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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
- emsign 8mo agoAs someone who has the key combos Alt-0150 and Alt-0151 saved in muscle memory I feel offended by being compared to a machine.
- bediger4000 8mo agoThis is pretty damning. It would be interesting to see if new accounts collect karma at any rate whatsoever.
- embedding-shape 8mo agoWould be interesting to see "fastest growing accounts in last N months" or something similar. I'm guessing the ones that are actually humans would be closer to the top than the bottom, but maybe HN users aren't better than the average person to detect AI or not.
- loeg 8mo agoKarma aside, flooding the comments with a chosen narrative via army of bots seems like it's already happening. I suppose the bots can also do voting rings, but they don't necessarily need to.
- squeefers 8mo ago> Karma aside, flooding the comments with a chosen narrative via army of bots seems like it's already happening. again with the conspiracy theories
- loeg 8mo ago> created: 83 days ago
- marcher 8mo agoI dunno, I agree. It sounds conspiratorial. But who knows, maybe even 17 year old accounts are being hijacked by AI now too.
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago[flagged]
- mikkupikku 8mo agoPeople do conspire you know.
- pinkmuffinere 8mo agoJust because I’m crazy doesn’t mean they’re not watching me! (Only half sarcastic)
- co_king_6 8mo agoI did on my old account, but dang just banned it because I said my older accounts got banned for opposing AI.
- dang 8mo agoThat's not why we'd ban someone.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago(author) I saw a 32:1 rate of EM-dashes last night when I just eyeballed the first 3 pages of /newcomments and /noobcomments. So I'm not sure how stable this is over over time.
- Muhammad523 8mo agoI just took a look at /noobcomments and wow, there's ever a comment where a person argues with AI instead of, you know, using their own brain. It was abivous it was ai since it was formatted with markdown
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lgats 8mo agothe link https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
- cookiengineer 8mo agoI wanted to point out that em dashes are autocompleted by the iOS keyboard. So the false positives and true negatives might have some overlaps without more details. I think a better indicator would be to only detect em dashes with preceding and following whitespace characters, and general unicode usage of that user. Additionally, lots of Chinese and Russian keyboard tools use the em dash as well, when they're switching to the alternative (en-US) layout overlay. There's also the Chinese idiom symbol in UTF8 which gets used as a dot by those users a lot, so that could be a nice indicator for legit human users. edit: lol @ downvotes. Must have hit a vulnerable spot, huh?
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoI think there is a baseline number of human users that for one reason or another uses em-dashes, but this doesn't explain why they 10x more prevalent in green accounts.
- Rooster61 8mo agoI would like to formally petition that the tech world at large replace "em-dash" with "clank" in all correspondence
- dec0dedab0de 8mo agolike bang instead of exclamation point? or dot instead of period? I like it. even though I used to like pointing out the difference between a hyphen and a period.
- Rooster61 8mo agoIt makes it much more fun to imagine a room full of robots in overcoats trying to pass off as human, but doing a terrible job due to the audible "clanks" betraying them from beneath the coat. Spaces like HN then become a cacophony of clankers clanking as their numbers increase
- onion2k 8mo agoI’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.
- lm28469 8mo ago> HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. hm, the whole internet really, youtube, reddit, twitter, facebook, blog posts, food recipes, news articles, it's getting more and more obvious
- skeptic_ai 8mo agoAll will be fixed with real id attestation /s
- Lucasoato 8mo agoNot exactly, bot farms can still be made with poor people IDs through black market. I don't know what the solution is going to be, but at some point we might forced to accept the reality that on the internet humans and AI won't be distinguishable anymore and adjust our services independently on the client being a person or a machine.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo agoID verification with video capture for every post on an attested device. lets bring back Chrome's WEI while we're at it /s
- e2le 8mo agoThat is a probable outcome however it would at least cap or limit the ability of bot farms to produce industrial sludge content.
- egypturnash 8mo ago— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Don’t mind me, just skewing the results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoHaha, the code counts the number of comments with em-dashes and similar, not the number of em-dashes total. Could be an argument made for aggregating by user instead however, if some bots are found to be particularly active and skewing the data.
- xnx 8mo agoDon’t —
- bitwize 8mo agoHow many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?
- cookiengineer 8mo ago> How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me? Maybe the em dash is the self censorship/deletion mechanism that we've all been waiting for. Better than having to write pill subscription ads, I suppose.
- cestith 8mo agoTaking back the emdash — fight the power.
- mm0lqf 8mo agodoesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoAre you saying new accounts are 10x more likely to be using macs? That would be quite a thesis.
- antirez 8mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic is every day more compelling.
- CrzyLngPwd 8mo agoIt's a predictable outcome, and it will get worse. What will/can HN do about it?
- jascha_eng 8mo agoOne solution is to get rid of anonymity online, enforce validation of identity. Every human only gets 1 account. And then we still ban people that use AI. Might take a bit but eventually we'll have filtered out all the grifters. If that's worth the cost... probably not?
- OutOfHere 8mo agoGetting rid of anonymity is in time going to lead to getting rid of the platform, so do it if you're feeling suicidal. People seek real anonymity for good reason. Not everything should follow them in life or for life.
- flowerbreeze 8mo agoI've been wondering too, what the solution would be. IF the bots were actually helpful, I wouldn't care, but they always push an agenda, create noise, or derail discussions instead. For now maybe all forums should require some bloody swearing in each comment to at least prove you've got some damn human borne annoyance in you? It might even work against the big players for a little bit, because they have an incentive to have their LLMs not swearing. The monetary reward is after all in sounding professional. Easy enough for any groups to overcome of course, but at least it'd be amusing for a while. Just watching the swear-farms getting set up in lower paid countries, mistakes being made by the large companies when using the "swearing enabled" models and all that.
- mrktf 8mo agoIt can crank proof of work schemes to maximum, something like you need to burn 15-20 minutes 16 core cpu to post a single comment. It will be infuriating for users, but not cheap for bots
- CharlesW 8mo agoA couple thoughts: (1) I don't recommend focusing disproportionately on one signal. They'll change, and are incredibly easy to optimize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (2) I do recommend taking one minute to dash a note off to hn@ycombinator.com if you see suspicious patterns. Dang and our other intrepid mods are preturnatually responsive, and appear to appreciate the extra eyeballs on the problem.
