People are reaching pretty hard if they don't see what we're dealing with here.

Most of these owners aren't doing anything particular to preserve them, they're stacked up with 10,000 other TV Guides in a hoarder's moldy basement. Anyone interested in keeping October 1994's TV Guide pristine has had over 30 years to procure and protect their copy.

These particular buyers are converting their copy to a digital one that's getting some kind of use, which is better than the fate of 99.9% of the other copies.

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That creates a feedback loop:

- Playful style is rewarded

- Some rewarded examples contain a distinctive lexical tic.

- The tic appears more often in rollouts.

- Model-generated rollouts are used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT).

- The model gets even more comfortable producing the tic.

Tortured and near-miss metaphors are another thing it likes and it's loaded here. "groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat" sounds cool but then you think, do drum skins "groan"? And what does heat have to do with it? Or "breath of hills holding their heat like a secret", are they holding the heat or breathing it? At least for me there's the tendency to at first feel like I'm reading something really clever, words that are really tuned and carefully chosen, and then to start feeling like I've been pranked.

Ultimately I don't think there's any way to really be sure though, whether it's AI or just a human but annoying style. This doesn't really read as what GPT would typically drop from a basic writing prompt though, I would guess it's heavily prompted on style or reworked repeatedly.

FWIW though I experiment quite a bit with AI writing for fun, and I think Opus writes pretty nicely in its default voice (prompted mostly for content with little guidance about "how" to write). I'm an engineer so I don't know if real literary connoisseurs would see the slop right through this, but it's coherent, well paced, a little heavy on similes and metaphors but they land unlike the linked passage. Just a sample:

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Off the port quarter, the darkness lights up orange in a rolling line, gun by gun, and the sound arrives a full second behind the light.

Broadside.

Most of it goes over — a ripping, tearing sound in the air above, like heavy cloth torn by God. Two don’t. One takes the bulwark forward and turns eight feet of oak into a spray of splinters a foot long. One goes into the hull at the waterline abaft the fore chains with a sound you feel through your boot soles, and the sugar barrels in the hold scream as they shift.

A man is down by the foremast, shrieking, and another is not shrieking, and Homer is already running toward both with his hands out.

And Micheal is still aloft.

He’s on the fore topmast crosstrees with the stay gone under him, forty feet up, hanging off a spar that is swinging in a fifteen-degree arc and thumping the mast each time it comes back. You can hear him from the deck. Not screaming. Talking — fast, high, unbroken, reciting the rules to himself. "Touch wood don’t whistle don’t whistle spit to leeward—"

I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.

They're not human. They really can't help it.

Even then, huge swaths of the web were people putting up their personal pages, blogs about their interests, pages for their church or club or hobby, etc etc. Sites like Geocities ran dumb ads on the pages to provide the hosting service, not so every single kid with an animated gif on the page could get rich.

Early advertising was primitive by today's standards, the amount of tracking and spying we consider normal now would have been an outrage and would have gotten those companies regulated into bankruptcy if they'd tried it in the 90s.

TLDR no, just no. The early internet was nothing like the garbage we have now.