> Before 2025, nobody talked like this.
I enjoy writing posts online and I've been doing it since the days of BBSs and 300 baud modems, transitioning to Usenet and nowadays mostly just here on HN. People seem to find my posts generally informative and sometimes even mention they're well written. In school I always got good marks on creative and essay writing and in the early days of my startups I wrote some of the user documentation and all the advertising copy (one of which won an advertising award). So, I think I'm at least a bit better than average at writing. And I've never used AI for writing anything.
But in the last few months I've had posts accused of being "AI writing" TWICE (once here on HN and the other was on a retro-computing forum). So I Googled through a random sampling of around 50-ish of my own posts going back a couple decades. Damn. 90s me was naive about a few things. And I found three examples which are kind of like that pattern you described. I guess I'm screwed because apparently that's just how I sometimes write and no one ever minded before. And I have proof I wrote that way long before AI did... oh.
It just occurred to me that maybe some of my Usenet posts could be a small part of why AI writes like that. But I was here first! I should have dibs on writing like me. Regardless, I definitely don't want anyone here to think my writing is AI output - using AI would be disrespectful to the community I enjoy participating in. Recently, I've noticed a few times where I start second guessing something I wrote before hitting "Reply" which makes writing not fun. Once, I just hit delete and logged off without posting. It wasn't that good of a post anyway.
Now it occurs to me I'm not really sure what my point is other than venting. So much for being a better-than-average writer. I guess I'd like people to at least be really careful about making accusations - unless you're very sure. I mean, I get it. I hate AI slop too. I enjoy reading good posts here even more than writing posts. Slop sucks. But errant accusations can have a chilling effect or they've had some effect on me.
Oh, wait was that last sentence too much like THE pattern? No... it's an either/or so I think it's probably okay.
And, to be clear, I promise I didn't plan that sentence as some kind of example. I wrote it and only then did I wonder if it might be too much like THE pattern. Maybe this is one of the ways AI destroys community. Simply by making us second guess each other - and then that gets some of us second-guessing ourselves. Shit, I just noticed I used a dash in the last sentence... but at least it's not an em dash, so I should be good. I just suck at semicolons and started using dashes as a lazy shortcut. My freshman comp teacher complained about it too. Wait, did I use dashes anywhere else? Checking... Shit. I did. Now anyone reading this will definitely think I planned that both times or that maybe I'm an LLM. Because no one writes like that. Fuck.