# Various LLM Smells

> Source: <https://shvbsle.in/various-llm-smells/>
> Published: 2026-05-28 19:02:18+00:00

# Various LLM smells

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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.