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Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
by protontypes 11mo ago
Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
- psunavy03 11mo agoThat says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.
- happytoexplain 11mo agoThat's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory. This article does not appear to be AI-written, but use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on keyboards. It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean they have bad writing skills or don't understand grammar, as you have implied.
- johnisgood 11mo agoPressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.
- benji-york 11mo agoI don't think the character is that uncommon in the output of slightly-sophisticated writers and is not hard to generate (e.g., on macOS pressing option-shift-minus generates an em-dash).
- Kerrick 11mo agoIn fact, on macOS and iOS simply typing two dashes (--) gets autocorrected to an em dash. I used it heavily, which was a bit sloppy since it doesn't also insert the customary hair spaces around the em dash. Incidentally, I turned this autocorrection off when people started associating em dashes with AI writing. I now leave them manual double dashes--even less correct than before, but at least people are more likely to read my writing.
- Izkata 11mo agoThat's an en dash, not an em dash. An em dash is longer and as far as I know Libreoffice doesn't have a built-in way to make one (though you may have added it to the autocorrect settings yourself). en dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2013 https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2013 em dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2014 https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2014 Edit: Ah, Libreoffice does have a built-in autocorrect for em dash, but you have to type this: :---:
- johnisgood 11mo agoThanks! I did confuse the two despite knowing of both. So ":---:" does work for the em dash? I thought something with fewer keystrokes work, too, at least I remember the em dash from less, but perhaps I just typed it so quickly I did not realize it was indeed ":---:".
- Terr_ 11mo ago> That's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory. That same critique should first be aimed at the topmost comment, which has the same problem plus the added guilt of originating (A) a false dichotomy and (B) the derogatory tone that naturally colors later replies. > It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care The text is true, but in context there's an implied fallacy: If X is "reasonable", it does not follow that Not-X is unreasonable. More than enough (reasonable) real humans do add em-dashes when they write. When it comes to a long-form blog post—like this one submitted to HN—it's even more likely than usual! > the extra keystrokes Such as alt + numpad 0150 on Windows, which has served me well when on that platform for... gosh, decades now.
- acuozzo 11mo ago> use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing Where do you think the training data came from?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- gdulli 11mo agoThat's a silly take, just because they existed and were proper grammar before AI slop popularized them doesn't mean they're not statistically likely to indicate slop today, depending on the context.
- psunavy03 11mo agoWhat's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are. It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.
- gdulli 11mo agoYou're overthinking it. LLMs exploded the prevalence of em-dashes. That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content, but it's a reasonable heuristic at the moment.
- psunavy03 11mo ago> That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content No, it doesn't. But people are putting that out there, people are getting accused of using AI because they know how to use em dashes properly, and this is dumb.
- Terr_ 11mo ago> but it's a reasonable heuristic I dunno, I feel like the base rate fallacy [0] could easily become a factor... Especially if we don't even have an idea what the false-positive or false-negative rates are yet, let alone true prevalence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
- dkersten 11mo agoIt doesn't really matter. Before LLM's, they were relatively rarely seen, after LLM's, they are commonly seen in AI-written text. Its not unreasonable for people to associate them with being AI-written.
- IncreasePosts 11mo agoReferring to an orthographic construct as grammar is not a good indication that you understand what grammar is.
- DannyPage 11mo agoThe article itself is very skeptical of AI, so I highly doubt that's the case. Also in the footer: "Everything on this website—emdash and all—is created by a human."
- amflare 11mo agoIronically, I love using em dashes in my writing, but if I ever have to AI generate an email or summary or something, I will remove it for this exact reason.
- dkersten 11mo agoI used to use them, but stopped because I feel it makes people think that I used an AI to write.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- defgeneric 11mo agoI'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.
- almosthere 11mo agoIt's comical too because the only reason AI uses emdashes is because it was so common before AI.
- kazinator 11mo agoIt's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ... AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers. It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.
- svat 11mo agoNot uncommon even on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public) posts seem to contain an em dash: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4 pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in total).
- kazinator 11mo agoI use three hyphens. In my case, I picked it up from Knuth's TeX many years ago; it's a lexical notation which typesets to a proper em dash. Three hyphens---it looks good! When I use three hyphens, it's like I dropped three fast rounds out of a magazine. It demands attention.
- protontypes 11mo agoMaybe because the em dash is not on the keyboard of most people? It is not about the dash, but about the long em dash.
- random3 11mo agoWhenever I see these takes, I'm thinking of Idiocracy - a world built on very simple rules, like yours.
- commandlinefan 11mo agoI published a book once (way before LLMs came along). My publisher insisted that I replace parenthetical inserts with em dashes. Humans do use them.