Episode

AI loves negative parallelism

Podcast: Marketplace Tech
Published: Aug 24, 2026
Duration seconds: 542
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Canonical source: https://www.marketplace.org/episode/2026/08/24/ai-loves-negative-parallelism
Audio: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/5/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/VnCzW2iO9G8z4eDWfXCd/play.publicradio.org/podcast/o/marketplace/tech_report/2026/08/24/tech_20260824_MP_TECH_pod_128.mp3?awCollectionId=mkp-MKPtech&awEpisodeId=01M0JN2NPCMQBFAE9F05PYXMJT
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Summary

Anthropic recently announced it's adding watermarks to all text outputted by its chatbot Claude. But often, you don't need fancy detection software to know; you just need to look for language that gets repeated over and over by AI chatbots, like “it's not X, it's Y.” That's a rhetorical structure referred to as negative parallelism. And it's the topic for today's “Uncanny AI,” those times when it becomes clear AI doesn't think like us. Will Oremus recently wrote about this AI tic for The Atlantic. More on this “ The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious ” from The Atlantic “ Move Over Em-Dash, There’s a New AI Tell in Town ” from Ai-Ai-OH