You forgot one more tell that this post is riddled with - “not x, but y”. The rule of 3 is also seen in general sentence structure as well as bullet points. Example:
A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed.
Em-dash (probably), into rule of 3, into em-dash, into not x but y. That sentence is what made me suspicious but there are plenty of other examples.
Well, that and…this killing had nothing to do with any of those points. The sentence sounds flashy but is completely wrong on closer examination. Almost like a…hallucination…ahem.
This does sound like it was written by an off the shelf LLM. You can’t just rely on em dashes anymore, most LLMs don’t spam those anymore.
When you tell a modern LLM to write a post like this, it’ll use a very LinkedIn-esque tone. It’ll spam short, active sentences, often preceded by a colon:
“Not this, but that” and the “rule of 3” are getting less useful as tells, but they are absolutely littered everywhere in this post.
I quote this formatting as a joke for obvious LLM writing. I’ve never seen human writing with more than 3 of these in a single post.
My guess is that this was written by Claude since it stays rather personally neutral if you don’t guide it that way.
I made Claude generate a post like this and it’s a very similar tone.
claude.ai/…/1d27b5eb-dd85-43a1-bddf-1289d8a77b0f