As someone who neither uses any sort of text-generating software, nor voluntarily interacts with any texts made that way…. I am largely oblivious to what is currently considered an “AI tell” in written or spoken language

(I’m aware of the outrageous suspicion of em dashes and semicolons, but not much more)

Therefore, I was extremely confused for quite a while into the Hank Green scandal thing… since I had no idea that the phrase “I appreciate the pushback” reads like AI to people.

to me, it reads like manager-speak. Like a thing that a manager would say to try and be diplomatic when getting criticism.

Which, yes, has existed since long before LLMs. I have definitely heard similar from my managers going back to 2020 and earlier.

But it is generated by a very similar process.

Many managers, in my experience, don’t actually listen to anything people say. They just train themselves on “which meaningless buzzwords to use” through the pure positive reinforcement of babbling until their nonsense gets some kind of positive response. Same as a LLM.

That phrase is not nearly the worst example of manager speak, though. It has a meaning, albeit untrue, and it occurs in response to correctly recognizing that someone is trying to give criticism.

The most “managerial” thing about it is that it’s always followed by “but,” and then a reiteration of whatever statement triggered the criticism, paraphrased just enough to make it clear that the criticism had absolutely no effect on the manager’s opinion or future decisions. The diplomacy is entirely fake. The pushback is not appreciated or even heard, really.

“AI tells” are things real people say, because that’s how the LLM works.

Some of them are commonly used because they’re good. Others are commonly used because they’re…. the habits of financially successful people.

Sigh.