You are absolutely right. It’s not X that’s the give away, it’s A, and B — moreover it’s C that is the clincher.

AI is popularizing a writing style that has been common in advertising for quite some time. For example, Apple uses it a lot. Now everyone can imitate advertising copy.

It's not that it didn't exist before. It's that it wasn't overused.

Heh.

Neurodivergent people tend to write like this too, there was a study about it.

Yeah, I know, I just feel like at this point it's useless to call that out.

We can learn useful rhetorical techniques from AI that can help us clearly communicate. We should separate those babies from the bathwater.

So far, any "useful rhetorical technique" one could've learned from AI has become a dead giveaway of AI slop (lazy writing and lazy thinking).

Seriously: what tool do you want to use that's immediately available to the absolute lowest common denominator "writers" on the Internet?

"It's not X, it's Y" literally makes my stomach churn from seeing so much of it on LinkedIn.

Rhetorical techniques that are so easily identifiable as AI now.

You can also just find a book on writing. I recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Dense and quite informative.

And the scripts of most recent YouTube videos, and the dialogue in Stranger Things Season 5 (the last 3 episodes specifically).