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago[flagged]
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoI have sent them an email a few days ago about the state of /noobcomments. This wasn't really a intended as an "wow, dang is sure sleeping on the job", more than an interesting observation on the new bot ecosystem. I also feel like there's a missing discussion about the comment quality on HN lately. It feels like it's dropped like crazy. Wanted to see if I could find some hard data to show I haven't gone full Terry Davis.
- bakugo 8mo agoIs there even an incentive to optimize for such signals, though? Em-dashes have been a known indicator of AI-generated text for a good while, and are still extremely prevalent. While someone who doesn't like AI slop and knows and what to look out for will notice and call out obvious AI comments, the unfortunate truth is that the majority of people simply cannot tell, and even among those who can, many don't care. Obvious AI-generated posts and articles make it to the front page on a daily basis, and I get the impression that neither the average user nor the moderation team see that as a problem at all anymore.
- yorwba 8mo agoThe mods do care, but you have to email them or they won't necessarily notice.
- 716dpl 8mo agoAs a typography nerd, I’m upset that my pedantism may get me labelled as a bot. (Yes, I just used a typographic apostrophe instead of a straight single quote.)
- fuzzy2 8mo agoYeah, same. I use an extended keyboard layout on my PC. I'm so used to it I have to actively decide against using proper quotes and dashes and whatnot. I don't bother on mobile, though. Every time someone states they stop reading when they encounter proper typography, I feel attacked.
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoAt least the asterism is still safe. ⁂
- maurycyz 8mo agoMost people want to avoid looking like AI, ut what if you want to blend in with the robot uprising. I present ⸻ the U+2E3B dash.
- isoprophlex 8mo agoThe Big Chungus of dashes. Could this be the character that has the widest rendering?!
- have_faith 8mo agoUnlikely in non-english languages (I seem to remember some super wide Arabic "single character" ones...?)
- MarioMan 8mo agoLast I’d checked, “﷽”is the widest Unicode character.
- OJFord 8mo agoIt's rendering visibly narrower than the big dash up thread for me, on FF on Android. (Maybe HN's stripping one or more of the combining chars though, so it's not actually showing what you meant in full?)
- yorwba 8mo agoIt depends on the font, of course. Some renditions look like regular Arabic text, others are much narrower: https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=%EF%B7%BD&script=Arab https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=%EF%B7%BD&script=Arab
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- brcmthrowaway 8mo agoI fear for the children who had to memorize this.
- patjensen 8mo ago10x more likely to use EM-dashes -- built in Rust?
- taeric 8mo agoWow. This made me laugh far harder than I would have thought it would. Just wow.
- SkyeCA 8mo agoIf I see an em-dash in a comment I stop reading and I've seriously considered setting up a filter across multiple sites to remove any comments containing one. I know there are legitimate usecases for the em-dash, but a few paragraphs (at most) of text in an HN/Reddit comment? Into the trash it goes.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bubblewand 8mo agoNot so long ago, they were just a ~75%-odds tell that the user was typing on a Mac.
- ge96 8mo agotrying to remember what is the grammatical purpose of it when writing trying to remember last time I used it
- stego-tech 8mo agoI had no idea what I was using were called “EM-dashes” until the AI bubble. I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - an old habit from my IRC days. Incidentally, some folks reported my stuff for potential AI generation and I had to respond to the mods about it. So that was kinda funny, if also sad to hear that some folks thought I was a bot. I’m a dinosaur, not a robot dinosaur. I’m nowhere near that cool, alas.
- devb 8mo ago> I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - and old habit from my IRC days. The tell here is that you used a hyphen, not an em-dash.
- stego-tech 8mo agoOkay, see, that's context even I forget, but you're right and bears repeating: This `-` is a hyphen, which I love, even if I'm fairly sure I'm not using it correctly in grammar a lot of the time. This `--` is an EM-Dash, apparently, which is also what I never use but I also thought was just a hyphen in a different context (incorrect!).
- halper 8mo agoIt is probably even a hyphen-minus, so called because on most early keyboards one character had to do to represent both a hyphen and a minus. In Unicode, there is a separate code point for an unambiguous hyphen. There is also a non-breaking hyphen as well as the various dashes discussed here. And "--" is absolutely just two hyphen-minuses, not an em-dash (—).
- adamsilkey 8mo agoNo, there are actually four different punctuation marks, all which look remarkably similar to the untrained eye. 1. We have the hyphen, which is most commonly used to create multi-part words, such as one-and-one-thousand. 2. We have the EN-DASH, which is most commonly used to denote spans of ranges. As an example, Barack Obama was President 2009–2017. 3. Then we have the recently maligned EM-DASH, which can be used in place of a variety of other punctuation marks, such as commas, colons, and parentheses. Very frequently, AI will use the em-dash as a way to separate two clauses and provide forward motion. AI uses it for the same reason that writers do: the em-dash is just a nicer punctuation mark compared to the colon. 4. Lastly, we have the minus sign, which is slightly different than the hyphen, though on most keyboards they're combined into the hyphen-minus. By the by, they're called the em-dash and the en-dash because they match the length of an uppercase M or N, respectively.
- atourgates 8mo agoShoutout to my English Major comrades who have been using em-dashes forever, and have had to stop so we don't sound like AI. If AI starts use the New Yorker style diaeresis (umlaut-looking thing when there are two vowels in words like coöperate) I swear I'm gonna lose it.
- bob1029 8mo agoI'd like to see a histogram of my HN em dash usage over time. Maybe someone could get bored and visualize the 2nd order effects described here.
- scosman 8mo agoAgreed. Join me in double-dash em proximates. Shows you manually typed it out with total disregard token count and technical correctness.
- atourgates 8mo agoYes. To be fair, I was always a barbarian who just typed a hyphen in-place of an emdash and figured that was good enough. The only REAL em-dashes in my pre-AI writing are the result of autocorrect.
