“Quietly” is quietly becoming a big GenAI copy tell, and that’s more interesting than you think.
(It may not actually be very interesting – but that’s what AI would tell you, because “more interesting than you think” is another GenAI linguistic meme it’s now nearly impossible to escape.)
The problem isn’t AI writing
This is not another rant about GenAI writing patterns. I personally hated the em-dash long before it was cool – not its use as a grammatical tool, which I use all the time, but its ugly aesthetics.
The point is that it used to take months, if not years to notice trends in headlines and framing devices – now they’re shifting far, far more rapidly.
This started with the BuzzFeed effect, more than a decade ago – everything was suddenly clickbait or a listicle, usually with an uneven number. The writing style even of newspapers of record shifted towards ever more chatty informality.
Suddenly every media brand sounded like a relatively smart Californian trying to sound dumber than they are.
The issue is systemic
GenAI has been trained on this stuff.
And because this kind of content was designed largely to cut through social and search algorithms via a brute force attack – combined with test, learn, repeat until false – it was produced in inordinately vast quantities, spamming the system.
And because LLMs are probabilistic, and they’re trained from the internet, this kind of annoyingly-formulated content is a core part of their training data.
Pattern recognition drives addictive behaviour
This kind of copy is designed to appeal to intrigue, encourage engagement, encourage a click, trigger a dopamine response when the (barely mysterious) mystery of what the hell the headline is talking about is revealed and either tells you something new or makes you feel smarter if you already guessed the answer.
It’s designed to suck you in, and keep you coming back.
There was a lawsuit about this recently. Meta and YouTube lost, found guilty of designing their platforms to suck users in and get them hooked.
GenAI is the output of a pattern recognition system. These are patterns it has recognised.
Now it’s doing its own equivalent of test, learn, double down and iterate to find new formulas that will suck in intrigue- and dopamine-hungry brains.
And so headlines written by AI – a great use case for the media – are all starting to converge into similar patterns again. Just as they did a decade ago when BuzzFeed disrupted then industry and turned almost all newspapers on the planet just that little bit dumber.
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This is how language and culture has always evolved. The process just seems to be accelerating.