It's not written by humans, it's written by AI. It's not useful, it's slop. It's not hard to find, it's everywhere you look.
As AI-generated text is becoming increasingly ubiquitous on the internet, some distinctive linguistic patterns are starting to emerge — maybe more so than anything else, that pattern of negating statements typified by "it's not X, it's Y."
Once you notice it, you start to see it everywhere. One teacher on Reddit even noticed that certain AI phrase structures are making the jump into spoken language.
"Comments and essays (I'm a teacher) are the obvious culprits, but I've straight up noticed the 'that's not X, it's [Y]' structure being said out loud more often than it used to be in video essays and other similar content," they wrote.
It's a fascinating observation that makes a striking amount of AI-generated text easily identifiable. It also raises some interesting questions about how AI chatbot tech is informing the way we speak — and how certain stylistic choices, like the em-dash in this very sentence, are becoming looked down upon for resembling the output of a large language model.
"Now I know that linguistic style existed before GPT, and it was common enough, but now I just can't unsee or unhear it," the Reddit user wrote, saying they now "assume AI was involved" when they see it.
"Makes me grimace just a bit on the inside," they added.
Others quickly chimed in, agreeing and riffing on the phenomenon.
"You're not just seeing it — you're saying something," one user wrote in a tongue-in-cheek comment, imitating ChatGPT. "And that's not illusion — that's POWER."
"It's almost as if AI use is becoming the preferred way of communication," another user commented. "It's not just frustrating — it's insulting."
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