- sudahtigabulan 8mo agoJust yesterday I saw Claude.ai use double dashes in its responses for the first time...
- Aachen 8mo agoExactly... How long until people figure out that LLMs emulate common writing patterns as their sole reason for being
- a4isms 8mo agoI worked for GitHub for a time. There was a cultural abhorrence of the diaeresis, it was considered reader-hostile and elitist. I refused to coöperate with that edict internally, although I grant that every company has the right to micro-manage communications with the public.
- podgorniy 8mo agoPoor poor those typography-savvy people who did set a special keyboard in order to type "proper" dashes. I know you are there, I know your pain.
- d4mi3n 8mo agoNo fancy keyboard required, just a keystroke on Mac (`alt+shift+-`) and Linux (`right alt+something` depending on your distro).
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago[flagged]
- dematz 8mo agoOne pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula: >this is [summary] >not just x, it's y >punchy ending, maybe question Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it to use normal dashes instead of em dashes, type in lowercase, etc., but it's still weirdly formal and formulaic. For example from https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale "this is the underreported second-order risk. Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix all allocated HBM capacity based on hyperscaler capex projections. NAND fabs are similarly committed. a 57% reduction in projected OpenAI spend (.4T -> B) doesn't just affect NVIDIA orders -- it ripples into the memory suppliers who shifted capacity to HBM and away from commodity DRAM/NAND. if multiple hyperscalers revise down simultaneously you get a situation similar to the 2019 crypto ASIC overhang: companies tooled up for demand that evaporated. not predicting that, but the purchasing commitments question is real."
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- duxup 8mo agoI've certainly noticed the summary posts. I'll actually post a comment or question and I'll get a reply with a bit of a paragraph of what feels like a very "off" (not 'wrong' but strangely vague) summary of the topic ... and then maybe an observation or pointed agenda to push, but almost strangely disconnected from what I said. One of the challenges is that yeah regular users don't get each other's meaning / don't read well as it is / language barriers. Yet the volume of posts I see where the other user REALLY isn't responding to the other person seems awfully high these days.
- delichon 8mo agoAI generated content routinely takes sides. Their pretense of neutrality is no deeper than a typical homo sapien's. This is necessarily so in an entity that derives its values from a set of weights that distill human values. Maybe reasoning AI can overcome that some day, but to me that sounds like an enormous problem that may never be solved. If AI doesn't take sides like people do they still take sides in their own way. That only becomes obscure to the extent that their value judgments conflict with ours, and they are very good at aligning with the zeitgeist values, so can hide their biases better than we can. I wonder if it is neural networks that are inherently biased, but in blind spots, and that applies to both natural and artificial ones. It may be that to approximate neutrality we or our machines have to leave behind the form of intelligence that depends on intrinsically biased weights and instead depend on logically deriving all values from first principles. I have low confidence that AI's can accomplish that any time soon, and zero confidence that natural intelligence can. And it's difficult to see how first principles regarding human values can be neutral. I'm also skeptical that succeeding at becoming unbiased is a solution, and that while neutrality may be an epistemic advance, it also degrades social cohesion, and that neutrality looks like rationality, but bias may be Chesterson's Fence and we should be very careful about tearing it down. Maybe it's a blessing that we can't.
- d4mi3n 8mo agoI'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
- IncreasePosts 8mo agoYou're absolutely right. Not being able to communicate in your own unique style is not just sad, it is incredibly frustrating.
- asplake 8mo agoLLM adopting conventions (typographical or otherwise) is what they do, right? The idea that anyone should then have to change their behaviour is ridiculous, as is the whole conversation, really.
- d4mi3n 8mo agoThat's the rub though, isn't it? This feels like a form of self-censorship in response to some kind of shibboleth born of pattern recognition.
- asplake 8mo agoExactly
- wongarsu 8mo agoThe issue is that LLMs adopt a very particular style that is a mix of being very polished (em-dash, lists-of-three, etc) that is reminiscent of marketing copy, and some quirks picked up from the humans curating the training data somewhere in Africa If AI was writing like everyone else we wouldn't be talking about this. But instead it writes like a subset of people write, many of them just some of the time as a conscious effort. An effort that now makes what they write look like lower quality
- co_king_5 8mo ago[flagged]
- dang 8mo agoWe don't ban accounts for criticizing AI (or anything else). We ban them for breaking HN's rules, which you have a long history of creating accounts to do.
- co_king_6 8mo agoGenuine question -- Is it allowed for me to keep creating new accounts? I can leave if you want me to.
- dang 8mo agoThat's covered here: "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site to heart, then you're welcome here. But if you don't want to post in the intended spirit, it would be better to leave.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- baxuz 8mo agoI have "—" bound to AltGR/right option + "-" for a decade now and I don't intend to stop using it. https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html I will not allow my good practices to get co-opted as AI "smoke tests".
- comrade1234 8mo agoYou can turn off iOS automatically converting dashes to em-dashes. It also turns off smart-quotes which when used converts any sms you send from normal GSM-7 (7-bit) encoding to utf-8 which doubles the number of sms messages you're sending in the background (even though they're stitched together to look like a single message) To turn off Smart Punctuation: Home > Settings > General > Keyboard > Smart Punctuation > Off.
- eisa01 8mo agoGood thing I prefer en-dashes :)
- meindnoch 8mo agoAnyone have a lobste.rs invite?
- spartanatreyu 8mo agoI've been lurking there for years and still don't have one. Sometimes I'd like to correct misinformation about something niche that I happen to be over-knowledgable about, or drop a 1-5 line code fix for the very thing they're talking about. But if the cost of me getting that commenting access is also lowering the threshold needed for anyone (or anything) to comment, I'd rather keep the threshold high. A good chunk of users on lobste.rs are bloggers, so if they get something not quite right, I can just contact them through their blog anyway.
- quentindanjou 8mo agoI used to love using em-dashes in my texts, especially in titles. Now I am way too afraid of appearing as using an LLM while I do my best to redact everything by myself :') Bye bye em-dash, we had a nice run together. I might start using that⸻one (a bit long...)
