Another thing to consider is that LLMs have become a premier source of reading for the public. If more of what you read is AI generated, how you write is going to be significantly influenced by that.
One (slightly frightening) possibility is that many people write like LLMs even without assistance from LLMs. AI writing may have just become the norm for some. Maybe that's what's happening here.
LLM style is in many ways "The Atlantic from Temu". Nearly every article in The Atlantic sounds the same - I think we all know the cliches I am talking about. This doesn't mean that every author underwent a lobotomy (I hope). It just means there's a group of editors enforcing a common style.
Joining these editors used to take years of training in order to write like they do. Now we have their wisdom available on the command line.
To put it another way: LLMs write in what was considered pretty good style before their proliferation. There are all these examples of people finding "llm cliches" in well-respected authors' works pre-llm (somewhat obviously, if you think about it).
What made pretty good "taste" pretty good was its novelty. Now that pretty good is common it's no longer stylish.
Magazines’ style is generally good but affected, with some distinct quirks mixed in. These quirks have been also picked up in the training and their automated repetition at scale made it weird and "AI-style"
Yeah if you look back at earlier posts on the same blog, definitely not the same style. I'm guessing the author is either lying to save face or has spent so much time with Claude that they cannot distinguish Claude's voice from their own (we're all vulnerable to this).
Just because LLMs exist does not mean people stopped writing themselves. I mean, some people did, but not everyone. It's a kind of AI psychosis to think or suspect that everything is LLM generated.
