breakdown more than a consequence.
From reading his journals the editor of the Corsair publicly mocked him and used the paper to hide behind (in the name of journalism). His lamentations on journalism are very much due to this personal attack and he does name the perpetrator in his writings.
Kierkegaard himself had his targets for cynicism, primarily the state church (Danish Lutheran) that he attacked endlessly in his writings.
Yes, he had quite a few things to say. Unfortunately I don't have my ratty bookmarked copy on hand as he wrote some quite prescient ideas that are relatable to our "modern" world.
"We make our happiness dependent on situations outside ourselves and blame others in the process if things don’t turn out well. In all our 'freedom,' we seek one thing: to be able to live without responsibility." probably sums up the Instagram/TikTok generation.
or the imprisonment of Galileo or the persecution of Socrates or the crucifixion of Christ or the legal charges against James Comey or even interpersonal dynamics in the corporate world. politically powerful insecure people swinging a stick at those who challenge them.
Always happy to discuss existentialism, but I'm not going to read through an AI generated article. The other comment I wrote today was me recommending Borges to people!
Article is full of AI tells. "The two men shared surface-level similarities.", "Not X but Y", and em-dashes everywhere. I wish that people would write articles themselves, with their own style, if they expect people to read it.
I doubt it. It's the house magazine of a a Christian sect (the Bruderhof Anabaptists), and it also needs a firmer editor. There were sections that stuck out to me as I read it where I was like "Claude would have caught that".
I wish people would stop keying in on em-dashes. They might be a tell on message boards and Twitter, but lots of writers use them heavily and have for decades.
By itself it's not a tell but combined with all else it's hard to pass by. Author's other article from 2025 has less than half the dashes and it's the same length
How would the rise of dash usage in LLMs have arised if a significant portion of non-LLM writers weren't inclined to take them up and make them more common? The only explanation I see is that they are common in training materials we don't as commonly consume as website visitors.
I have often wondered this myself, especially because the same stylistic quirks are found across models from different labs.
I haven't found a satisfactory explanation, but whatever the explanation is, it is undoubtedly true that LLMs use them to an almost absurd extent compared to the vast majority of human writers. Anyone who reads a lot of prose can see that.
It all falls into one overarching category: style over substance, quantity over quality. Em-dashes are a simple way to sound important, same for generic throat-clearing phrases like “It’s important to note that…” plus they puff up the text without saying anything, same for overly symmetrical structure like neat triplets parallel clauses, and balanced pros/cons even when the topic does not naturally call for them, etc.
And they don't have a sense of stylistic restraint, so they often go overboard with one or more of the above.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, a verbose and elaborate writing style is also traditionally more common in humanities whereas scientific or technical writing favours a rather more terse and matter-of-fact style.
I don't know about the structures you mention specifically but if you compare an article on humanities or social matters against the style that's common in science and technical writing, chances are it's going to look more verbose in any case.
I don't necessarily have the best AI-dar but TFA didn't ring any LLM bells to me.
It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it.
The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.
Just so I'm clear, I'm saying I don't think the writing in this is coherent enough to be LLM product. It kind of meanders and there are some rough paragraphs.
(That's not a bad thing! I'm not saying it wasn't worth reading. Just that it had rough edges that in my experience LLMs polish off.)
At a minimum, I do see a lot of AI-as-researcher tells here. You can get Claude to draft very similar essays (of surprisingly quality) if you feed it a target market/philosophy, a few articles for style, then ask it to dig up dirt on any published author in the humanities. It connects the dots and writes stuff that feels just like this article, right down to the meandering. The rough edges and sudden shifts in register is the author editing, then asking for a revised draft.
Claude says: "Verdict: Heavily assisted, possibly lightly edited from an LLM draft. The primary sources are real and the Kierkegaard scholarship is accurate, which suggests a human who knows the material. But the connective tissue and virtually all the 'writerly' prose is machine-generated."
I've written essays in this exact format and I recognize specific tells. He's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Pro (now Adaptive) as a research assistant then tweaking the output. Know it, done it, smell it.
"The piece moves in a pattern that LLMs default to: historical episode, philosophical summary, contemporary relevance, theological application. Each section is self-contained, cleanly closed, and bridges to the next with a meta-sentence. A human essayist leaves more mess in the transitions."