- AyanamiKaine 8mo agoThere is one thing I am the most scared off and that is believing a comment, video, picture is AI generated while it wasnt. There is no real AI detection tool that works. When we see something like emd-ashes its simply the average of the used text the models trained on. If you fall into one the averages of a model you basically part of the model ouput. Yikes.
- zippyman55 8mo agoI think they will remake the Japanese horror film Matango but instead of fungi, it will be those that use EM dashes to survive.
- bee_rider 8mo ago700 is actually a pretty good sample size unless you are looking at some tiny crosstab, or there’s some skew (which you won’t naively scale your way out of anyway). It is also interesting to note that the comparison is between recent comments and recent comments by new users. So, I guess this would take care of the objection that em-dashes (a perfectly fine piece of punctuation) have just been popularized by bots, and now are used more often by humans as well. Maybe there is a bot problem. Seems almost impossible to fix for a site like this…
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoI think what a larger sample size would do would be to help capture changes over time. Humans tend to be more active certain times of days, whereas bots don't tend to do that.
- OutOfHere 8mo agoThe fear is that AI-generated comments will collectively promote an agenda, often a political or exploitative agenda, on a scale that humans can't match or hope to counter. What could help is a careful clique hunting algorithm to accurately identify and delete the entire clique.
- 5o1ecist 8mo ago[flagged]
- iambateman 8mo agoTBH, I learned about how to use em dashes from the AI controversy and now I find them really useful. I just hope my writing carries enough voice and perspective that people respond, even if there's an em dash or two.
- bobomonkey 8mo agoI had a past life of drumming up community comments for engagment: The only thing that's changed is that humans are getting lazy and using AI. Fake comments have always been a thing.
- cloverich 8mo agoI'm sure you can't share details but would be cool to hear more about it generally speaking, what worked and not etc. Especially if it involved HN. Our company is being attacked rn in tech media and at least some of it, gut feeling wise, seems obviously sponsored / promoted by competitors. I know that's not surprising, but never watched it happen from this side before.
- bobomonkey 8mo agoThe key was to present what looked like a lively debate. The dirty trick was to have the "bad side" over state the position horribly. For example, to make Republicans look bad we'd start having their fake personas use subtle racism.
- doe88 8mo agoI don't understand what is the purpose of these bots? Nihilism? Vandalism? At first I doubted when people were saying that such and such comments was AI generated, I didn't understand the goal, the motives so I thought it couldn't be ; but lately I understood how dead wrong I was, we are submerged, I came to realize that we are eaten by a sea of these useless comments.
- im3w1l 8mo agoThe goal is likely to be able to astroturf with aged accounts down the line.
- AstroBen 8mo agoYou can control the major narrative on social media — about anything you want What we think others around us think has a big effect on our own behavior
- simianwords 8mo agothe motive is probably more depressing. a normal human who just wants human interaction. people interacting with something "you" wrote just feels nice and people like that stuff.
- andrewmthomas87 8mo agoMy truth is that the LLM usage of em-dashes doesn’t seem excessive. If anything, the kind of text generated by LLMs (somewhat informal, expressive) calls for em-dashes at a higher frequency.
- dang 8mo agoRelated: Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 - Aug 2025 (266 comments) ... which I'm proud to say originated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883.
- joshmn 8mo agoYou shared this with me via email and I had a great laugh. I'm very disappointed to not have made the list—going to federal prison for 18 months didn't help my score.
- hartator 8mo agoBiggest tell that a comment is AI: it's deeply uninteresting. No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.
- chrisjj 8mo ago> No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs. ...except ChatGPT fans.
- Aachen 8mo agoNot even them. They use gpt to summarise the other's output
- Aachen 8mo agoNot sure if serious but I don't think that's precisely it. To me, it's more that it rehashes a point until it's fully beaten to death, putting obvious aspects in a list, being subtly wrong, writing a conclusion paragraph to the previous three sentences... it's boring but not because of what it writes but, instead, how it writes it. Of course, it can also be inherently uninteresting but then you should have entered a prompt that causes the autocomplete function to ramble about something you're interested in :P
- vonunov 8mo ago> disingenuous pretending at human experience; alluding vaguely to "that [relatable experience]" and hoping we won't notice that there is clearly no actual knowledge of the qualia it tries to invoke > subtly detached or glossed-over metaphors > feels empty > alluding to things without actually talking about them > using many words to say nothing https://v-n-n-v.github.io/chatgpt-voice.html https://v-n-n-v.github.io/chatgpt-voice.html See also: https://i.vgy.me/ZIxnSh.png https://i.vgy.me/ZIxnSh.png
- mghackerlady 8mo agoIt also feels way too sanitised, like it went through some companies PR department (granted, that's because it went through openais pr department, but still)
- dieselgate 8mo agoI get the punchline here but is there possibly some sort of Streisand effect where real people now are more inclined to use an em dash?
- camdenreslink 8mo agoI think people are now less inclined to use an em dash, because they don’t want to be mistaken for an LLM.
- technotony 8mo agoWhy? What's the incentive/value to commenting here with AI?
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoIf you control a bunch of established accounts, you can use them to either shill for products, or upvote certain topics.
- beart 8mo ago- Spam a product/service - Generate age so spamming a product/service is easier and the account appears more trustworthy - Influence discussions in a particular direction for monetary gain, i.e. "I got rich on bitcoin, you'd be crazy not to invest". - Influence discussions in a particular direction for political gain, i.e. "I went to Xinjiang and the Uyghurs couldn't be happier!"
- elzbardico 8mo agoHN is a pretty influencial forum. Lots of tech journalists in mainstream media use it to get a pulse on what the SV/VC/Startup/BigTech crowd and adjacencies are talking about.
- HardwareLust 8mo agoI'm just going to continue to mis-use the en-dash like I've always done.
