'It's sweet. It's bitter. It's ours.' The chocolate ritual that binds my family(csmonitor.com)
csmonitor.com
'It's sweet. It's bitter. It's ours.' The chocolate ritual that binds my family
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Home-Forum/2026/0212/chocolate-valentines-day-love
6 comments
There's something distressing about this being AI-generated, given the subject matter.
What makes you think it's AI-generated? My parents have been reading the monitor for decades. The paper always struck me as trustworthy and even-keeled. This is exactly the sort of article they've been publishing in "home forum" for as long as I can remember.
I think sometimes people forget that LLMs were trained on text that actual people wrote.
https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... I keep coming back to this.
Probably the handful of dashes (not even em dashes!) and the sentences "It was never just about the candy. It was about being together." Superficially these look like the AI markers people are always calling out, but only superficially.
I didn't notice the dashes, and I thought that construction was actually fine. I first noticed whatever I'm noticing at the passage:
> It was never just about the candy. It was about being together.
And then, a subsequent paragraph ends:
> But the ritual remained.
I'll allow "Grandpa’s chocolate was something else entirely. It was sacred." because (while it fits the pattern) it actually works; but we see the same pattern again later:
> It’s sweet. It’s bitter. It’s ours.
I'll give the benefit of the doubt for the overall structure of the narrative, too, because maybe the author's picked up (or, heck, perhaps pioneered) the traditional Facebook Anecdote Genre. I'll even give a pass for the style, because it resembles the writing style of https://www.csmonitor.com/1996/0502/050296.home.home.1.html – if somewhat less skilful. But those parts I've identified as least skilful are also those parts I've identified as most AI-like.
Now look at when Nancy Intrator contributed to the Christian Science Monitor: 1994–1997. Sure, it's plausible that she's contributing again after a long haitus (and the facts of the story back this up)… but we've got a lot of "plausible"s adding up.
You mentioned the en-dashes (which I don't treat as an AI indicator; I use them myself, even!). Nancy's 90s writing did use dashes, but much less frequently: https://www.csmonitor.com/1994/1228/28172.html has 4 dashes in a much longer piece (all spaced ASCII, but we can chalk that difference up to software), whereas TFA has 11! (https://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0329/29161.html has no dashes at all, but it's a slightly different genre of anecdote, so I'll ignore that as an outlier.)
If I had to guess, I would say that there was a shorter draft written by the real Nancy Intrator (or someone pretending to be her, but probably the real Nancy), which was then expanded by a generative AI system. The additional research I've done for this comment has not changed my guess.
> It was never just about the candy. It was about being together.
And then, a subsequent paragraph ends:
> But the ritual remained.
I'll allow "Grandpa’s chocolate was something else entirely. It was sacred." because (while it fits the pattern) it actually works; but we see the same pattern again later:
> It’s sweet. It’s bitter. It’s ours.
I'll give the benefit of the doubt for the overall structure of the narrative, too, because maybe the author's picked up (or, heck, perhaps pioneered) the traditional Facebook Anecdote Genre. I'll even give a pass for the style, because it resembles the writing style of https://www.csmonitor.com/1996/0502/050296.home.home.1.html – if somewhat less skilful. But those parts I've identified as least skilful are also those parts I've identified as most AI-like.
Now look at when Nancy Intrator contributed to the Christian Science Monitor: 1994–1997. Sure, it's plausible that she's contributing again after a long haitus (and the facts of the story back this up)… but we've got a lot of "plausible"s adding up.
You mentioned the en-dashes (which I don't treat as an AI indicator; I use them myself, even!). Nancy's 90s writing did use dashes, but much less frequently: https://www.csmonitor.com/1994/1228/28172.html has 4 dashes in a much longer piece (all spaced ASCII, but we can chalk that difference up to software), whereas TFA has 11! (https://www.csmonitor.com/1995/0329/29161.html has no dashes at all, but it's a slightly different genre of anecdote, so I'll ignore that as an outlier.)
If I had to guess, I would say that there was a shorter draft written by the real Nancy Intrator (or someone pretending to be her, but probably the real Nancy), which was then expanded by a generative AI system. The additional research I've done for this comment has not changed my guess.