8 ms·
My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I
by ssiddharth 8mo ago
My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.
- archagon 8mo agoTo quote Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”
- parsimo2010 8mo agoMostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes. AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it. My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.
- wrs 8mo agoIf you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you.
- lelanthran 8mo ago> If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you. No, you are writing for people who see LLM-signals and read on anyway. Not sure that that's a win for you.
- wrs 8mo ago"Seeing LLM-signals" == "reading shallowly", so I think I covered that case.
- kyralis 8mo agoOr you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.
- lelanthran 8mo ago> Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win. What delusion? The false positive rate just on HN alone is so low it's not even a rounding error.
- parsimo2010 8mo agoI don’t think I’m judging shallowly- there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is if you use a typesetting program like LaTeX, or Word changes an en-dash with auto formatting, or the user consciously interrupts their writing flow to insert the character with a special keystroke combination or by pasting it in. The proportion of people who do any of those things in writing for the web is quite small. The number of clearly AI written posts with em-dashes is quite large. So large, that I immediately suspect AI writing when I see an em-dash and I rarely see countering evidence that suggests the author is human but meticulous about how they write.
- latexr 8mo ago> there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is (…) Then you proceed to list multiple ways to do it, but neglected to mention that by default on Apple operating systems they are inserted automatically when typing “--“. It’s something you have to explicitly turn off of you don’t want it. On Apple mobile operating systems you can also long press the hyphen to get the option. Em-dashes are trivial to type.
- ggggffggggg 8mo agoTo be fair, if they don’t know that they probably run Android, and are you even writing for them? I bet their bubbles are… green. The horror!
- parsimo2010 8mo agoBoth of the examples you gave both fall under "a special keystroke combination," which I did list. Typing "--" is two keystrokes compared to one for an en-dash. The iOS example isn't just "long press the hyphen" it's "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen, and slide your finger over the em-dash" compared to "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen" for the en-dash. If you're going to argue at least be genuine. I didn't say it was hard to type an em-dash, I showed that every way to get an em-dash into your writing takes an extra step. Taking an extra step compared to other characters means it isn't trivial. For someone writing publication quality work, em-dashes appear and if I see an em-dash in a book I don't assume AI writing. But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated. When people are writing, needing an extra step to insert an em-dash is disruptive to most people's train of thought.
- 98codes 8mo ago> assume There's your trouble. The real problem is that most internet users are setting their baseline for "standard issue human writing" at exactly the level they themselves write. The problem is that more and more people do not draw a line between casual/professional writing, and as such balk at very normal professional writing as potentially AI-driven. Blame OS developers for making it easy—SO easy!—to add all manner of special characters while typing if you wish, but the use of those characters, once they were within easy reach, grew well before AI writing became a widespread thing. If it hadn't, would AI be using it so much now?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kevstev 8mo agoAs someone who frequently posts online- with em dashes- I wonder if I am part of the problem with training llms to use them so much- and am going to get punished in the future for doing so. I also tend to way overuse parenthesis (because I tend to wander in the middle of sentences) but they haven't shown up much in llms so /shrug.
- collingreen 8mo agoTo continue the story, the guy saying this got fired and probably wouldn't have without taking this stand.
- catoc 8mo agoExactly this! I love(d) using em dashes. Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe
- deron12 8mo agoAI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.
- catoc 8mo ago> ”AI never uses em dashes in a pair” I wish that were true, but I feel a little bit vindicated nevertheless
- Yizahi 8mo agoIn my limited text generation experience, LLMs use em-dashes precisely like that, only without spaces on the sides and always in pairs in a single sentence. Here some examples from my Gemini history: "The colors we see—like blue, green, and hazel—are the result of Tyndall scattering." "Several interlocking cognitive biases create a "safety net" around the familiar, making the unknown—even if objectively better—feel like a threat." "A retrograde satellite will pass over its launch region twice every 24 hours—once on a "northbound" track and once on a "southbound" track—but because of the way Earth rotates, it won't pass over the exact same spot on every orbit." "Central, leverages streaming telemetry to provide granular, real-time performance data—including metrics (e.g., CPU utilization, throughput, latency), logs, and traces—from its virtualized core and network edge devices." "When these conditions are met—indicating a potential degradation in service quality (e.g., increased modem registration failures, high latency on a specific Remote PHY)—Grafana automatically triggers notifications through configured contact points (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty)." After collecting these samples I've noticed that they are especially probably in questions like explain something or write descriptive text. In the short queries there is not much text in total to trigger this effect.
- 8mo ago
- tkzed49 8mo agoI've gone back to using two dashes--LLMs typically don't write them that way.
- awesome_dude 8mo agoI'm going to propose that we name this the --gnu-long-form :)
- Bukhmanizer 8mo agoYou’re absolutely right. I hate AI writing — it’s not that I hate AI, it’s that it makes everything it says sound a specific combination of smug and authoritative — No matter the content. Once you realize it’s not saying anything, that’s the real aha moment. \s
- 4b11b4 8mo agoAlso, unfortunately I have in my global instructions to never use em dashes...
- 4b11b4 8mo agoMaybe I'll get over it eventually.
- nxobject 8mo agoWhat I do – and I know this isn't conventional style – is use ex dashes. (Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.)
- OGWhales 8mo agoI've noticed that LLMs generated text often has spaces around em dashes, which I found odd. They don't always do that, but they do it often enough that it stood out to me since that isn't what you'd normally see.