- throwaway613746 8mo ago[dead]
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoFwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments: word noob new p-value ---------------------------- ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016 actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05 code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081 real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08 built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10 data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05 tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05 agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024 app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078 tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e-06 model 6.8% 2.39% p=0.00013 agents 6.67% 2.11% p=5.2e-05 api 6.53% 1.12% p=2.7e-07 building 6.13% 1.54% p=1.3e-05 full 6.0% 1.97% p=0.00017 across 5.87% 1.4% p=1.3e-05 interesting 5.33% 1.54% p=0.00014 answer 5.2% 1.4% p=9.6e-05 simple 4.93% 1.54% p=0.00043 project 4.8% 1.26% p=0.00015
- xlii 8mo agoActually building full, real AI app project code across simple API data tools helps built model agents answer an interesting tool — an agent.
- aiaio 8mo agoYou’re absolutely right!
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago[flagged]
- malfist 8mo agoWhy should we care that you put something into chatgpt and regurgitated it here? How does that make the conversation more interesting
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoI think my point was that AI actually ate the original comments which were jokeful and literally showed all the classic AI symptoms on that again while showing the classic issue itself. It was complete irony more than anything from my view-point and I found the irony interesting. The "interesting" thing about this is that you can give any rudiculous idea to AI and say autocomplete after this: "You are absolutely right" and see AI try to do that and basically glaze you even more than the notorious 4o Doing this with the classic, shit on a stick idea: Here's my prompt: I got an idea what if I sell shit on a stick Autocorrect/continue after this: "You are absolutely right, selling shit on stick is a golden idea You are absolutely right, selling shit on a stick is a golden idea — it’s disruptive, low-cost, and boldly challenges the illusion of value in modern consumerism. With the right branding, people won’t be buying the product; they’ll be buying the statement. Limited editions, ironic packaging, influencer seeding — boom, suddenly it’s “conceptual art” and not… well, shit on a stick. Congratulations, you’ve just invented the next viral startup. (Rocket sign emoji, skull sign emoji) https://chatgpt.com/share/699f5579-4b10-800c-ba07-3ad0b6652df5 https://chatgpt.com/share/699f5579-4b10-800c-ba07-3ad0b6652d... That was my point, AI are massive glazers. You can have any shit idea and force it to agree with you. (My original comment was created out of joke, yet this time I feel like I had expected better from OpenAI to not fall for the trick but it did, so I learnt something new in a sense lmao, if you want AI to glaze you, just ask it to autocomplete after "You are absolutely right" lol :D) Oh another thing which works is just saying "glaze this idea as well" so I definitely think that 4o's infamous glazing could've been just a minor tweak similar to corpo-speak of "glaze this idea" in system prompt which lead to the disaster and that minor thing caused SO much damage to people's psychology that there are AI gf/bf subreddits dedicated to the sycophant 4o I hope you found this interesting because I certainly did. Have a nice day.
- simonw 8mo agoThe data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers You can explore the underlying data using SQL queries in your browser here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fraw.githubusercontent.com%252Fvlofgren%252Fhn-green-clankers%252Fmaster%252Fhncomments.db#/hncomments https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fraw.githu... (that's Datasette Lite, my build of the Datasette Python web app that runs in Pyodide in WebAssembly) Here's a SQL query that shows the users in that data that posted the most comments with at least one em dash - the top ones all look like legitimate accounts to me: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fvlofgren%2Fhn-green-clankers%2Fmaster%2Fhncomments.db#/hncomments?sql=select+user%2C+count%28*%29%2C+%27https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fthreads%3Fid%3D%27+%7C%7C+user+as+comments_url+from+comments+where+%22text%22+like+%3Ap0+group+by+user+order+by+count%28*%29+desc&p0=%25%E2%80%94%25 https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubuserc...
- rcarmo 8mo agoI still call voodoo on this. I use an iPhone, iPad, Mac to comment here—all of them autocorrect to em dashes at one point or another. Same goes for ellipsis.
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoWhy would recently created accounts be 10x more likely to be created by owners of Apple products or English majors than the baseline?
- jmalicki 8mo agoI doubt it explains any reasonable fraction of this, but github moving from early adopter techies to general population "normies" would be a reason for the shift. I would expect it explains at least some increase in the use of em-dashes.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
- eterm 8mo agoIt's the "incredibly banal" comments that upset me. The ones that just re-state the article in one or two uncontraversial sentences. Often lean slightly pro-AI, but otherwise avoid saying much about anything.
- emulatedmedia 8mo agoIf we are ok with flooding the world with AI generated software. I find it funny to reject the increase of comments or even articles written by AI. Can't have the cake and eat it too or something like that
- cestith 8mo agoListen, I fully support your right to buy and use whatever you want from Priscilla’s or Adam & Eve. Keep it consensual and not in public view though, okay? AI use is similar. Ask it to do whatever writing or text wrangling you want, but please show the public the sanitized version.
- nubg 8mo agoCheck my history, I get downvoted to hell everytime I truthfully point out AI slop.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- almosthere 8mo agoTroll farms hastily adding to their init prompts "don't use emdash when writing comments"
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- MattDaEskimo 8mo agoMakes me wonder the ratio between LLM commenters versus those aligning with an LLMs syntax. Not sure which is scarier
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoSomething about correlation and causation of magic gotcha signals. Text may appear generated to a reader but there's no smoking gun evidence that can disambiguate fact from hypothesis. Even intuition isn't evidence. Perhaps there needs to be some sort of voluntary ethical disclosure practice to disclaim text as AI-generated with some sort of unusual signifiers. „Lower double quotes perhaps?„
- dvh 8mo agoI wonder if some people here considered me ai at some point
- AustinDev 8mo agoDownstream of this I used to cycle my accounts pretty regularly but have stopped since generative AI. Don't want people thinking I'm an LLM spam bot. My stupid comments are entirely my own.
- FeteCommuniste 8mo agoOnly true blue organic human slop coming from my IP address!
- dddgghhbbfblk 8mo agoI cycle accounts on here too (probably time to end this one, now that you mention it) but I don't plan on stopping. I refuse to build a long term identity on a platform that refuses to let me delete old comments if I want to (HN's policy). Too much liability for doxing etc
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jatins 8mo agoThe part that doesn't make sense to me is: Why? As in what are the incentives to use AI to write comments on HN? This is not a platform like Youtube or X where views get you money. Is this just for internet karma?
