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That is indeed an LLM-written sentence — not only does it employ an em dash, but also lists objects in a series — twice within the same sentence — typical LLM b
by standardly 1y ago
That is indeed an LLM-written sentence — not only does it employ an em dash, but also lists objects in a series — twice within the same sentence — typical LLM behavior that renders its output conspicuous, obvious, and readily apparent to HN readers.
- drekipus 1y agoAm I the only one who picks this as LLM output too?
- anonymous908213 1y agoThe poster is using the LLMisms they're calling out in the process of calling them out, for the purpose of irony.
- kcatskcolbdi 1y agothanks, I hate it.
- Jackson__ 1y agoLLM slop is not just bad—it's degrading our natural language.
- itsnowandnever 1y agowhy do they always say "not only" or "it isn't just x but also y and z"? I hated that disingenuous verbosity BEFORE these LLMs out and now it'll all over the place. I saw a post on linked in that was literally just like 10+ statements of "X isn't just Y, it's etc..." and thought I was having a stroke
- Starlevel004 1y agoGPT loves lists and that's a variant of a list
- wizzwizz4 1y agoLists have a simpler grammatical structure than most parts of a sentence. Semantic similarity makes them easy to generate, even if you pad the grammar with filler. And, thanks to Western rhetoric, they nearly always come in threes: this makes them easy to predict!
- moritzwarhier 1y agoIt's not just a shift of writing style. It symbolizes the dangerous entrapment of a feedback loop that feeds the worst parts of human culture back into itself. scnr
- heavyset_go 1y agoThey're turns of phrase I see a lot in opinion articles and the like. The purpose is to take a popular framing and reframe it along the lines of the author's own ideas. LLMs fundamentally don't get the human reasons behind its use, see it a lot because it's effective writing, and regurgitate it robotically.
- turtletontine 1y agoI think this article has already made the rounds here, but I still think about it. I love using em dashes! It really makes me sad that I need to avoid them now to sound human https://bassi.li/articles/i-miss-using-em-dashes https://bassi.li/articles/i-miss-using-em-dashes
- janderson215 1y agoThe em dash usage conundrum is likely temporary. If I were you, I’d continue using them however you previously used them and someday soon, you’ll be ignored the same way everybody else is once AI mimics innumerable punctuation and grammatical patterns.
- astrange 1y agoThey didn't always em-dash. I expect it's intentional as a watermark. Other buzzwords you can spot are "wild" and "vibes".
- whitten 1y agoSo if the vibes are wild, I’m not a hippie but an AI ? Cool. Is that an upgrade or &endash; or not ?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 1y agoIf they wanted to watermark (I always felt it is irresponsible not to, if someone wants to circumvent it that's on them) - they could use strategically placed whitespace characters like zero-width spaces, maybe spelling something out in Morse code the way genius.com did to catch google crawling lyric (I believe in that case it was left and right handed aposterofes)
- landdate 1y ago
- veber-alex 1y agohehe, I see what you did there.
- djmips 1y agoit is amusing to use AI to write that...
- AlecSchueler 1y agoDon't forget the "it's not just X, it's Y" formulation and the rule of 3.
- antegamisou 1y agoMore signs of AI Writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoCan we back this into the internet communities or corpuses of human work that excessively used these phrases? The "it's not just X" seems copy pasted from SEO marketing copy. But some of the others are less obvious.
- hunter-gatherer 1y agoLol. This is brilliant. I'm not sure if anyone else has this happen to them, but I noticed in college my writing style and "voice" woukd shift quite noticeably depending on whatever I was reading heavily. I wonder if I'll start writing more like an LLM naturally as I unavoidably read more LLM-generated content.
- actionfromafar 1y agoYes. It’s already shifting spoken language.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoI've always read AI messages in this voice/style [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiqkclCJsZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiqkclCJsZs.
- wholinator2 1y agoEveryone I've spoken to about that phenomena agrees that it happens to them. Whatever we are reading at the time, it reformats our language processing to change writing and, I found, even the way i speak. I suspect that individuals consistently exposed to and reading LLM output will be talking like them soon.
- 0xFEE1DEAD 1y agoApparently, they already do https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
- antegamisou 1y agoOmg you mean everyone's becoming an insufferable Redditor?
- 1y ago
- b33j0r 1y agoI talked like that before this happened, and now I just feel like my diction has been maligned :p I think it’s because I was a pretty sheltered kid who got A’s in AP english. The style we’re calling “obviously AI” is most like William Faulkner and other turn-of-the-20th-century writing, that bloggers and texters stopped using.
- mikeiz404 1y agoAh now that's the kind of authentically human response I was hoping for! (It's a joke: The parent uses the same writing style they described as being indicative of LLMs)
- vardump 1y agoDamn, I've used em dash often — do I have to stop using it? Sigh. Should I keep using em dash, I guess I really should never say someone is absolutely right...
- kragen 1y agoI've been doing that for decades. See for example https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg00009.html https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg000...: > Many programming languages provide an exception facility that terminates subroutines without warning; although they usually provide a way to run cleanup code during the propagation of the exception (finally in Java and Python, unwind-protect in Common Lisp, dynamic-wind in Scheme, local variable destructors in C++), this facility tends to have problems of its own --- if cleanup code run from it raises an exception, one exception or the other, or both, will be lost, and the rest of the cleanup code at that level will fail to run. I wasn't using Unicode em dashes at the time but TeX em dashes, but I did switch pretty early on. You can easily find human writers employing em dashes and comma-separated lists over several centuries.
- _AzMoo 1y agoWhich is exactly why LLMs use these techniques so often. They're very common.
- kragen 1y agoWell, em dashes are not all that common in text that people have written on computers, because em dashes were left out of ASCII. They're common in high-quality text like Wikipedia, academic papers, and published books. My guess is that comma-separated lists tend to be a feature of text that is attempting to be either comprehensively expository—listing all the possibilities, all the relevant factors, etc.—or persuasive—listing a compelling set of examples or other supporting arguments so that at least one of them is likely to convince the reader.
- danielhughes 1y agoI was surprised to learn from your comment that em dashes were left out of ASCII, because I thought I've been using them extensively in my writing. Perhaps I'm just relying heavily on the hyphen key. I mention that because it's likely instances of true em dash use (e.g. in the high-quality text you cite) and hyphen usage by people like me are close enough together in a vector space that the general pattern of a little horizontal line in the middle of a sentence is perceived as a common writing style by the LLMs. I find myself constantly editing my natural writing style to sound less like an AI so this discussion of em dash use is a sore spot. Personally I think many people overrate their ability to recognize AI-generated copy without a good feedback loop of their own false positives (or false negatives for that matter).
- captainclam 1y agolol
- rhubarbtree 1y agoI know you’re tongue in cheek here, but even posting stuff like this just decreases the SNR and can encourage others to post slop.
- Psyonic 1y agowell played