- yencabulator 8mo agoThe practice varies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Spacing_and_substitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Spacing_and_substitution
- treetalker 8mo ago> Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is. It's a matter of style preference. I support spaces around em-dashes — particularly for online writing, since em-dashes without spaces make selecting and copying text with precision an unnecessary frustration. By the way,what other punctuation mark receives no space on at least one side?Wouldn't it look odd,make sentences harder to read,and make ideas more difficult to grok?I certainly think so.Don't you? /s
- kimixa 8mo ago> Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is. That's the normal way of using them in British English. Though they also tend to be the (slightly shorter) en-dashes too. I feel that style is often pretty common on the "old" internet - possibly related to how they can be so easily be replaced by a hyphen back when ascii was a likely limitation.
- vonunov 8mo agoChicago says to format dashes like this—and ellipses . . . like this. . . . AP says to format dashes like this — and ellipses ... like this. ... Who's "correct"?
- Lalabadie 8mo agoFor what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles. LLMs have a bias towards expertise and confidence due to the proportion of books in their training set. They also lean towards an academic writing style for the same reason. All this to say, if LLMs write like you were already writing, it means you have very good foundations. It's fine to avoid them out of fear, but you have this Internet stranger's permission to use your em dash pause to think "Oh yeah, I'm the reference for writing style."
- djhn 8mo agoAren’t books massively outweighed by the crawled internet corpus?
- r_lee 8mo agoI would doubt that because books are probably weighed as higher quality and more trustworthy than random Reddit posts Especially if it's unsupervised training
- petters 8mo agoI think that bias is not due to the proportion of books and more due to how they are fine-tuned after the pretraining.
- the_af 8mo ago> For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles. I think that's only part of the story. I think that while it's true what LLMs do is somehow represented in their corpus of training data, they also lack any understanding of how to adapt to the context, how to find a suitable "voice", and how not to overdo it, unless you explicitly prompt them otherwise, which is too much of a burden. Their default voice sucks, basically. So let's say they learned to speak in Redditese. They don't know when not to speak in that voice. They always seem to be trying to make persuasive arguments, follow patterns of "It's not X. It's Y. And you know it (mic drop)." But real humans don't speak like this all the damn time. If you speak like this to your mom or to your closest friends, you're basically an idiot. It's not that you cannot speak like this. It's that you cannot do it all the time. And that's the real problem with LLMs. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)
- wiseowise 8mo agoI use it to trigger false positives in haters – why not?
- account42 8mo agoI don't think someone who doesn't want AI slop filtering out someone who gets mad at that to the point of calling them haters is really a false positive.
- manuelmoreale 8mo ago> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second. Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write. [0]: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes
- akoboldfrying 8mo agoThat's not really how it works. Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism? I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mindshare to displace the culturally dominant meaning. At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.
- abustamam 8mo agoI'm not confident that the average person is aware of an em dash nor that it is widely associated with AI; I think the current culturally dominant meaning is just a fat hyphen (which most people just call a dash anyway).
- AlecSchueler 8mo agoMy wife was working from home recently and I overheard a meeting she was having. It's a very non technical field. She and her team were working on a presentation and her boss said "let's use one of those little AI dashes here."
- abustamam 8mo agoI find that amusing but I know somewhere an English major is crying.
- eYrKEC2 8mo agoI used to enjoy the literate usage of the word "literally". You'll get over it.
- peterashford 8mo agoUsing literally to mean figuratively goes back hundreds of years
- duskwuff 8mo agoNot to mention "seriously", "really", "truly", "very", "verily", etc. There's a long history of using words related to truth as intensifiers in English.
- Lio 8mo agoYou can still use them — it’s just that they have a new purpose; getting things ignored by AI detection or AI;DR. Now you can ask for outlandish things at work knowing your boss won’t read it and his summariser will ignore it as slop — win.
- gnat 8mo agoWe're in the brief window of time when AI's writing style is the weirdness. It's an artifact of the production process, like JPG blur, MP3 distortion, autotune's rigidity. And it didn't take long for those things to become normalized, in fact for them to become artifacts that people proudly adopted and embraced. DJs release tracks built from MP3s samples instead of waves. Autotune is famously a 'sound' that was once something to be subtly added and never confessed to, but which now genres and artists lean into rather than away from. Long story short: I think emoji in headings and lists, em dashes, and the vile TED Talk paragraph structure of "long sentence with lots of words asking a question or introducing a possibility. followed by. short sentences. rebutting. or affirming." are here to stay. My money is that it gets normalized and embraced as "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."
- calvinmorrison 8mo agoShort sentences were popularized in writing only in the last hundred and fifty years. Styles change.
- the_af 8mo agoYes, but it's kinda sad, isn't it, that this robotic way of writing in turn teaches a new generation of people how to write? Also, you forgot the extremely enervating: "It's not X. It's Y. <Clincher>."
- AlecSchueler 8mo ago> "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere." These assumptions might also change though. Up until now any writing you saw "everywhere" was probably written by someone who studied and loved written communication and was brining their artisanal care to the table. That's no longer the case. It's called slop for a reason. When I come across a GitHub README written by AI I don't feel put off just because the author used AI to write it, I feel frustrated because it's genuinely poorly communicating with me. Fill of extraneous details, artifacts from the conversation, and stuff I already know ("uses GitHub to share the source democratically!").
- itisuseless 8mo agoThe correct thing to do is to use an en-dash with spaces. ;)
- kyralis 8mo agoThis is the modern day "I can tell that's photoshopped because I've seen some 'shops in my day." The sooner we stop glorifying the people who think they're magical LLM detectors, the better, frankly.
- account42 8mo agoIt doesn't have to be a perfect filter to be a good heuristic. And unless you have a better suggestion how people can avoid slop then it'll keep being used.
- user____name 8mo agoMy history teacher thought me to use "8==3" instead, the Romans used it to sign their graffities.