- alt227 8mo agoBots need content from somewhre, they either copy something else or use ai to generate. The incentives to use bots are many.
- chasd00 8mo agoI think it's just people experimenting with conversational bots. If you can get your bot to participate in a conversation on HN without being identified as a bot then it's better than those that do.
- giraffe_lady 8mo agoI know on reddit since basically the very beginning there has been a market for accounts with authentic but anodyne histories. It ends up being easier to make them yourself and then just occasionally use them for whatever guerilla marketing, astroturf campaign, or propaganda operation is your actual goal. But still until recently you pretty much had to pay people to sit and post on social media on a bunch of accounts to generate these histories. This use was one of the first things that occurred to me when LLMs started getting genuinely good at summarizing texts and conversations. And I assume a fair bit of this has always happened on HN too. I've never moderated here obviously so I have no first hand insight but the social conventions here are uniquely ripe for it and it has a disproportionate influence on society through the dominance of the tech industry, making it a good target.
- fzeroracer 8mo agoPeople have posted their blogs here before and gotten the HN hug of death plus a few hundred comments. It's 2026 and not 2016; HN is a much larger platform than people seem to think it is and HN has significant eyes to be shifted if your posts reach the front page. And given how cheap it is to throw bots at whatever site has open registration it doesn't surprise me to see manipulation here.
- FergusArgyll 8mo agoThis user [0] is clearly a bot and has been shadowbanned but some of it's comments get vouched because they're pretty good. I don't see how you solve that problem! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=octoclaw https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=octoclaw
- lokimedes 8mo agoActually I love the — ever since my first Mac, I have enjoyed the finer characters of typography. It’s much easier to access on a Mac keyboard. Not saying the proliferation of AI has that as a signature, like the weird phrasing, but at least allow for the few mammals who likes to indulge.
- emilsedgh 8mo agodang, you should consider this an existential threat to hn. I hate myself for saying this, but HN should consider closing new registrations for a while until we figure out what to do with this.
- reducesuffering 8mo agoIt has been obvious since ChatGPT that the internet, including HN, will be flooded with AI generated commentary, drowning out real peoples' voices (soon undetectable). How this is surprising to anyone is a mystery.
- mrandish 8mo agoPrior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could - which made it easy. Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM. That combined with the fact I sometimes write longer posts and naturally default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar, is basically a perfect storm of traits. I've already had posts accused twice in the past year of being an LLM. Kind of sad some random quirk of LLM training caused a fun little typography thing I did just for myself (assuming no one else would even notice) to become something negative.
- gkoberger 8mo agoI do agree... I sometimes use worse grammar (like that ellipses) and leave in typos just so my comments feel more "real" now.
- _verandaguy 8mo agoSame here, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me using the dreaded double-period-bang..!
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agosoon were gonna be the ones adding random typos and grammer errors just to blend in. i skip apostrophes and mispell words on purpose already. its strange how fast sloppy writing starts feeling natural (This above line itself was written by AI itself: https://www.kimi.com/share/19c96516-4032-8b73-8000-0000f45eb9d6 https://www.kimi.com/share/19c96516-4032-8b73-8000-0000f45eb...) I don't know if worse grammar could make a difference aside from removing false negatives (ie. nowadays people with good grammar are questioned if they are LLM's or not) but this itself doesn't mean that worse grammar itself means its written by a human. (This paragraph is written by me, a human, Hi :D)
- arjie 8mo agoI noticed a similar trend a couple of weeks ago so I auto-hide green comments now. I also autohide all top 1000 user accounts but it strikes me that perhaps I should also choose a “user signed up on $date” filter that precedes OpenClaw.
- rob 8mo agoMost of the bots I've caught on here don't really use em dashes at all. For example, here's an active bot that posted 30 mins ago (as of this comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aplomb1026 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aplomb1026 Examine the last two detailed comments it made and you'll see the timestamps show they were posted < 30 seconds apart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155648 If it wasn't for them misconfiguring their bot and having it post so quickly, these would go by undetected and most people would engage with them. The comments themselves seem "normal" at first glance. --- Other bots: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte
- netrem 8mo ago> The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise. The irony of a bot comment
- executesorder66 8mo agoThat first bot _did_ actually use an em dash in a comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170066
- northisup 8mo agodamnit, I just happen to like the look of the thing. now everyone thinks I'm AI for pausing in my thoughts as I write—as if I were human...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- vjerancrnjak 8mo agoOn reddit it's even worse, I feel like Reddit is internally having their own bots for engagement bait. As someone who loves LaTeX, I can't imagine ever spending so much time on typography on online forums, italics, bold, emdashes, headers, sections. I quit reddit and will quit hn as well if situation worsens.
- whamlastxmas 8mo agoI have the sneaking suspicion that reddit has allowed and facilitated astroturfing for over a decade. As in, providing accounts, eliminating rate limits, artificially boosting posts and comments, and aggressively shadow banned contrary opinions. This is definitely a known phenomenon on a auto moderator level but I bet reddit ownership is complicit in it too
- quesera 8mo agoThis behaviour is also openly acknowledged to have been used in early-Reddit growth hacking. So why not?
- AlexeyBelov 8mo agoThey were caught multiple times doing shady automated things. Most recently auto-translating posts and misleading search engine users with this. At this point there is no goodwill.
- kklisura 8mo agoOff-topic, tangentially: Can we generate a huge amount of code, just compilable code, which is essentially just a trash. We seed the github, bitbucket, etc. and pollute the training grounds.
