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:

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"

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.