Easy Sunday: "And here's the surprisig part."

Would someone please train large language model artificial intelligence to stop using the same tiresome device?

"Hey! Wake up! Here comes the point."

You have read it. You have heard it in scripts for TikTok, Reels, Instagram, YouTube Shorts. 

--  "Here's why that matters."

--  "But here's the kicker."

--  "Here's what nobody expected."

-- "The result?"

--  "But here's the thing."

--  "But it turns out that what is really important was what no one noticed."

Those are AI giveaways and I see them several times a day. So is the "em-dash," although I have sometimes used an em-dash instead of commas to set off appositive phrases for the 11 years that I have been writing this blog. 

I don't use artificial intelligence to write blog posts, so readers will find fewer examples of the "look-at-this" device in these posts. Since I tend to "write long," and then cut about a third of what I wrote before I push the "Publish" button, those phrases usually get cut.

I think AI offers bullshit in opinion journalism. It creates the equivalent of empty calories. Vague words gloss over knowledge gaps. It is a conflict-avoider in a realm where facts and opinion conflict, and the edges of agreement and disagreement are the point. For example, if I wanted AI's help to describe U.S. policy on Israel, it might say;

Under Biden, America's forward-facing, qualified and guarded support for Israel's military engagement with Gaza contrasts with Trump's more-robust stance, although Trump was restrained by policy constraints imposed by an increasingly-restless public.

I believe the sentence above is  accurate, but every descriptive word is unfalsifiable. Forward-facing, guarded, more-robust, restrained, constraints, and increasingly-restless are words that likely conform to what a well-informed person could agree with, but that person would be filling in the blanks from his or her own existing knowledge base, thinking "Yeah, that is sort-of right." The sentence fills up space; it doesn't inform. It did not require the purported author to state a position about either fact or policy. If I were to write that way, why bother?

So here's the thing: I expect to keep writing the old fashioned, do-it-yourself way.

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