Licensed US amateur operator here. In general the FCC regulations allow you to listen on whatever frequencies you like, EXCEPT the cellular frequencies (This dates back to the analog era, before cellular traffic was encrypted).
Some jurisdictions may also have restrictions on, for example, using a police scanner in a vehicle, that would restrict listening (even though most of that traffic is now also encrypted).
Don't quote me on this, but I believe there's some more nuance to the cellular band issue. What's restricted, AFAIK, isn't simply receiving traffic on those frequencies in and of itself, but:
1. Decrypting those communications if they are encrypted
and
2. Selling equipment designed to receive on those bands.
Of course there's not much purpose in sitting around listening to the digital chirping noises of encrypted traffic, but as I understand it, if that's your hobby, that part is actually legal.
(Also a licensed US ham, not not an expert in anything in particular and definitely not a lawyer)
Get ready to be surprised, because the 800Mhz band used for AMPS (1G / analog cellular) was explicitly carved off as a no-receive zone by Congress because AT&T was pissed[0] anyone could just listen in on any cellphone conversation. I'm told the law actually makes it really difficult to legally sell fully open software-defined radios (SDR), even though nobody uses analog cellular anymore, because you still have to design the SDR to be tamper-proof against attempts to receive 800Mhz.
[0] Wikipedia also mentions the existence of cloning tools that would let you copy any AMPS subscriber ID and program another phone with the same number, stealing the subscriber's account. I suspect AT&T was more angry about that.
A functioning Congress would find it absolutely laughable that you could be disallowed from receiving/listening to certain bands of electromagnetic waves, drawing an analogy to being forced to look away every time someone shines a spotlight of a particular color frequency in public. Absolutely ridiculous. Radio is not a wire and should never be treated as such. Unfortunately, we do not and may never have had a functioning Congress.
I can't find anything supporting the notion that it's illegal to receive those frequencies IF you own hardware for doing so. What I can find, is where they made it illegal to sell such equipment[1]. But it doesn't say pre-existing equipment is banned so presumably a pre-ban scanner or radio would still be legal. But again, that's only with regards to actually receiving the signal. Listening to it, if it's a cellular call, or decrypting it if it's encrypted, would presumably be illegal under other statutes.
(d) Cellular telecommunications receivers
(1) Within 180 days after October 28, 1992, the
Commission shall prescribe and make effective
regulations denying equipment authorization
(under part 15 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations, or any other part of that title) for any
scanning receiver that is capable of—
(A) receiving transmissions in the frequencies allocated to the domestic cellular
radio telecommunications service,
(B) readily being altered by the user to receive transmissions in such frequencies, or
(C) being equipped with decoders that convert digital cellular transmissions to analog
voice audio.
(2) Beginning 1 year after the effective date of
the regulations adopted pursuant to paragraph
(1), no receiver having the capabilities described
in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C) of paragraph (1),
as such capabilities are defined in such regulations, shall be manufactured in the United States or imported for use in the United States.
That said, the law is complicated and there could be some other pertinent statute that I'm not aware of.
EDIT: OK, this gets even weirder. I haven't followed every line of this through in detail, so take this with the amount of salt you consider appropriate. But according to ChatGPT, the FCC, in this order:
effectively repealed this restriction. What makes it weird is that the statute itself is apparently still on the books, but the FCC seems to have exercised their rule-making authority to say "this no longer applies". Here's what appears to be the relevant sections:
We have identified 36 rule provisions, totaling 12,008 words and covering more than 25
pages in the Code of Federal Regulations, that no longer serve the public interest because they regulate
obsolete technology,4 are no longer used in practice by the FCC, industry, or the public,5 or are otherwise outdated or unnecessary.6 Applying the “good cause” standard discussed above, we conclude that prior notice and comment are unnecessary before repealing the rules identified in the Appendix.
and contained within one of those footnotes:
15.121 (contains provisions to protect consumers’ privacy from technology that is now obsolete);
The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer.
It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?
The sloppiness in the AI comes from the human sloppiness on this topic. This seems like a variant of what I've seen called the "fake because", which is the idea that people don't generally analyze whether or not a given reason actually makes sense. For example, the common advertising "You need to buy this beer because it'll get you the girls". It is obvious to conscious examination by pretty much everyone that this is obviously false... the problem is getting it up to that conscious examination in the first place.
I've also noticed several times the deployment of "It's not about the X, {because} it's actually about the Y" where the connection between the X and the Y has no real logic in it upon examination. That can often be translated to "I want to change the topic to Y" without much loss. I think this is one of the primary ways that AI writing can be really exhausting to work through logically and it gets people who are for whatever reason thinking sloppily, including just the sheer exhaustion of the amount of thinking navigating the modern world takes even for someone who nominally understands how to penetrate this sort of sloppy thinking, into so much trouble when they just trust the torrent of words going by. AIs can very easily hallucinate "fake becauses" at a rate no human could possibly keep up with.
