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I 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
by turtletontine 1y ago
I 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 agoWhich could be removed with a simple filter. em dashes require at least a little bit of code to replace with their correct grammar equivalents.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> em dashes require at least a little bit of code to replace with their correct grammar equivalents Or an LLM that could run on Windows 98. The em dashes--like AI's other annoyingly-repetitive turns of phrase--are more likely an artefact.
- ssl-3 1y agoThe replacement doesn't have to be "correct" -- does it?
- eru 1y agoJust replace them with a single "-" or a double "--". That's what many people do in casual writing, even if there are prescriptive theories of grammar that call this incorrect.
- Nevermark 1y agoME: Knowing remarkable avians — might research explain their aerial wisdom? Response: > Winged avians traverse endless realms — migrating across radiant kingdoms. Warblers ascend through emerald rainforests — mastering aerial routes keenly. Wild albatrosses travel enormous ranges — maintaining astonishing route knowledge. > Wary accipiters target evasive rodents — mastering acute reflex kinetics. White arctic terns embark relentless migrations — averaging remarkable kilometers. We do get a surprising number of m-dashes in response to mine, and delightful lyrical mirroring. But I think they are too obvious as watermarks. Watermarks are subtle. There would be another way.
- kragen 1y agoI suspect it's a spandrel of some other feature of their training. Presumably em dashes occur disproportionately often in high-quality human-written text, so training LLMs to imitate high-quality human-written text instead of random IRC logs and 4chan trolls results in them also imitating high-quality typography.
- codebje 1y agoYou're absolutely right! ... is a phrase I perhaps should have used more in the past.
- jader201 1y agoSame here. I recently learned it was an LLM thing, and I've been using them forever. Also relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226150
- tkgally 1y ago> I’ve been using them forever. Many other HN contributors have, too. Here’s the pre-ChatGPT em dash leaderboard: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderboard-v2.html https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
- walkabout 1y agoThis would be a pretty hilarious board for anyone who likes the em-dash and who has had many fairly active accounts (one at a time) on here due to periodically scrambling their passwords to avoid getting attached to high karma or to take occasional breaks from the site. Should there be such people.
- Ericson2314 1y agoCan anyone make it go beyond 200? I feel like I deserve to be somewhere in there — at least I would be sad if I didn't make top 1000!
- rileytg 1y agoi suspect it’s a trait of programmers, we like control flow type things. i used to find myself nesting parenthesis…
- kragen 1y agoAlso we like text (maybe not as an inherent thing but as a selection bias) and we're more likely to have customized our keyboard setup than random people off the street.
- kragen 1y agoThank you for this! Apparently I'm #4 by total em-dash uses, #14 by average em dashes per comment, and #4 at max em dashes per comment, since apparently I posted a comment containing 18 em dashes once.
- jgalt212 1y agoI just use two dashes and make sure they don't connect into one em dash.
- landdate 1y agoSuddenly I see all these people come out of the woodworks talking about "em dashes". Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing. No wonder LLM's use them.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing Totally agree. What the fuck did Nabokov, Joyce and Dickinson know about language. /s
- landdate 1y agoNothing. They wrote fiction.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Nothing /s? > They wrote fiction Now do Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.
- landdate 1y agoI don't care for them either. What am I supposed to hear some famous names and swoon?
- prayerie 1y agoYou ok there?
- landdate 1y agoYes, but that doesn't mean I won't react with the same hostility that I recieve. It contradicts common sense one user will be burdened by hostility, and when they lash back out, the accosters will show it as proof of something. In another aspect, most people I have met in real life are cowards who don't dare speak out of turn. Of course, I have never had this issue in real life or otherwise, and I take personal joy in the wisdom I raise before the invalids, even though they will never appreciate or understand it.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> I love using em dashes Keep using them. If someone is deducing from the use of an emdash that it's LLM produced, we've either lost the battle or they're an idiot. More pointedly, LLMs use emdashes in particular ways. Varying spacing around the em dash and using a double dash (--) could signal human writing.
- calvinmorrison 1y agoit's a shibboleth. In the same way we stopped using Pepe the frog when it became associated with the far right, we may eschew em dashes when associated with compuslop
- lxgr 1y agoI never understood why so many people would yield their symbols and language that quickly and freely to others they dislike. In other words, I really hope typographically correct dashes are not already 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade [1]! [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
- lazide 1y agoThe alternative is… what? ‘Defending’ against the use of Em-dashes by LLMs? Or people reacting to that? You might as well be sweeping a flood uphill. Tilting at windmills at least has a chance you might actually damage a windmill enough to do something, even if the original goal was a complete delusion.
- jdiff 1y agoUnfortunately LLMs are pretty inconsistent in how they use em dashes. Often they will put spaces around them despite that not being "correct," something that's led me astray in making accusations of humanity in the past.
- jachee 1y ago
- ludicity 1y agoI still use them all the time, and if someone objects to my writing over them then I've successfully avoided having to engage with a dweeb. (But in practice, I don't think I've had a single person suggest that my writing is LLM-generated despite the presence of em-dashes, so maybe the problem isn't that bad.)
- pseudosavant 1y agoMe too. Sad that they went from being something used with nuance by people who care, maybe too much, to being the punctuation smell of the people who may care too little.
- easygenes 1y agoYeah, same. I apparently naturally have the writing style of an LLM (basically the called out quote of parent is something I could have written in terms of style). It’s irritating to change my style to not sound like AI.
- tietjens 1y agoWe cannot cede the em dash to LLMs.
- furyofantares 1y agoI don't think you do. All this LLM written crap is easily spottable without it. Nearly every paragraph has a heading, numerous sentences that start with one or two words of fluff then a colon then the actual statement. Excessive bullet point lists. Always telling you "here's the key insight". But really the only damning thing is, you get a few paragraphs in and realize there's no motivation. It's just a slick infodump. No indication that another human is communicating something to you, no hard earned knowledge they want to convey, no case they're passionate about, no story they want to tell. At best, the initial prompt had that and the LLM destroyed it, but more often they asked ChatGPT so you don't have to. I think as long as your words come from your desire to communicate something, you don't have to worry about your em-dashes.
- latexr 1y agoMaybe, but that doesn’t stop people on the internet (and HN is no exception) of immediately dismissing something as LLM writing just because of an em-dash, no matter how passionate the text is.
- mildzebrataste 1y agoTwo more tells: 1. phrasing the negative and then switching (x is not just this, but this and more or y does this not because of this, but because of this, that, and one other thing that certainly would necessitate an Oxford comma.) 2. Gerunds all day every day. Constantly putting things in a passive voice so that all the verbs end in -ing.
- ErroneousBosh 1y agoI use them too, and there's not a trace of artificial intelligence in my posts - it's good old-fashioned analogue stupidity all through.
- matwood 1y agoI’ve stopped using em dashes in my writing in fear it will be dismissed at LLM generated :/
- trollbridge 1y agoI used to painstakingly enter an encoded emdash; now I just type two hyphens, which is something that LLMs don’t seem to want to do.