The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious

tekdude 14 points 2 comments July 12, 2026
www.theatlantic.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (2 comments)

doginasuit

This is something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I understand why people don't want to read AI slop, but I find myself using negative parallelism in my writing frequently and I've wondered how to navigate it now that it has a stigma. I've assumed that there's something particularly meaty about drawing that kind of distinction, and that is why LLMs reach for it so often. But the given explanation about how a sentence unfolds when written by an LLM was really insightful.

JamesSwift

This got me thinking… why does AI use em-dashes nearly exclusively? I think “in the wild” examples overwhelmingly weight toward en-dashes instead.

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