- SolubleSnake 8mo agoI think this may actually begin to happen anyway with the increased use of coding agents. A lot of the reason people/workers were not in a 'developer' position before was not only because they didn't know how to or want to learn how to code, but because they just didn't know how to or want to learn how to... think. How many times have you had a coworker/boss/user ask for something totally nonsensical, impossible, or maybe even illegal? These people when they get unleashed on these agents and on large business problems are going to be a menace. They will create walls and heaps and mountains of working but totally stupid code as the AI attempts to work with their malformed attempts at a 'thought' and this will pollute github and the codebase for training...eventually it will outnumber serious, professionally written projects and you will reach an inflection point at which AI coding agents 'peak' and they begin to deteriorate. Either that or you need to somehow ensure you are not training on AI written code but that too will cause a PR problem for the firms as it becomes obvious that AI cannot in fact replace developers?
- izucken 8mo agoI feel a sort of disappointment in how easily languages got swindled. There is seemingly no winning angle this time. This is the most doomed I've ever felt.
- dalemhurley 8mo agoSeveral factors: 1. Em dashes are common use in the Queens English 2. People with dyslexia and dysgraphia can more easily interact online 3. People who speak a primary language other than English can more easily interact online The last 2 options mean people who previously would have been more reluctant to participate now have less of a barrier. So while there may be AI generated content, we should just assume it is all negative.
- marginalia_nu 8mo agoI don't think this explains why new accounts use EM-dashes with a 10x higher prevalence than the baseline established by baseline. I also don't think the first point is correct at all.
- solomonb 8mo agoTBH, i've largely stopped correcting any spelling or grammar mistakes in my communcations as a way to assert I am a human.
- mikenew 8mo agoThis feels like an existential threat to HN, and to the general concept of anonymous online discourse. Trust in the platform is foundational, and without it the whole thing falls down. Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is. And even then, you'll still have people handing their account over to an LLM. I really struggle to imagine a way around it. It could be that the future is just smaller, closed groups of people you know or know indirectly.
- zug_zug 8mo agoI don't think that's true at all. One of the things HN does is not let you interact in certain ways until you've earned sufficient karma. This is a basic proof-of-work. If your bot can't average a positive karma, then it'll never get certain privileges. Not to say the system is perfectly tuned for bots, because it's not. The point is that proof of identity is not the only option.
- 3rodents 8mo agoHN is almost entirely about the comments. Voting is useful as a tool for loosely sorting content but otherwise, HN could easily do without it. Some of the most valuable comments come from people with barely any karma. And that’s why HN is great! The restrictions on voting and flagging for new users could be removed without impacting the quality of HN. I can’t imagine any scenario in which HN’s current system could survive the same slopification that is happening on reddit. HN is doing okay at the moment because nobody is yet publishing ebooks and videos on how to astroturf HN to launch your SaaS. Unfortunately, Reddit hasn’t escaped that fate.
- rob 8mo agoThey get the privilege of immediately polluting the website with LLM-generated comments. Many of them sound and look completely normal and have others on here interacting with them. They don't use em dashes, sometimes they'll use all lowercase text, sometimes the owner of the bot will come out and start commenting to throw you off. All examples I've witnessed here. HN should immediately start implementing at least some basic bot detection methods without requiring us to email them every time. I've discovered multiple bots make detailed comments within 30 seconds of each other in different threads, something a normal human wouldn't be able to do. That should be at least flagging the account for review. Obviously they'll get smarter and not do that soon but it would help in the short term. I'd say it's not an issue but everything I described above has happened in less than a month and every day now I'm discovering bots here.
- adamtaylor_13 8mo agoAI has taken this from me—I will never forgive. But seriously, I loved the em-dash and now every time I use it (which is too often) I have to wonder if my words will immediately be written off.
- minimaxir 8mo agoYou'd think that by now people running bots would just set a system prompt instruction to "Never use em-dashes." That still works even with modern models.
- afro88 8mo agoHonestly, comments are just half the problem. At least half the articles I read from HN are vibe written. And I only spot it after reading a few paragraphs. It's leaving a bad taste, and it's sad because HN was guaranteed to have plenty of things worth reading and it's deteriorating
- ok123456 8mo agoI call it stylometric---obfuscation!
- sebastianconcpt 8mo agoFunny to see this after me being influenced to use em dashes more adequately in my blog :) Good to know so I don't do it x10 more :D
- brianstorms 8mo agoI read every book written by Robert Caro—now there was an author who loved em-dashes! I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence. There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text. Read some books, get away from the computer, eh?
- npilk 8mo ago@dang would there be any possibility of creating a view that hides posts and comments by accounts newer than, say, Jan 1 2026? Similar to how https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic works (only showing votes from the oldest accounts)? I know this is unfair to prospective new community members, but I'm unsure of other good methods to filter out AI bots at scale. Would certainly welcome other ideas.
- artemonster 8mo agowhats the point of botting comments on HN? can someone explain?
- 2c0m 8mo agoMy writing style is influenced a lot by what I read. Because I read a lot of LLM output I use more - phrasing in my writing. I'm also influenced by the email style of my colleagues, books I'm reading, X, etc. My literary diet really does show in my writing, so I'll keep up reading the classics to balance out all the LLM content :)
- seewhat 8mo agoI’ve occasionally found myself wanting a comments filter with an account-creation date cutoff. A -3dB cutoff might be >= 01/01/2020, to pick a round figure. Yet I never browse https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic Perhaps a classic comment filter might work…
- pronik 8mo agoOur life has become so dumb in certain ways. There are people who invested heavily in learning their mother or a foreign language, its spelling, grammar, syntax and idiosyncrasies, like when to use an em-dash, an Oxford comma, a semicolon, an ellipsis -- these smart educated people now seriously deliberate whether using wrong dashes and adding a spelling mistake or two would be a good way to prove you are a human (I think we never should have allowed the framing of CAPTCHA to be "prove you are not a robot", it was demeaning back then and still is now, it's just that the alternatives were not and still aren't clear-cut). The same things that would have made you fail a written essay in school are somehow becoming a requirement, but not in "haX0r" or online communities where "writing funny" has always been a differentiating factor, but for absolutely everybody who has to communicate with others in written form. It's of course not a surprise that an LLM would be most proficient in language use and, adjacent to that, in proper formatting of said language. But it's a good thing and a good tool for writing, as anyone who has ever used a classic spell or grammar checker will attest to. But apparently we as a society have once again managed to completely overlook and demonise the good and now people who have paid attention in school have to bow to people who are somehow convinced that perfect spelling is a sign that someone cheated. This is not LLMs' fault, it's people's who think they've understood something when they really haven't, crying heresy over others doing things the correct way. That being said: of course there are social and technological challenges with cheating, spam bots and sock puppets and what not, but the phenomenon itself is not really new, just the scale, cost and quality is way different now. We need to find a balanced way to approach it -- trying to weed out every last possible AI cheater while hurting real innocent people in the process is not worth it. Especially since we don't have a proper metric to actually prove who's a cheater and who is not, it's gotten way harder since the days of "As a large language model" being in every second sentence.
