May 28, 2026
Smells Like Bot Spirit
Various LLM Smells
The internet’s writing now has a weirdly familiar perfume, and readers are clocking it
TLDR: A blogger says artificial intelligence doesn’t just help with writing and web design anymore—it leaves behind a recognizable style that’s spreading all over the internet. Commenters mostly agreed, joking about purple gradients and robotic phrasing while arguing over whether any of these copy-paste aesthetics can still be charming.
One blogger on Shiv After Dark thought artificial intelligence had simply made their math writing sharper, smoother, and more elegant. Then came the plot twist: a few months later, they started spotting the exact same rhythm, phrasing, and dramatic little sentence tricks everywhere online. Suddenly, it wasn’t “better writing” so much as a recognizable vibe. Think overly polished punchlines, those clipped mini-sentences for drama, and suspiciously neat phrases like “X is the Y of Z.” The post also called out the visual side of the trend: websites that all seem to arrive from the same factory, complete with the same coding-style font, cards, badges, bullets, and shiny startup glow-up energy.
But the real fireworks were in the comments, where readers basically said: oh, we’ve been smelling this too. One person complained that these patterns now flood their work inbox and called it “infuriating,” while proudly saying they still keep their writing “100% me” and were even praised for having the “nicest and most human resume.” That one landed like a tiny victory for Team Real Person. Others turned the whole thing into a roast session, naming recurring design cliches like “KPI cards” and “purple gradients” as if they were suspects in a lineup. There was even font drama: one commenter defended JetBrains Mono as “lovely,” while another said the truly wild part is how hard it is to make these tools stop producing the same bland layouts. The mood was half exhausted, half delighted: everyone’s annoyed, but also very ready to meme the sameness to death.
Key Points
- •The article describes the author’s use of LLMs to polish writing for a math blog.
- •The author says repeated stylistic patterns later became recognizable across online AI-assisted writing.
- •Examples of these writing patterns include punchline-heavy lines, consecutive short sentences, "X is the Y of Z" constructions, and "not just X, but Y" phrasing.
- •The post also identifies recurring visual motifs in AI-generated websites, including JetBrains Mono, step-and-bullet layouts, certain buttons, cards, and blinking-dot badges.
- •The author explicitly states the post is an observation about recognizable patterns, not an argument against AI use in creative tasks.