EDIT: Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.

I also like Will's "em-dash disclosure" on his about page:

> I like em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and hyphens (-), and I know how to type them. I also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I didn’t know how to type one… until now. I believe that footnotes and sidenotes are superior to endnotes, appreciate the occasional fleuron, and at one point in my life, I knew what a colophon was.

> All of this is to say: the words, punctuation marks, misspellings, and opinions on this site are my own.

Neurodiverse people have been running this gauntlet forever. Your pacing is too flat or too intense. Your vocabulary is too formal or too casual. You don't make eye contact correctly. You're either masking so hard you're invisible, or you're visibly yourself, and people assume something is broken.

The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human is to pass your writing through an LLM. That maps onto something a lot of us already live. The only way to seem normal is to perform a version of yourself that isn't quite you.

And the everyday troll, seeing a less than perfect word choice or awkward turn of phrase will drop a comment like:

    L0l d0 J00 3V3N 41

So, the plot twist was somewhat refreshing. Who/what wrote the post seems besides the point.

For better or worse, my first version of any post tends to contain quite a few typos. It usually takes a few train rides of re-reading the post and making notes of the typos, then fixing them and pushing the changes once I get home, before most of them get weeded out. So there is at least one rather low grade indicator that the writing is coming from an imperfect human brain. I also double-space between sentences which can be another low grade indicator for people who care to 'view source'.

But even so, I find myself increasingly wary that something I wrote might be mistaken for LLM output. It is a nagging worry that has slightly dampened the joy of writing. I very well understand why people have become more suspicious about LLM-generated writing. But I do hope that once things settle down perhaps in a few years, the current hair trigger suspicion will ease and that people who still handcraft their blogs will not feel a persistent sense of suspicion lingering over their work.

I am actually trying to build ways to prove you are human properly. I wrote about it on my blog: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...

confession time. i read the post once. then twice. the em dashes whispered secrets to people clearly smarter than me. somewhere between complement and compliment i accepted defeat. a quiet tab switch. a small prompt. a large language model clearing its throat.

it explained things patiently. suspiciously patiently. step by step, like a machine that has explained the same thing to ten thousand confused readers before breakfast.

so yes. irony noted. to understand a text about hiding machine fingerprints, i borrowed a machine.

the explanation made sense though. unsettlingly structured. bullet-point neat, internally consistent, statistically likely to be correct. you know the type.

anyway—great post. very human. extremely human.

is there anything else i can help you with?

"Here's my response written in a stylized way that will appeal to highly technical readers. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Interesting piece though.