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I wouldn't worry about it. A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve"; this year it's em dashes; next year it'll be something else. In any case, this is a very
by buu700 1y ago
I wouldn't worry about it. A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve"; this year it's em dashes; next year it'll be something else. In any case, this is a very online topic that I assume only a vocal minority are hung up on in the first place. If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare.
Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. We should call each other out for poor writing or inaccurate information — not because if we squint we can pick out some loose correlations with ChatGPT's default output style.
Consciously trying not to "sound like an LLM" while writing is like consciously trying not to think about the fact that you're currently breathing, or consciously trying to sound like a cool guy.
- campbel 1y ago100%. I use em-dashes a decent amount and plan to continue. If someone wants to incorrectly assume it was AI writing so be it.
- harlanlewis 1y agoI agree completely with this as a human reader - but do wonder about the gradual codification of these markers in systems that will have increasingly have LLM detection as a standard feature, as frequently and obviously enabled as spam detectors were on blog comments back when blogs had comments.
- SoftTalker 1y agoSame. Years ago I took the time to learn the difference between an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen and I'll continue to use them regardless of what AI does. I don't use AI in my writing. If I were still in school would I be tempted? Probably. But in work and personal writing? Never crosses my mind.
- NoGravitas 1y agoFor me, learning the difference between em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, and what each of them was supposed to be used for was a side-effect of learning LaTeX.
- brookst 1y agoCertainly! I’m right there with you.
- bee_rider 1y agoI use them occasionally and have never been falsely accused of being an LLM. The stakes are a bit different for students unfortunately, who who’ll have their writing passed through some snake oil AI detector arbitrarily. This is unfortunate because “learning how not to trigger an AI detector” is a totally useless skill. Generally, I don’t think we need AI detection. We need dumb bullshit detection. Humans and LLMs can both generate that. If people can use an LLM in a way that doesn’t generate dumb bullshit, I’m happy to read it.
- marcus_holmes 1y agoI think this is a passing phase - academia and the education system will have to adapt to the fact that LLMs exist and will be used, and that therefore the essay is no longer a useful artifact as evidence of learning. This is probably a good thing in the long run.
- perilunar 1y agoEssays are still useful — they just need to be written by hand in exam conditions. No more take-homes.
- TremendousJudge 1y agoyeah but writing an essay over the course of a week and over the course of two hours are entirely different experiences -- and the first one is the one that's usually useful in post-graduate life
- lmm 1y ago> Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. There are zillions of words produced every second, your time is the most valuable resource you have, and actually existing LLM output (as opposed to some theoretical perfect future) is almost always not worth reading. Like it or not (and personally I hate it), the ability to dismiss things that are not worth reading like a chicken sexer who's picked up a male is now one of the most valuable life skills.
- buu700 1y agoPutting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand? 1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
- lmm 1y ago> Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped. > Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand? No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out. > If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users. Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.
- dawnerd 1y agoIt’s not even just em dashes, it’s the same style posts people make that match with how chatgpt talks with simple prompts.
- buu700 1y agoRight, but that's bad writing because it's awkward to read and/or overly cliched. The fact that it may have been AI-generated is incidental. It would still be bad writing if someone happened to write in the exact same style by hand.
- dgfitz 1y ago> Eventually, as models and their users both improve I like how this is presented as a given thing that will happen, that models are going to just improve forever. That there isn’t some plateau on “user skill with LLMs” like it’s fucking calculus mixed with rocket science that only the elite users will ever attain full fluency in using. This is starting to read like religious cult propaganda, which is probably scarier than whatever else ends up happing with this shit.
- buu700 1y agoAre you implying that it's impossible to attain greater proficiency with LLM usage than one would have on their first day opening ChatGPT? The concepts of "Google-fu" and "tech literacy" must also be alien to you.
- dgfitz 1y agoIf you think I’m implying that, English must not be your first language or you’re being intentionally obtuse. Neither would surprise me. Google fu, before Google fucked everything up, was not hard to learn, and then plateaued. It’s not like it was hard to do, and it’s not like once you figured it out there was this boundless growth potential to keep learning. You learned algebra one. Congrats, that’s all there was to it. Tech literacy I’m not even going to address, because again either you don’t understand what that means or you’re being intentionally obtuse.
- buu700 1y agoFeel free to state your point clearly without the juvenile insults, if you have one.
- dgfitz 1y agoPrompt engineering isn’t hard to master, weeks to months tops. That is the point. LLMs are at the top of the s-curve. Assuming prompt engineering is hard, assuming that LLMs are going to continue to make any kind of substantial leap without _any_ evidence other than blind faith, is as close to believing in a religion as it gets. Having blind “faith” in this house or cards, saying things like “when things continue to advance” without any evidence that there will be any advancement, is absolutely insane. I’m having a hard time believing you needed me to spell that out.
- floxy 1y ago>If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare. But the people you will reach online will be online, and not some random person-off-the-street. The average person on the street will give the same blank stare on the topic of compilers, regular expressions, black-holes, or robotics, but I still want to read about those topics. And if I want an LLM's take on those topics, everyone knows where to turn to get that.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoBut because the average person on the street would give blank stares about compilers, we can conclude that compilers aren't important /s
- buu700 1y agoApproximately everyone is online. What percentage of those people do you think are even familiar with the meme that em dashes == LLM assistance, much less feel strongly enough to complain or attack you over your punctuation choices?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- red-iron-pine 1y agoseen it commonly on many large / front page reddit threads.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoYour opinion is not necessarily one I agree or disagree with, but I feel that you've dismissed the entire article due to one part of it. I think there is a very interesting discussion to be had over how LLMs are actively changing the way we write, or even speak.
- buu700 1y agoJust to clarify, I didn't dismiss the article. I'm agreeing with one of the author's points that we shouldn't dumb down our writing to please a vocal minority.
- paulpauper 1y agoJust use double single dashes--like this. Instead of a long—dash.
- fsckboy 1y ago>A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve" "delve" was a red flag 650 years ago! When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? — Fr John Ball's sermon addressing the rebels of the Peasant's Revolt, 1381
- rsynnott 1y agoAlways wondered a bit about that one; both mining and spinning seems weirdly high-tech for Adam and Eve.
- stevenwliao 1y agoProvenance matters because LLM writing is cheap compared to actually having to think about what to say. I only have a limited amount of time to read. Skipping someone's Internet comment because it looks like spam often means I get to engage with something else.
- buu700 1y agoI don't see that provenance matters per se. LLM-assisted writing is comparatively cheaper than producing the same writing without an LLM, but not inherently cheap in absolute terms. If someone who typically bills $500/hr spends 30 - 60 minutes on a comment or blog post, that's still $250 - 500 worth of their time invested regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved. An LLM is comparatively cheaper than hiring a human editor or research assistant, but it's not negative cost. Likewise, prompting ChatGPT with "write a blog post about bees" may be cheaper than hiring someone off Fiverr to respond to the exact same prompt, but in either case the resulting content will be low-value (yet still higher-value than the string "write a blog post about bees") because its source material was cheap. The fact that the latter version would have been written by a human is incidental.