"If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI."

"A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' In Act III, Scene ii: 'Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.' And later in that same scene: 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.' These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place...."

Writes Will Oremus, in "The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious/Why chatbots love 'it’s not X, it’s Y'" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one. When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two...."