Windows would do just fine. But the state of cheap Windows laptops is abysmal, and Windows as a product is in the doghouse lately because... well, I honestly don't know why Microsoft is doing what they're doing, but from the outside they certainly do appear to want to ruin Windows.

That's sadly possible.

When I've noticed this it's been in contexts where things lean against text being fully LLM-generated but... who the hell knows.

I've been called out more than once for using too much italics in my writing.

But the trick is I usually write like I would speak. This leads to italicizing any word or phrase I'd speak emphatically. (Which, yes, I've also been called out for doing a lot when I speak. So what; I've also been told I'm good at getting my point across. I'll take it!) In any text important enough to go through multiple revisions, or to be written from the start with multiple revisions in mind, this characteristic is diminished. But most text is more throwaway, just like most speech, so it gets left a little rough.

This also tends to feel pretty natural. If you read LLM-written text out loud, or the prose TFA is talking about, it... does not feel natural at all. So what I'm trying to say is: some level of emphasis is just fine. Don't overthink it.

I think it's getting more and more common, quickly. The obvious inference is that people are using LLMs a lot and starting to mimic them, consciously or unconsciously. (Probably the latter: if people have weak internal models of how to write well, being around a lot of LLM text can probably influence them pretty quickly.)

> Several commenters suggested the original essay was written by an LLM. They were half right. Both that essay and this one were written with Claude as a drafting partner. I directed the argument; the LLM helped with prose. I mention this not as confession but as demonstration: the human brought the utility function, the machine brought the compute. If that division of labour bothers you, I’d suggest the discomfort says more about the Bitter Lesson than about my writing process.

This paragraph is pretty condescending to your reader. Whatever else is going on with AI authors, the fact is that if your reader can tell you wrote a piece with AI (and I could with this one), you fucked up.

I think one of the longer-term consequences of AI authors will be that writing gets shorter. There's a lot of fluff in a lot of writing (though not as much as there used to be in say the 19th century), and much of it's culturally expected. We might end up at a place where writing is much shorter and readers expect their own AI assistants to fill in the gaps. That might not be so bad.

But if you can't write a piece without AI, do you understand what you've written? It could go either way. But the condescension here combined with the obvious tells do not make me think highly of this author and his argument.