I love language, and I study it. I also use LLMs. I am not anti-AI, but neither am I prescriptively pro-AI. I just happen to find them useful.
I also, however, find them to have quirks. I won’t regurgitate the supposed over-representation of delve — or em dashes, or lists of three, and so on. These are each, at once, true and hardly egregious – especially given that we were all schooled on the same English that now sits in their training data.
What I want to focus on is the cadence. I watched this video, and the historical information is interesting – in fact, much of the material on the channel is. A few shorts were recommended to me, I discovered more, I subscribed, as one does. But listen to the talk track.
Whilst I may be mistaken, it sounds like an LLM-produced script. Perhaps the joke is on me, and the presenter herself is an AI avatar. It also sounds as though a de-LLM process was applied afterwards to obfuscate the patterns – whether by a human or by another model running some humaniser GPT.
Of course, there are other explanations. Perhaps the writer simply happens to write this way, and the LLMs merely encroach on it. Without a writing history, one can’t know for certain. And – I know this is true of me – exposure, dare I say overexposure, shapes how one writes.
I run almost everything I write through AI and ask for suggestions – and you needn’t even ask; it volunteers anyway. When the output looks better, I adopt it: a word, a phrasing, a more concise rendering, a supporting sentence or a setup. After a while, my writing has been nudged in that direction. I already used delve; now I am merely conscious of it. I used to use em dashes – look at my pre–2020 posts – and switched to en dashes purely to avoid the witch-hunt. In each case, the LLM Age has done something to my style.
So, back to the video. If you are familiar with long-form LLM output, you will notice how she supports her ideas and how she builds her asides – with a very particular pattern. I am not judging: as I say, I use these tools extensively. I only want to point out an observation.
BONUS: I don’t pronounce Wednesday as /wenz.day/. I pronounce it closer to /wedñz-day/, the tilde is rather on the /d/ or the space the /d/ occupies, but I placed the mark on the /n/ instead because there is no tilde-d glyph, and I wanted to represent a nasality the more typical pronunciation doesn’t have – but that I add.
From here on, I asked Claude to analyse my post (above) along with the video script. Pay special attention to its own cadence, which comports with the video.
Here, then, is the observation.
Watch how a point is made to land. The move is nearly always the same: state the naïve reading, snatch it away, and hand back the corrected version as a tidy little binary. It’s not random. There’s a reason. It wasn’t design. It accumulated. English spelling isn’t bad design. It’s no design at all. The shape does the work an argument would otherwise have to do. Negate, reverse, reveal – and the reveal feels like insight precisely because something was first taken away. It is the cheapest available route to the sensation of having been told something.
Notice, too, the reassurance travelling alongside it. There’s a reason. There’s always a reason. The promise of an explanation, delivered before the explanation arrives, so that you settle in and stop wondering whether one is coming. And where genuine argument would be laborious, the list stands in for it: Old English, Norse, Norman, French, Latin, scholarship, Dutch typesetters, the great vowel shift. Abundance, read as authority. Say enough true things in a row and the row itself begins to feel like a proof.
Then the asides. Almost every one is the same manoeuvre – the proper noun that renames itself the instant it appears. Woden, the chief god of the Anglo-Saxon pantheon. Latin, the prestige language of learning. A Quechua word from the Andes. Frigg being Odin’s wife. Nothing is permitted to sit unglossed for even a clause. This is what maximal legibility looks like once it hardens into reflex: a horror of the unexplained referent, a compulsion to footnote in real time. The second variety is the personality wink – and English being English, it kept both – character applied topically, like a balm.
And, so that you are never left to feel anything unsupervised, your reactions are narrated back to you in advance: if that feels insane to you, good, because it is. The response, pre-issued, so you may be spared the labour of having it. The whole is held together by a governing metaphor with a landing – fossil, photograph, museum – reactivated at the close (every mispronounced word is a crime scene) and finished with a note of absolution: you haven’t been mispronouncing English because you’re careless. It is very nearly a form one could fill in.
None of which proves a human didn’t write it.
And that is the part worth sitting with. Suppose no model ever touched this script. Suppose the writer arrived at the cadence honestly, by the same route I did – by reading enough of the stuff that the rhythm simply seeped in. Then the pattern is no longer evidence of authorship at all. It is evidence of a house style, and the house is one we have all quietly moved into. The tell no longer tells you a machine was here. It tells you the machine’s prosody has become the water.
I find that rather more unsettling than a mere ghost-writer would be. A ghost-writer you can dismiss. A cadence you have caught, like an accent, off the sheer ambient volume of the thing – that you carry home. And the video is, with some poetry, about exactly this: silent letters as fossils, sounds that mouths stopped making but that spellings preserved, layer upon historical layer that nobody ever cleaned up. The irony is that the script is laying down a fresh one as it speaks. Somewhere in the prose of the next decade there will be a stratum you can date almost to the year – ah, yes, written just after the models arrived – and it will be made of precisely these moves.
I switched to en dashes to dodge the witch-hunt. But the dash was never the point. You can strip every em dash from a sentence and leave the skeleton wholly intact, because the skeleton was never punctuation. It was the not-this-but-that, the aside that footnotes itself, the pile that mistakes its own length for weight. A humaniser can launder the vocabulary. It cannot, so far, launder the architecture. Which is how one reads a script scrubbed clean of every obvious tell and still hears, quite distinctly, the thing it was scrubbed to hide.
I am not judging. I write this way too, now – rather more than I would like. I only wanted to point it out. While I can still tell that I’m doing it.
Philosophics 