Now that I've pointed it out, you'll see more stuff like this. It's everywhere.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the font, these seem to be the shorter en-dashes, not the em-dashes that are otherwise rare to see.
Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.
Same. I believe Word and most other word processors and desktop publishing applications convert standard keyboard-typed hyphens to em- or en-dashes automatically, and have for decades.
particularly academic writing... said having worked as an editor at an academic journal long before ChatGPT was a thing, and having corrected many hyphens to m-dashes.
If only there was a way to find out the truth. But who has the appetite for that these days? Or the appetite for the effort required?
The irony of this comment can even be found in the post itself:
> ...the magazine’s fortunes soared by exploiting the public’s appetite for outrage. Articles frequently relied on exaggerated – and at times outright false – stories... Accuracy and integrity were secondary to the relentless churn of opinions. The formula worked.
You people should work out why you need to know if something was AI written or not. If there's really no way to know the truth, then the truth can't have any impact on you, so it doesn't matter. Why then do you care?
I've heard people say they want a human connection with the author but there was never one anyway. It's 1-way (parasocial), repeatedly edited (not natural human thought), formulaic (effectively AI writing rules implemented by a human), sometimes written by multiple separate people, and you have no other interactions with the same individual(s) so you can't build any kind of relationship or coherent understanding of them.
Consider me. You've probably never interacted with me before and probably never will again. I might be two separate people. I might be an AI. This might be a copy-paste of something I already wrote to 10 other people. Will knowing any of that stuff make a difference to you?
Yes, for communication to hold any meaning there must be persons at either end of it working towards a common understanding of truth.
Read through Borges' Library of Babylon, it's brief and follows the readers in the infinite library of seemingly random text. I read the lesson to be this: The protagonist will not find meaning even if he finds a coherent book that walks through a philosophy of existence, rather it is by coming to terms with the design of the architects of the library that any hope at conversation can be had.
> for communication to hold any meaning there must be persons at either end of it working towards a common understanding of truth.
I'm really struggling to understand that. Are you defining the meaning of the word "communication"? Does "either" mean "both" or "at least one"? Does reading a blog post count as communication? It it just a fancy way of saying "words are only useful when they convey meaning"? How does any of that relate to AI? AI can also learn from communication. Do you exclude AI because you hold the controversial belief that it's not to be capable of understanding or perhaps not to be capable of working towards any goal? And how about humans who intentionally write nonsense?
I also don't see how the story of that library is relevant. This text is not seemingly random, so it's more like walking through an actual library.
I mean "either" as "both". Yes, reading a blog is communication. And you don't need to convince me that plenty of people go about life steeped in nonsense and that listening to what they have to say is a waste of time. But on the topic of existentialism, humans can grasp at truth through lived experience and this produces both a reason for and a means towards purposeful interaction with others.
LLMs at their root are next-word predictors. If there's any communicative value in what they produce, it is due only to the data they were trained on and the intentions of the prompt-director and publisher. I have no problem in saying that I would rather interact with the words from the source than with the machine-generated resultant text.
Thanks for clarifying. I think we just differ on what we value. I don't mind communicating with someone even when there's no hope of them gaining any understanding from our interaction. I'm happy to read a technical manual that may have been written by 100's of different individuals of many decades, many of whom aren't even alive anymore. That's the same one-way communication I get from a blog or news article. Who or what the author is is irrelevant to me.
Do you mean you'd rather read the prompt than the output? That's tantalizing but it's only possible because they used AI. I think regular journalists and bloggers effectively have a secret prompt in their head and generate an article to respond to it. Don't you feel the same way about that? It's not AI vs human, but seeing behind the scenes vs seeing the product of the work. Also, you probably don't want to see how the sausage is made. It might look like "here's a bunch of dense technical PDFs about resource use permits and lab reports. Write an article that makes Tesla look like they did something wrong". That might be the exact same secret prompt a human journalist uses, so why do you value the human's output more than the AI's? The human certainly isn't trying to gain any understanding - they're trying to rile up their readers.
Sure, I see your point. I too read and value technical manuals, but I think them worth reading because the underlying scientific truth or technology matters and the builders/maintainers were doing important work when they crafted the manuals.
