5 ms·
that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are t
by fsckboy 9mo ago
that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the illiterate think it's a name)
- root_axis 9mo agoThe audio artifacts of an AI generated video are a far more reliable heuristic than the presence of a single character in a body of text.
- dorfsmay 9mo agoFor now. A year ago they weren't even Gen AI videos. Give it a few months...
- dragonwriter 9mo agoWell, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)
- fuzzer371 9mo agoNo one uses em dashes
- awakeasleep 9mo agoExcept for highly literate people, and people who care about typography. Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.
- amrocha 9mo agoMy impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.
- rmunn 9mo agoExcept for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted. Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could-not-stop-for-death-479 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could... Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).
- Finnucane 9mo agoHere is an image of the original manuscript page: https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893 https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893 Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.
- crimony 9mo agoMicrosoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.
- BLKNSLVR 9mo agoThat's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.
- cwnyth 9mo agoCtrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.
- robin_reala 9mo agoOption shift - in macOS (option - gives you an en dash).
- leoc 9mo agoWindows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.
- dboreham 9mo agoYou can Google search "em-dash" then copy/paste from the resulting page.
- Terr_ 9mo agoAlt-0151 on the numpad in Windows. Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards. Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.
- schrodinger 9mo agoI do—all the time. Why not? I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9
- dboreham 9mo agoI didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.
- dragonwriter 9mo agoIf nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.
- DocTomoe 9mo agoTell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.
- account42 9mo agoApproximately no one writes internet comments or even articles in LaTeX.
- DocTomoe 8mo agoBut many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- 0xis 8mo agoWhen I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.
- Duanemclemore 9mo agoThe em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash. I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...
- XorNot 9mo agoWhich would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this. The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash). The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.
- Duanemclemore 9mo agoYeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?
- bee_rider 9mo agoIs this—not an em-dash? On iOS I generated it by double tapping dash. I think there are more iOS users than AIs, although I could be wrong about that…
- D-Machine 9mo agoThank you for saving me the time writing this. Nothing screams midwit like "Em-dash = AI". If AI detection was this easy, we wouldn't have the issues we have today.
- kelvie 9mo agoOf note is theother terrible heuristic I've seen thrown around, where "emojis = AI", and now the "if you use not X, but Y = AI".
- wjholden 9mo agoSimilarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.
- bee_rider 9mo agoEm-dashes are completely innocent. “Not X but Y” is some lame rhetorical device, I’m glad it is catching strays.
- bhaak 9mo agoWith the right context both are pretty good actually. I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects. The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.
- zahlman 9mo ago>I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects. I see this way more often on GitHub now than I did before, though.
- icedchai 9mo agoWhen I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.