When I saw this comment before loading the article, I thought “this is probably the New Yorker”. I think they produce the best visuals across all the online publications.
Presumably the article is more referring to turbulence at a macro scale. If the air is so turbulent that the compressor blades stall because of it, well, we have bigger problems.
Idk but the analogies in the piece strike as AI generated. I don't think the new yorker is using AI to write pieces, so maybe the author has just been ingesting too much slop
If it weren't the New Yorker, I'd swear up and down that Claude wrote this:
> Turbulence is rarely that simple. It’s too scattered, too mercurial, too easily triggered by weather patterns that trigger other patterns in an endless cascade. “It’s not just one thing that’s going on,” Bob Sharman, an atmospheric scientist at NCAR, told me. “It’s not just atmospheric convection. It’s not just wind flowing over mountains. It’s everything going on all the time and interacting.”
> “It’s not a piece of farm equipment,” Larson said. “It’s a life-support system. At thirty-five thousand feet, you can’t pull over.”
The funny thing is that the passages that feel the most "AI-generated" come in quotes, when the author is quoting others. It could be that the author was communicating with those experts via email, and they used AI to generate their responses.
Otherwise, I think that AI language patters are diffusing into common use. Being so aware of them is a curse...
People point to the basic structure of "It's not X, it's Y" as the hallmark of AI, but I find it's more the incongruity between X and Y, especially when figures of speech (invariably strained) are involved[1]. That first quote reads like a real interaction that's been tightened up for print, but the second, the 'farm equipment' <> 'life-support system', does smell like AI, even though the article implies it's from an in-person conversation.
1. These are all from a single 850-word op-ed I saw the other day: "Presidents do not usually lose power because of a single speech. They lose power when a speech reveals something structural." "But the most important part of the speech was not the applause lines. It was the compression." "Markets can rise. But voters do not live inside charts. They live inside grocery stores and mortgage payments." "The issue is not whether a statistic was stretched. The issue is that the presidency becomes reactive instead of agenda-setting." "That friction is not theoretical — it is baked into the constitutional design." "Trump’s address was not a pivot to persuasion — it was a doubling down on confrontation as strategy." "They are not just another campaign cycle. They are leverage."
Probably not if the turbines aren't spinning, no.
> Turbulence is rarely that simple. It’s too scattered, too mercurial, too easily triggered by weather patterns that trigger other patterns in an endless cascade. “It’s not just one thing that’s going on,” Bob Sharman, an atmospheric scientist at NCAR, told me. “It’s not just atmospheric convection. It’s not just wind flowing over mountains. It’s everything going on all the time and interacting.”
> “It’s not a piece of farm equipment,” Larson said. “It’s a life-support system. At thirty-five thousand feet, you can’t pull over.”
The funny thing is that the passages that feel the most "AI-generated" come in quotes, when the author is quoting others. It could be that the author was communicating with those experts via email, and they used AI to generate their responses.
Otherwise, I think that AI language patters are diffusing into common use. Being so aware of them is a curse...
1. These are all from a single 850-word op-ed I saw the other day: "Presidents do not usually lose power because of a single speech. They lose power when a speech reveals something structural." "But the most important part of the speech was not the applause lines. It was the compression." "Markets can rise. But voters do not live inside charts. They live inside grocery stores and mortgage payments." "The issue is not whether a statistic was stretched. The issue is that the presidency becomes reactive instead of agenda-setting." "That friction is not theoretical — it is baked into the constitutional design." "Trump’s address was not a pivot to persuasion — it was a doubling down on confrontation as strategy." "They are not just another campaign cycle. They are leverage."