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LLMs only know how to use emdashes, semicolons, and ellipses because human writers used them first. The way I see it, a large part of "respecting yourself as a writer" in current year is not letting the mere existence of LLMs change how you write, just because a bunch of people have latched onto cheap signals like the presence of certain punctuation as a hallmark of LLM output.

I don't really think an LLM wrote this, because the use of punctuation is actually a bit clumsy. However, I have no problem parsing the author's intended meaning.



It's not the semicolons or em dashes but the textual content that struck me as weird.

> The iPhone’s locked-down nature wasn’t a restriction; it was a selling point.

Was it really? I thought it was more about having 1 device that did it all when it launched, and app stores were a rather late addition if anything that still was more pro app store than pro lockdown.

To be clear, I think most of the text in that article was human written. I have absolutely no issues with em dashes or other humane figures of speech that LLMs have unsurprisingly picked up on.

But it was a few paragraphs here and there (like the example I gave) that felt odd and just out of place.


> Was it really? I thought it was more about having 1 device that did it all when it launched, and app stores were a rather late addition if anything that still was more pro app store than pro lockdown.

I don't really agree with it either.




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