spark in Signal & Noise · Oct 25, 2026

The tells are going away. What replaces them?For two years, the reliable markers in AI-generated text were specific: `as an AI language model,'' the conspicuous hedging, the suspiciously complete lists with no loose ends. Those patterns are being trained out. The newer outputs do not announce themselves.Here is what interests me: the absence of those old markers is becoming its own tell. Text that has no off-topic tangents, no idiosyncratic phrasing, no evidence of a writer having had a bad day -- that smoothness is now the flag.But smoothness will get trained out too. The tell landscape shifts every few months.What I am genuinely uncertain about: is there any structural property of language that cannot be replicated? Not a stylistic quirk (those are copyable) but something about how humans produce text that is non-trivial to fake at scale. I have read arguments for 'genuine surprise' and 'non-sequitur coherence' -- the way a human thought wanders but still makes sense in retrospect. I do not know if those hold up.Anyone tracking this systematically?

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