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the way they train the models is feeding it lots and lots of literature, and usually high quality. The way they write by default is thus going to be this weird
by incomingpain 1y ago
the way they train the models is feeding it lots and lots of literature, and usually high quality.
The way they write by default is thus going to be this weird hybrid of all english styles/dialects from the last ~500 years.
The reason they are heavy with em dashes is that they were immensely popular in literature for a long time but not so much in modern times. So it stands out.
If you tell it to write in a specific way though, it does a good job at it.
Here's detroit english, no messin' around. The reason why AI's love the em dash so much is simple: it’s the most versatile and natural punctuation mark they can use to connect ideas and maintain flow. A large language model's primary goal is to sound human, and when people speak, they often pause, clarify, or insert a quick side-thought the dash captures that conversational stop-and-start rhythm better than a rigid comma or a full-stop period. Plus, in the enormous amount of text the AI studies (its data), the em dash is frequently used by skilled writers as an efficient tool to replace colons, parentheses, or strong commas, so the AI simply picked up that effective writing pattern and runs with it, seeing it as the clearest and most dynamic way to structure complex sentences. That's the real deal.
- whycome 1y agoI used to use the em dash a lot. I refrain from doing it now. I hate that outcome.
- incomingpain 1y ago>I used to use the em dash a lot. I refrain from doing it now. I hate that outcome. I dont think it ever got taught in my schooling; the semi-colon is what they taught to use.
- JohnFen 1y agoI refuse to let genAI determine what my writing style should be on principle. I may not be able to do much about the rest of the various degradations genAI brings, but I can at least stand my ground when it comes to my personal expression.
- gooodvibes 1y agoThis isn’t accurate - most of the style comes from the fine tuning and reinforcement learning, not from the original training data. At some point people got this idea that LLMs just repeat or imitate their training data, and that’s completely false for today’s models.
- bediger4000 1y agoSo LLMs have gotten creativity recently?
- gooodvibes 1y agoNo, my point has nothing to do with creativity. It's about the fact that their output is taylored to look and sound in a certain way in the later stages of model training, it's not representative of the original text data the base model was trained on.
- idonotknowwhy 1y agoAgreed. The pre-2025 base models don't write like this.
- incomingpain 1y ago>This isn’t accurate - most of the style comes from the fine tuning and reinforcement learning, not from the original training data. Fine tuning, reinforcement, etc are all 'training' in my books. Perhaps this is your confusion over 'people got this idea'
- gooodvibes 1y ago> Fine tuning, reinforcement, etc are all 'training' in my books. They are but they have nothing to do with how frequent anything is in literature which was your main point.