Yes, I'd rather read the prompt than the output. The problem you bring up with journalists and bloggers is exactly why provocative content is not worth reading. Kierkegaard brings up this point exactly! One of his most famous quotes is precisely this, "The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist.'". The problem is exactly their motives and the distortion of truth.
ZeroGPT is a gimmick. Just last month it flagged my paper as AI and I wrote the thing myself. How is it coming up with that 84%? Seems like snakeoil to me. Even the academic department at my Uni agreed and admitted they cannot use any of these AI checkers in actual academic hearings. They are akin to dowsing rods.
Emil is a fringe crackpot racist and Søren is like top 10 most influential philosophers. Anyone thinking Emil first should maybe take a break from the internet.
Emil is a highly cited scientist doing lots of empirical research despite relentless cancellation attempts by people who don't like the results: that intelligence is heritable to a substantial degree and that it differs statistically between groups of people. If you think any of his results are false, say so. Just accusing someone of racism is the exact type of mobster cancel culture that was already wrong in the case of Søren Kierkegaard.
The interesting part is not the intro about a literary conflict inside mid-19th-century Danish literary circles, but the quotes from Kirkegaard that seem to apply to our modern situation, and to social media, which did not and could not exist in 1840s, but the dynamics of which was already visible in the literary society. The crowd of opinion without much substance, with the desire to stand out, but also a desire to deride anything that does not align with their notion of proper. Nothing very new, but amplified by the power of the printed word.
> Where earlier generations had to risk everything on decisive choices (good or bad), the reflective age thrives only in appearance – reacting, commenting, and circulating impressions in an endless loop.
> What Kierkegaard sees as missing in the modern age is passion – not mere intensity of feeling, but a single, unifying purpose that gathers and orders a person’s whole life. Without such passion, existence breaks apart into disconnected fragments, each governed by its own narrow concerns. The virtues no longer form a coherent character; they wander separately, untethered from any central commitment. In this condition, even the possibility of true, wholehearted virtue – or even genuine sin – fades away, replaced by a confusion of contradictions, postures, and incompatible “principles.”4 Moral noise only increases, as each fragment insists on its own limited standard of right and wrong, with nothing higher to integrate them. As Kierkegaard remarks, “There is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason, people gossip all the more.”
> Out of this fragmentation arises something new – the public, a hollow substitute for genuine judgment. Where inward conviction falters, collective opinion steps in to bind the pieces together. But the bond it forges is thin and corrosive. Public opinion, Kierkegaard suggests, functions like an acidic pool: every act and thought which enters it is dissolved into a uniform solution. What emerges is a flat, standardized output where nuance is reduced to metrics and authority is measured by the size of the count. What remains is not genuine collective life, but a mass of unreal individuals “held together as a whole,” yet “never united in any actual situation.”
> For Kierkegaard, the despotism of “the public” represents not democracy’s realization but its grotesque fulfillment: a leveling power that smooths out real differences in the name of equality and replaces personal responsibility with the mere illusion of engagement. Committees, petitions, surveys – these are less tools of participation than props in a play where everyone can feel involved. “Now everyone can have an opinion,” Kierkegaard quips, “but they have to band together numerically in order to have one. Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion.”
> What holds this abstraction together is envy, the “negative unifying principle” of modern life.8 Envy does not look upward; it glances sideways, measuring its own worth by comparison, punishing excellence for the discomfort it causes. Yet even as it resents distinction, it cannot help but crave it. The result is a paradox of modern identity: in seeking to assert ourselves, we demand validation from a phantom audience. “That is the leveling process at its lowest” Kierkegaard warns, “for it always equates itself to the divisor by means of which everyone is reduced to a common denominator.”
I disagree, I found the story to be the interesting part. It's inspiring to me when people have the moral conviction to put themselves out there in a big way at great risk to their personal lives and mental health. And it was gratifying that he succeeded in swaying someone from the dark to the light.
History is rife with examples of "what's old is new again." Human nature and our psychological and social issues are basically constant throughout history. Good examples like this are always worth noting but, as you note, it's nothing very new, I'm sure one of the Greeks said something similar.
Oh boy, would he enjoy the modernity.
I agree. A good read overall as well.
