Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?

Yes.

Where did that trend start? Who writes like that, with emoji bullet points? I'm seeing it around, but surely nobody looks at that and says "yeah that's good"?

Around 2020, I think tools like Notion (notion.so) made it popular. Even the Huggingface itself is an emoji...

I remember when someone registered (poopemoji).la

https://xn--ls8h.la/

It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.

>but not in a firefox address bar.

That is by design (on Firefox's part) to avoid someone registering e.g. steаmpowered.com (notice а as U+0430 instead of a as U+61) and running a scam that looks valid on the address bar.

Yes absolutely to avoid phishing sites with idn homograph, homoglyph attacks. Personally I'd like to see the punycode first then the emoji

LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.

But that means it had to be a trend already to be overrepresented in the training corpus, right? Or was it just something the RLHF evaluators got a kick out of...

It was common before but the LLMs took it to the extreme. They seemed to have mostly fine tuned it though. Page copy definitely smells like ai

I've really seen it a lot in Discord channels that have [emoji]channelname Occasionally in some channels lists may be bullets with emojis particularly the welcome/rules, usually to match reaction emojis, or to automate channel(s) selection (click on the youtube icon to get notified when a youtube vid is posted, etc.)

ChatGPT was the first place to really do it to this extent

Look inward at our infantile and excessively positive industry. We are just trying to have fun! Do you hate fun?

Likely em units and missing closing tags.