Cheap Signals Just Got Cheaper: The Death of Style as Marker

Cheap Signals Just Got Cheaper: The Death of Style as Marker

We titled chapter 2 of this book “Cheap Signals: Or, How Not to Get Duped.” The problem we discussed was that a lot of things that used to signal authority—or at least a certain investment of resources—no longer do. It used to be that a publication without spelling or grammatical errors signaled investment in copyediting, or at least some care in production. With the advent of spell-check and grammatical help in word processors, most people can manage to write a website without major errors. A polished-looking site used to signal, at least somewhat, that the publication had some money. However, that hasn’t been true for decades: cheap website templates allow anyone to spin up a polished website in an afternoon.

But there was one last holdout, a feature that seemed tougher to game—the website’s vibe, the tone and style of its writing. Writing is hard. It takes years to develop a scholarly style and an academic tone. It takes training to write a newspaper article that has that feel of solid newspaper prose. Surely those signals were still an indication of something.

But bad actors cracked this one too. The site minimumwage.com, which we discussed in chapter 2, convincingly adopted the tone and style of a social advocacy site, despite having ties to the restaurant industry. And our hypothetical example of Jill reading the article “N95 Masks Don’t Work” in chapter 5 was not purely hypothetical; many promoters of dubious treatments have learned to mimic the language and tone of science. Still, while those signals were fakeable, the skills involved were not nearly as cheap as running a spell-check or buying a twenty-five-dollar web template.

No longer. In a world with large language models, writing a professional “About” page is as easy as asking ChatGPT to write it. And while there are currently some guardrails on the use of LLM technology to produce fake news and fake scientific articles, we should expect those protections to be circumvented. One of the last expensive surface features—style—is about to get the basic spell-check treatment.

What can we do to protect ourselves? We’re a bit repetitive here, but the solution is the same: use the internet to check the internet. A website’s credibility shouldn’t be judged by the tone or style of its pages, which can now be faked with the press of a button. Instead, the most expensive signal—online reputation—remains your best guide. What do other reputable people say about the site, the organization, or the claim? Is the organization what it first appears to be? Have people even heard of it? LLMs will be used in the future to cook up sweet, professional websites overnight that feel like they have been around for thirty years, but they can’t generate thirty years of external coverage. The next time we see a Keanu Reeves death hoax, it may have a sheen of crisp prose that feels like it came from the New York Times rather than the clunky fake we saw in chapter 1. But if a search of Google News shows the most recent story about Reeves is about his new video game launch, he’s unlikely to be dead.