A common phenomenon I’ve seen people cite is the use of em dashes
– yeah, “The Magic School Bus” –
It isn’t even the punctuation, but more the writing style that makes me think this is AI generated. A human isn’t going to write an obituary and be this casual and informal about it, not even for TMZ.
The article does not use an em dash, it uses two hyphens. Bizarrely, you correctly quote it in your original post but did not the second time.
This is something humans often do because it’s easier on most keyboards. I’ve never seen a genAI spit out two hyphens rather than an actual em dash.
Your argument about writing style does not convince me. I scanned some TMZ celebrity death articles going back a decade (before genAI would be used) and they look very similar.
In this 2019 article reporting on Rip Torn’s death, they end with “RIP, Rip”. Feels to me as a very similar level of informality. (the double hyphens, opposed to em dashes, are also used in this example)
Odd that the dash/hyphen would change, I copied and pasted both (the first directly from the article, and the second from my original post). I do think that when I write an email in Outlook it will automatically change my hypen to an em dash.
And there’s a difference in writing a tongue-in-cheek obituary for someone like Rip Torn than for Malcolm-Jamal Warner, but I will concede that it does sound like TMZ is just bad at writing obituaries.
It isn’t even the punctuation, but more the writing style that makes me think this is AI generated. A human isn’t going to write an obituary and be this casual and informal about it, not even for TMZ.
The article does not use an em dash, it uses two hyphens. Bizarrely, you correctly quote it in your original post but did not the second time.
This is something humans often do because it’s easier on most keyboards. I’ve never seen a genAI spit out two hyphens rather than an actual em dash.
Your argument about writing style does not convince me. I scanned some TMZ celebrity death articles going back a decade (before genAI would be used) and they look very similar.
In this 2019 article reporting on Rip Torn’s death, they end with “RIP, Rip”. Feels to me as a very similar level of informality. (the double hyphens, opposed to em dashes, are also used in this example)
Odd that the dash/hyphen would change, I copied and pasted both (the first directly from the article, and the second from my original post). I do think that when I write an email in Outlook it will automatically change my hypen to an em dash.
And there’s a difference in writing a tongue-in-cheek obituary for someone like Rip Torn than for Malcolm-Jamal Warner, but I will concede that it does sound like TMZ is just bad at writing obituaries.
I use em-dashes—and goddamnit I’m not gonna stop!