As more and more of the world becomes less comprehensible, we revert to a childlike understanding of the world, where things are vast and incomprehensible and filled with wonder. When our cargo cult like understanding of it all fails to give us what we want, we find attachment figures, like substitute parents to guide us and shape our understanding, and even our desires. Those attachment figures might be faking it too and often are, but it's better than despair at the incomprehensibility of reality.
> more of the world becomes less comprehensible, we revert to a childlike understanding of the world, where things are vast and incomprehensible and filled with wonder.
When has the world ever been comprehensible? The vast majority of people thought that lighting was gods fighting and where looking to sacrifice some person if they thought it would buy them favor with said gods.
i’m convinced a significant number of that majority just thought it’d be cool as hell if lightning was in fact gods fighting, which i can respect. at that time: what’re they supposed to do with knowledge of lightning and electricity? might as well prefer the better story.
Highly recommend reading Kierkegaard's Journals where he writes about what he called the evils of the "daily press" and also his relationship to Regina and his attempts the befriend the Bishop Mynster.
"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control"
He saw that pure focus on Fact is empty without a framework of meaning behind it. He does not mean falsehood when he says degeneration! But purpose must transcend and direct the truth from fact.
identical critique of democracy, just sub in “manipulation of voters“ for choice of readers”
(my comment is admittedly in poor form since I’m just redirecting to a hobby horse of mine)
H.L. Mencken is my preferred critic of democracy.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
or
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
Mencken's cynicism and mockery were arguably the type of thing Kierkegaard lamented, and perhaps in a sense were more a cause of social breakdown more than a consequence.
From reading his journals the editor of the Corsair publicly mocked him and used the paper to hide behind (in the name of journalism). His lamentations on journalism are very much due to this personal attack and he does name the perpetrator in his writings.
Kierkegaard himself had his targets for cynicism, primarily the state church (Danish Lutheran) that he attacked endlessly in his writings.
I guess he wouldn’t have thought much of social media either
Yes, he had quite a few things to say. Unfortunately I don't have my ratty bookmarked copy on hand as he wrote some quite prescient ideas that are relatable to our "modern" world.
"We make our happiness dependent on situations outside ourselves and blame others in the process if things don’t turn out well. In all our 'freedom,' we seek one thing: to be able to live without responsibility." probably sums up the Instagram/TikTok generation.
> True to its name, The Corsair cultivated a reputation for mischief
Mischief is a crazy way to describe the name of a chief implement in the Barbary slave trade.
> Nothing ever happens
so Kierkegaard originated this meme
And folks claim cancel culture is new smh
Just wait till they learn about the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.
or the imprisonment of Galileo or the persecution of Socrates or the crucifixion of Christ or the legal charges against James Comey or even interpersonal dynamics in the corporate world. politically powerful insecure people swinging a stick at those who challenge them.
Instead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition we are discussing em-dashes. Peak HN.
Always happy to discuss existentialism, but I'm not going to read through an AI generated article. The other comment I wrote today was me recommending Borges to people!
[flagged]
Extremely rude reply. I don't want HN to be an AI article aggregator. And you sure don't seem to want to discuss anything important anyways.
>Instead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition
Why didn't you discuss these?
But I did.
If I want to ask AI about something I'd ask AI about something, not read someone else doing it
[dead]
Article is full of AI tells. "The two men shared surface-level similarities.", "Not X but Y", and em-dashes everywhere. I wish that people would write articles themselves, with their own style, if they expect people to read it.
I doubt it. It's the house magazine of a a Christian sect (the Bruderhof Anabaptists), and it also needs a firmer editor. There were sections that stuck out to me as I read it where I was like "Claude would have caught that".
I wish people would stop keying in on em-dashes. They might be a tell on message boards and Twitter, but lots of writers use them heavily and have for decades.
By itself it's not a tell but combined with all else it's hard to pass by. Author's other article from 2025 has less than half the dashes and it's the same length
How would the rise of dash usage in LLMs have arised if a significant portion of non-LLM writers weren't inclined to take them up and make them more common? The only explanation I see is that they are common in training materials we don't as commonly consume as website visitors.
I have often wondered this myself, especially because the same stylistic quirks are found across models from different labs.
