Various LLM smells

28 May, 2026

Late last year I started writing a math blog and decided to use LLMs to polish/enhance my writing. The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. It had better vocabulary, interesting sentence structures etc etc. I swear it did not seem like AI-slop to me at the time. Then about 3 months later, I see the exact sentence structures appearing ACROSS THE ENTIRE F***** INTERNET. And what is fascinating to me is that ai-smell seems like an artifact that emerges across various AI assisted tasks that you can now easily recognize. A few examples that I've collected so far to show the "ai-smells" across two domains:

1. LLM writing (beyond the obvious em-dashes):

Some picks from my math blog (now deleted) and the drafts that accompanied it

Way too many punchlines

• "Humans trust symmetry because it feels like intelligence made visible."
• "The Tiger fit the story. Jin-yong fit the physics."
• "Symmetry becomes a trap."

Consecutive short sentences

• "Yet the tilt is not an accident. It is the shape of the optimum."
• "Then AlphaEvolve arrived. It had no preference for symmetry. No aesthetic prior. No instinct to preserve harmony."
• "These examples are not decorative. They form a distributed argument."

"X is the Y of Z"

• "Cringe is the visible signature of moving along a gradient you chose."

"ist not just X, its Y"

• "solutions that do not merely satisfy the constraint but satisfy the aesthetic instincts"

2. AI generated websites

The "JetBrains Mono" font

The "step" and bullets on every webpage with this exact font:

Exactly these button

These cards

This blinking-dot in a badge component

Footnotes

• I'm not against LLM/AI usage for creative tasks. This is just me noticing things.