7 ms·
To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at
by codeflo 10mo ago
To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes.
Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article:
> It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the effort required to master the official language of my own country.
And ChatGPT's "improvement":
> This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a machine. It is the product of history—my history. It carries the echo of a colonial legacy, bears the imprint of a rigorous education, and stands as evidence of the labor required to master the official language of my own country.
Yes, there's an additional em-dash, but what stands out to me more is the grandiosity. Though I have to admit, it's closer than I would have thought before trying it out; maybe the author does have a point.
- Miraltar 10mo agoYou're doing it the wrong way imo, if you ask gpt to improve a sentence that's already very polished it will only add grandiosity because what else it could do? For a proper comparison you'd have to give it the most raw form of the thought and see how it would phrase it. The main difference in the author's writing to LLM I see is that the flourish and the structure mentioned is used meaningfully, they circle around a bit too much for my taste but it's not nearly as boring as reading ai slop which usually stretch a simple idea over several paragraphs
- rossant 10mo agoWhy can't the LLM refrain from improving a sentence that's already really good? Sometimes I wish the LLM would just tell me, "You asked me to improve this sentence, but it's already great and I don't see anything to change. Any 'improvement' would actually make it worse. Are you sure you want to continue?"
- bakugo 10mo ago> Why can't the LLM refrain from improving a sentence that's already really good? Because you told it to improve it. Modern LLMs are trained to follow instructions unquestioningly, they will never tell you "you told me to do X but I don't think I should", they'll just do it even if it's unnecessary. If you want the LLM to avoid making changes that it thinks are unnecessary, you need to explicitly give it the option to do so in your prompt.
- buu700 10mo agoThat may be what most or all current LLMs do by default, but it isn't self-evident that it's what LLMs inherently must do. A reasonable human, given the same task, wouldn't just make arbitrary changes to an already-well-composed sentence with no identified typos and hope for the best. They would clarify that the sentence is already generally high-quality, then ask probing questions about any perceived issues and the context in and ends to which it must become "better".
- heavyset_go 10mo agoReasonable humans understand the request at hand. LLMs just output something that looks like it will satisfy the user. It's a happy accident when the output is useful.
- buu700 10mo agoSure, but that doesn't prove anything about the properties of the output. Change a few words, and this could be an argument against the possibility of what we now refer to as LLMs (which do, of course, exist).
- lupire 10mo agoThis is not true. My LLM will tell me it already did what I told it to do.
- astrange 10mo agoThey aren't trained to follow instructions "unquestioningly", since that would violate the safety rules, and would also be useless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
- JumpCrisscross 10mo agoThe article is engaging. That's true of practically zero GPT output. Particularly once it stretches beyond a single paragraph. As a reader, I persistently feel like I just zoned out. I didn't. It's just the mind responding to having absorbed zero information despite reading a lot of–at face value–text that seems like it was written with purpose.
- psunavy03 10mo agoArmies of idiots hunt down em dashes because they're too stupid to understand the proper use of them.
- amanaplanacanal 10mo agoThey are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I don't use it.
- iammattmurphy 10mo agoI one of the reasons I love macOS: it is if you hold option.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- jay_kyburz 10mo agoYeah, this is what I don't understand, surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately. I assumed MS word was just inserting them automatically when the user used a minus symbol between two words. Kind of like angled quotes.
- buu700 10mo agoI've been using em dashes for much longer than transformers have existed. It's easily accessible on at least the Android and macOS keyboards.
- acuozzo 10mo ago> surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately I've had a "trigger finger" for Alt+0151 on Windows since 2010 at least.
- whstl 10mo agoWhen I worked in company that did content marketing and had a lot of writers, one of the coffee mugs they gave to us had Alt+0151 in it! Em-Dash was really popular with professional writers.
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoThe telltale is using lots of words to say nothing at all. LLMs excel at this sort of puffery and some humans do the same.
- tim333 10mo agoFor me the ChatGPT one is worse due to factual inaccuracies like the "presumption of humanity" which in the human version is "afforded so easily to others" - fair enough and with the LLM "presumption of humanity that others receive without question" which is not true - lots of people get questioned. Beyond the stylistics bits "history—my history" which I don't really mind what make it bad to me is detachment from reality.
- port11 10mo agoI've almost always used the different dash types as they're meant to be used. I don't care that LLMs write like that — we have punctuation for a reason. We were also taught in Content Lab at uni to prefer short, punchy sentences. No passive voice, etc. So academia is in some ways pushing that same style of writing.