I agree that it's marketing mumbo jumbo, but it's saying "we haven't added more features because more is better, we added them because they actually improve the longevity of the product."
If anything, that sentence tells me that they are insecure of their features being perceived as bullshit.
It's phrased poorly for that point, though. "Unlike the competition, we aren't just adding these features to pad out a spec sheet. Each change we've made for the plus model this year will pay off in improved lifespan and better functionality for you."
Or something in that vein. Like this isn't very hard to write?
I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.
Because you need to show something that executives can parse and people that only want to eat slop writing to read. People literally took marketing material as gospel before. They still do now.
Nice try, but it's generated slop all the way down, Mr. Feynman.
The tech specs aren't safe either. Last year the official Google Store had some laughable AI translations in the specs for their Pixel phones. Eg. "Rear video" was translated to "Rückansicht" ("Rear view"). That nonsensical translation for an audience of 80 million persisted for months. In 2025 blessed vibe-translation of formerly reputable sites really stood out to me.
> Professional editing is both an art and a discipline of diagnosing what a text needs and applying the right level of editorial intervention without flattening voice or intent. This skillset requires language mastery, analysis, and workflow efficiency that many aspiring editors lack. This editing and proofreading course closes that gap by treating editing as a structured profession with repeatable methods. You will discover editing style systems to help you perfect your skillset, while covering specialized domains, ethical considerations, tools and technology, as well as business operations that will help you succeed in your career as a professional editor.
> You will progress through 10 sequential modules and build real-world editor workflows, such as style sheets, author queries, consistency systems, and professional deliverables. You will also strengthen your editorial judgment across various genres and contexts. This online proofreading training program culminates in a capstone editing project that produces industry-standard artifacts, including a marked-up manuscript, editorial letter, style sheet, author queries, and reflective analysis, that will help you demonstrate your competence to prospective employers and clients.
PWP 330 COPYEDITING 3 Units
Apply and further develop skills needed to work with authors and prepare a manuscript for publication. Focus is on the procedures of editing a manuscript, particularly editing for correctness and style, following the conventions of The Chicago Manual of Style.
PREREQ: (PWP 230 AND PWP 310) OR INSTRUCTOR CONSENT
IMO it all comes down to the desire to have too my "copy" without enough to say. the people who generate it don't value their own output enough to try, which is a great way of intuiting that they have had the requirement to create copy delegated to them without them expecting that copy to be useful in any way.
In other words, "doneness" is the metric of quality for most of this stuff.
This has it backwards, it is the AI that writes like cliched AD copy. Feast your eyes on this quote from a whiskey CEO, supposedly written in 2016:
> ‘When you bring people in from overseas [to Scotland], you’re working on their mindsets,’ he says. ‘You make them get a feeling for Scotch. It’s not about an advert, it’s about this magical industry with its rich heritage and this history.
> ‘It’s not about kilts and drums, but it’s about the Highlands, the water, the peat, the stories, and I call it softness – it’s very gentle marketing. A lot of what you’ve got to do is to win the hearts and minds.’
This is something that frustrates me a lot when I see people jumping on a piece of writing as AI generated, these AI-isms didn't show up in a vacuum. Yes, AI commonly overuses some patterns, but it got those patterns from it's training data because real people wrote (and continue to write) that way. A few matching sentences here or there is not the smoking gun people make it out to be.
The other thing that is characteristic of AI text is messing up the underlying meaning or fine details of what it's saying. It's not just that it's imitating people who write bad contrasting clauses, it also can't write good ones reliably.
edit: Ironically that last sentence is not super clear (but hey writing is hard and I'm constantly exposed to slop). My point is the nature of AI makes its writing worse than its training data, it's not all bad training data.
To be fair to committees, the above quote is explicitly from a single person and I expect that is true of most AD copy simply because having one person write it is cheaper.
Committees are more about stamping out flavour by making what exists more bland, rather than adding endlessly regurgitated idioms.
I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters
I mean, AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set. Honestly AI producing it so much is much more likely to make humans avoid it.
> AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set
I don't think this is true. Someone probably had to write like this, but a base model has to be able to write like anyone. The specific mannerisms of AI appear in post training, either as things that are rewarded or as mode collapse artifacts. ChatGPT didn't get obsessed with goblins because that's incredibly common among humans.
I would bet real money that the usable life of a television now, even accounting for anything that required repair, is much higher than it used to be in the CRT era.
This reminds me something my the teacher of my university public speaking class told us (in the context of doing research): No matter how trivial, esoteric or obscure the topic, there is someone on earth who has devoted their entire career to studying it.
There's an episode called "Digital Estate Planning" where his dad mocks him for his lack of business acumen: "In 1980, you said that video games, not moist towelettes, were the business of the future. Today, moist towelettes are stocked in every supermarket, while arcade after arcade closes."
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