I haven't found a satisfactory explanation, but whatever the explanation is, it is undoubtedly true that LLMs use them to an almost absurd extent compared to the vast majority of human writers. Anyone who reads a lot of prose can see that.
It all falls into one overarching category: style over substance, quantity over quality. Em-dashes are a simple way to sound important, same for generic throat-clearing phrases like “It’s important to note that…” plus they puff up the text without saying anything, same for overly symmetrical structure like neat triplets parallel clauses, and balanced pros/cons even when the topic does not naturally call for them, etc.
And they don't have a sense of stylistic restraint, so they often go overboard with one or more of the above.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, a verbose and elaborate writing style is also traditionally more common in humanities whereas scientific or technical writing favours a rather more terse and matter-of-fact style.
I don't know about the structures you mention specifically but if you compare an article on humanities or social matters against the style that's common in science and technical writing, chances are it's going to look more verbose in any case.
I don't necessarily have the best AI-dar but TFA didn't ring any LLM bells to me.
So we're actually witnessing in real time that he was slowly learning where to use emdashes? That's sort of hilarious.
to your point, a book i had as a kid in chicago suburbia has a section on hyphens and dashes
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch06/to...
It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it.
The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.
Just so I'm clear, I'm saying I don't think the writing in this is coherent enough to be LLM product. It kind of meanders and there are some rough paragraphs.
(That's not a bad thing! I'm not saying it wasn't worth reading. Just that it had rough edges that in my experience LLMs polish off.)
At a minimum, I do see a lot of AI-as-researcher tells here. You can get Claude to draft very similar essays (of surprisingly quality) if you feed it a target market/philosophy, a few articles for style, then ask it to dig up dirt on any published author in the humanities. It connects the dots and writes stuff that feels just like this article, right down to the meandering. The rough edges and sudden shifts in register is the author editing, then asking for a revised draft.
Claude says: "Verdict: Heavily assisted, possibly lightly edited from an LLM draft. The primary sources are real and the Kierkegaard scholarship is accurate, which suggests a human who knows the material. But the connective tissue and virtually all the 'writerly' prose is machine-generated."
Yeah I don't believe Claude's take on these kinds of questions at all. I can get Claude to say that about posts I wrote 10 years ago.
I've written essays in this exact format and I recognize specific tells. He's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Pro (now Adaptive) as a research assistant then tweaking the output. Know it, done it, smell it.
"The piece moves in a pattern that LLMs default to: historical episode, philosophical summary, contemporary relevance, theological application. Each section is self-contained, cleanly closed, and bridges to the next with a meta-sentence. A human essayist leaves more mess in the transitions."
Now that I've pointed it out, you'll see more stuff like this. It's everywhere.
Absolutely spot on. Or maybe should I say, "You're absolutely right!"...
> Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y”
i'm not even remotely convinced that's true.
It's not true, it's false.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the font, these seem to be the shorter en-dashes, not the em-dashes that are otherwise rare to see.
Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.
i would expect emdashes in a professionally published website.
Same. I believe Word and most other word processors and desktop publishing applications convert standard keyboard-typed hyphens to em- or en-dashes automatically, and have for decades.
particularly academic writing... said having worked as an editor at an academic journal long before ChatGPT was a thing, and having corrected many hyphens to m-dashes.
Did you go to law school?
If only there was a way to find out the truth. But who has the appetite for that these days? Or the appetite for the effort required?
The irony of this comment can even be found in the post itself:
> ...the magazine’s fortunes soared by exploiting the public’s appetite for outrage. Articles frequently relied on exaggerated – and at times outright false – stories... Accuracy and integrity were secondary to the relentless churn of opinions. The formula worked.
You people should work out why you need to know if something was AI written or not. If there's really no way to know the truth, then the truth can't have any impact on you, so it doesn't matter. Why then do you care?
I've heard people say they want a human connection with the author but there was never one anyway. It's 1-way (parasocial), repeatedly edited (not natural human thought), formulaic (effectively AI writing rules implemented by a human), sometimes written by multiple separate people, and you have no other interactions with the same individual(s) so you can't build any kind of relationship or coherent understanding of them.
Consider me. You've probably never interacted with me before and probably never will again. I might be two separate people. I might be an AI. This might be a copy-paste of something I already wrote to 10 other people. Will knowing any of that stuff make a difference to you?