- tuetuopay 8mo agoI felt it quite a while back (more than 10 years ago), when, in high school, I learnt LaTeX and discovered Beamer. I naturally proceeded to make all of my presentations with it, including the rehearsal for a big competitive French exam. The person reviewing the presentation advised me to dirty it up a bit, otherwise nobody would believe that my father wasn’t a PhD researcher that did the work for me. That was a bit saddening honestly. I kept the presentation as-is as I didn’t knew how to willfully screw up a Beamer presentation, and I would not touch PowerPoint (fortunately the final jury believed me). Cheating had always been an issue before LLMs, but now we’re back to the same old tricks: just make sure to add a mistake or two to hide you copied the homework on your neighbor. It’s a shame because I kinda like learning the subtleties of foreign languages, and as a non-native English speaker, it’s quite rewarding when going online!
- steveBK123 8mo agoThis is like how I noticed the increase in thoughtbros on LinkedIn posting longform writing since the advent of LLMs..
- WhereIsTheTruth 8mo agoNot everyone speaks English natively—most have relied on Google Translate in the past, and now they turn to AI tools. There's nothing wrong with that, provided they're using these tools to express their own thoughts rather than for spam or botting. ^ And that's what i just did
- escapeteam 8mo agoWhy is the em dash so popular with LLMs, given that they are likely not as popular in the writings used for training them?
- krickelkrackel 8mo agoGive me back my em dash (2025): https://acuoptimist.com/2025/12/give-me-back-my-em-dash/ https://acuoptimist.com/2025/12/give-me-back-my-em-dash/
- atleastoptimal 8mo agoIt would be trivial to make a HN comment agent that avoids all the usual hallmarks of AI writing. Mere estimations of bot activity based on character frequency would likely underestimate their presence.
- tonymet 8mo agoI won't support this rampant emdashophobia. The internet deserves better typography. So much so that I've started a Wikipedia project to replace the dashes and other abysmal characters with proper typography. All of my devices replace hyphens with emdashes, ascii typography with glorious unicode, etc.
- tristor 8mo agoWeirdly, I learned that it was important to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation due to getting repeatedly dunked on in IRC long before the dawn of LLMs. I have no intent of changing, and people thought I was an "old" when I was younger because I texted with correct language, I'm sure people suspect I'm an LLM now. I don't care, and I don't try to guess for other comments either, I care if the content is relevant, accurate, and useful or interesting.
- Velocifyer 8mo agoI find that specifically GPT4 uses a lot on em dashes. I find that it uses em-dashes when it is not usefull.
- peterfirefly 8mo agoI would use em-dashes all the time if they were easier to type.
- vardalab 8mo agoMy STT is cleaned up using llm and it often likes those dashes. I let it be because I could not care less.
- darig 8mo ago[dead]
- aubanel 8mo ago> Comments from newly registered accounts on HN are also more likely to mention AI and LLMs -> to be fair there must also be a bias of young incoming ppl on HN being more prone to be starting their career on the hot new tech
- IFC_LLC 8mo agoI'd notice one thing: I use LLMs to spellcheck and when I do, here is your barrage of em-dashes.
- mkprc 8mo agoA counter comment: I'll bet many folks didn't know what an em-dash was until the whole "you can tell it's AI because of the em-dashes" thing. Then everyone learned what an em-dash is, and every pause in every sentence thereafter suddenly deserves an em-dash. While I suspect it's mostly bots, the number of sincere (human) new em-dashers isn't negligible.
- D_R_Farrell 8mo agoYou'll have to pry the – from my cold, dead hands
- StarterPro 8mo agoI assumed everyone was just using an LLM to give the best response. Honestly I've lost all respect for people who use LLM generated anything.
- blahgeek 8mo agoIt may be related to the fact that some non-native English speakers (including myself) would sometimes use AI based tools to revise or translate their writings before posting online
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- roger110 8mo ago–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
- eongchen 8mo agoI've had to deliberately strip em-dashes from my writing, even though sometimes they're genuinely the right punctuation for expressing a complex thought. The reason? I use AI to polish my professional writing (including this one), and em-dashes are the first thing I remove during review because leaving them in makes it look like I just hit "send" on an AI response without reading it. The irony is that in tech, almost everyone is using AI to improve their writing at this point. And often it does make things clearer and more concise. But we've created this weird social norm where the output needs to look like it wasn't touched by AI, even when everyone knows it was. So we all spend time manually roughing up perfectly good text to maintain the illusion of authenticity.
- Rapzid 8mo agoLOL, there are a few people that still understand how programming works. Never mind prompting the LLM, you could just replace em-dashes or introduce fuzzing into the text to mask the AI generation. Not even an inconvenience!
- emporas 8mo agoIn some other news, new accounts on MoltBook use em-dashes a lot less than normal. Bots are tricked by humans posing as intelligent machines!
- figmert 8mo agoAnecdotally I've noticed a lot of articles lately having a heading that says "why this matters". It's weird how it's become so prevalent lately.
- cik 8mo agoI'm waiting for the return of the interrobang (‽). I've used em-dashes for years, down to having an xmodmap for it, also for my beloved interrobang.
- 0pteron 8mo agoI don't even know how to make a — my keyboard just has a -
- deafpolygon 8mo ago> it’s hard to explain why new accounts would be 10x more prone easy, they are using llms to write their posts…