Jeff Johnson:

These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of every reviewer was a first name followed by an initial for the last name. If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. In most cases, the name on App Store user reviews is a uniquely chosen username, with no space character, often suffixed by a number.

The final and most conclusive evidence that these reviews are fake, totally invented out of thin air by the developer (or more likely, by an LLM), is that the dates on the reviews, such as “Mar 12,” predate the release of TabControl Extension in the App Store!

God only knows what this obvious AI slop scam is doing with the data from users’ Safari tabs. It’s currently the 12th or 13th most popular Safari extension in the App Store.

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.

Basic Apple Guy:

Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.

This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift link is vexing you):

You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive and familiar. The Economist turned to prose that we’re sure is human and that readers will recognise: our own. We designed a study to ask top LLMs — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok — to write versions of our articles without consulting the web. (As a prompt, we gave them the AI-generated summaries that we have experimentally added to some of our articles.)

This gave us a corpus of human and AI creations and we compared them across 55,940 sentences and 1.2m words. To make sure we were detecting AI quirks rather than our own, we also checked the AI texts against journalism from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Excerpts from hit novels published between 1950 and 2022 offered another test.

Our findings are surprising. AI prose is distinguishable by word and punctuation choice as well as sentence and paragraph structure. But its hallmarks are not what you might expect, partly because its writing style has changed with software updates. That does not mean that LLMs are great writers: their prose lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic. So those aspiring to be impressive (human) storytellers should avoid the following peculiarities in their own prose.

On point for today.

Some specific findings:

Much of this language could be described as what George Orwell called “pretentious diction”. He railed against writers who “dress up simple statements” with complicated words and jargon to sound clever. Such pontificating penmen, Orwell observed, also believe that “Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones”. (Bots agree: more Latinate suffixes crop up in their writing than in human texts.)

Then look at punctuation. Many believe LLMs stuff their prose with em-dashes, but that is not true after the most recent updates. Today only Claude uses more em-dashes than human writers, with ChatGPT using markedly fewer than any other writer in our study. Humans rejoice — and start using dashes again.

A better way to spot AI-generated writing would be to look for texts without much punctuation at all. LLMs are very Joycean about it: they use fewer commas and semicolons than humans (and hardly any parentheses). They use less punctuation in part because they write longer sentences — “and” is their most overused word — and in part because they do not quote experts.