I agree. I think the point here was the self-appointed AI detectives, who will declare any writing style unfamiliar to them a product of ChatGPT. You might remember the Paul Graham "delve-gate" controversy on twitter last year. It was exactly this.
Yeah. But I will die on the hill that ChatGPT (today, at least) is a bad writer, and makes prompted writing worse in a way that isn't anything like the way schematic style or vocabulary rules might for an over-eager student.
For whatever combination of prompt and context, ChatGPT 5.2 did some writing for me the other day that didn't have any of the surface style I find so abrasive. But it could still only express its purported insights in the same "A & ~B" structure and other GPT-isms beneath the surface. Truly effective writers are adept with a much broader set of rhetorical and structural tools.