Yes, for communication to hold any meaning there must be persons at either end of it working towards a common understanding of truth.
Read through Borges' Library of Babylon, it's brief and follows the readers in the infinite library of seemingly random text. I read the lesson to be this: The protagonist will not find meaning even if he finds a coherent book that walks through a philosophy of existence, rather it is by coming to terms with the design of the architects of the library that any hope at conversation can be had.
> for communication to hold any meaning there must be persons at either end of it working towards a common understanding of truth.
I'm really struggling to understand that. Are you defining the meaning of the word "communication"? Does "either" mean "both" or "at least one"? Does reading a blog post count as communication? It it just a fancy way of saying "words are only useful when they convey meaning"? How does any of that relate to AI? AI can also learn from communication. Do you exclude AI because you hold the controversial belief that it's not to be capable of understanding or perhaps not to be capable of working towards any goal? And how about humans who intentionally write nonsense?
I also don't see how the story of that library is relevant. This text is not seemingly random, so it's more like walking through an actual library.
I mean "either" as "both". Yes, reading a blog is communication. And you don't need to convince me that plenty of people go about life steeped in nonsense and that listening to what they have to say is a waste of time. But on the topic of existentialism, humans can grasp at truth through lived experience and this produces both a reason for and a means towards purposeful interaction with others.
LLMs at their root are next-word predictors. If there's any communicative value in what they produce, it is due only to the data they were trained on and the intentions of the prompt-director and publisher. I have no problem in saying that I would rather interact with the words from the source than with the machine-generated resultant text.
Thanks for clarifying. I think we just differ on what we value. I don't mind communicating with someone even when there's no hope of them gaining any understanding from our interaction. I'm happy to read a technical manual that may have been written by 100's of different individuals of many decades, many of whom aren't even alive anymore. That's the same one-way communication I get from a blog or news article. Who or what the author is is irrelevant to me.
Do you mean you'd rather read the prompt than the output? That's tantalizing but it's only possible because they used AI. I think regular journalists and bloggers effectively have a secret prompt in their head and generate an article to respond to it. Don't you feel the same way about that? It's not AI vs human, but seeing behind the scenes vs seeing the product of the work. Also, you probably don't want to see how the sausage is made. It might look like "here's a bunch of dense technical PDFs about resource use permits and lab reports. Write an article that makes Tesla look like they did something wrong". That might be the exact same secret prompt a human journalist uses, so why do you value the human's output more than the AI's? The human certainly isn't trying to gain any understanding - they're trying to rile up their readers.
Sure, I see your point. I too read and value technical manuals, but I think them worth reading because the underlying scientific truth or technology matters and the builders/maintainers were doing important work when they crafted the manuals.
Yes, I'd rather read the prompt than the output. The problem you bring up with journalists and bloggers is exactly why provocative content is not worth reading. Kierkegaard brings up this point exactly! One of his most famous quotes is precisely this, "The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist.'". The problem is exactly their motives and the distortion of truth.
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84% likely human on zerogpt, but you could have done that yourself.
ZeroGPT is a gimmick. Just last month it flagged my paper as AI and I wrote the thing myself. How is it coming up with that 84%? Seems like snakeoil to me. Even the academic department at my Uni agreed and admitted they cannot use any of these AI checkers in actual academic hearings. They are akin to dowsing rods.
Hallucinated references are a 100% tell.
Definitely. In my case, I made all mine and they were real. There will always be obvious tells. Without those though it becomes opaque.
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This is Søren, not Emil.
I know nobody reads the things posted here before commenting, but this is pretty egregious.
Why spend money on tokens to process linked text when you can comment off the headline?
I have Søren on my mind and would mistake Emil for him and not the other way around.
Emil is a fringe crackpot racist and Søren is like top 10 most influential philosophers. Anyone thinking Emil first should maybe take a break from the internet.
Sørenity now.
Emil is a highly cited scientist doing lots of empirical research despite relentless cancellation attempts by people who don't like the results: that intelligence is heritable to a substantial degree and that it differs statistically between groups of people. If you think any of his results are false, say so. Just accusing someone of racism is the exact type of mobster cancel culture that was already wrong in the case of Søren Kierkegaard.