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I'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
by d4mi3n 7mo ago
I'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 7mo agoYou're absolutely right. Not being able to communicate in your own unique style is not just sad, it is incredibly frustrating.
- asplake 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo agoExactly
- wongarsu 7mo 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
- d4mi3n 7mo agoI think this is interesting in that I feel, grammatically and structurally, LLMs often generate _higher quality_ text than most humans do. What tends to be lower quality is the meaning of said texts. Say what you want about marketing-isms of your typical LLM, they have been trained and often succeed at making legible, easy to scan blobs of text. I suspect if more LLM spam was curated/touched up, most people would be unable to distinguish it from human discourse. There are already folks commenting on this article discussing other patterns they use to detect or flag bots using LLMs.
- Sharlin 7mo agoI mean, yes, LLMs write grammatically perfect, well-structured English (and many other languages prevalent in their training sets). That's exactly why many people are now suspicious of anyone who writes neat, professional-style English on the internet.
- pclmulqdq 7mo agoEm-dashes are a bit too conversational for formal prose, so they have always been looked down on aside from usage by AI.
- dang 7mo agoJust do it anyway—I always have, and always will. Well, I haven't always—just for maybe 20 years.
- bigyabai 7mo agoIn a lot of ways, it feels like this is simply a fight for recognition that the Mac keyboard supports emdashes. This wouldn't be an issue if mobile users or Windows users were exercising it too, but it's just Mac owners and LLMs. And Mac owners are probably the minority of instances where it is used.
- acheron 7mo agoIt works on mobile iOS too. Either the hold down - or just typing -- and letting it autocorrect will work.
- mkoryak 7mo agoSomeone should ban this bot, I've seen it before and it's always pretending to run this place
- cirelli94 7mo agoIt doesn't look like a bot. created: August 18, 2007 karma: 36696
- jules-jules 7mo agoIt was a joke. Dang is the site-wide moderator
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fernandotakai 7mo agoi've always used double dashes -- because i once i setup a osx shortcut to change those into em-dashes, but i never bother to setup this again in other computers. so now, i just use double dashes for everything. (shit, i wonder when llms will start doing this instead of normal em)
- OJFord 7mo agoFunnily enough I've actually started using them a little — it made me realise how much more legible/likable I find them. (Until a few years ago I probably mostly only saw them in print, and I suppose it just never occurred to me that I liked them in particular vs. just the whole book being professionally typeset generally.)
- basch 7mo agoare there really places that a comma, super-comma; or (parenthesis) dont work roughly as well? I find the em-dash mildly abhorrent, even before this all.
- mroche 7mo ago> super-comma This is the first time I've ever heard the character ";" referred to as such. It's always been "semi-colon" to me, is this a region/culture difference? I'm not saying you're wrong, I find it interesting.
- basch 7mo agosame character, used differently? i call it a super comma when its separating a list with commas within the sets. so if i am listing colors like green, blue, red; foods like apple, orange, strawberry; and seasons like winter, summer, fall. it's one use case for an em-dash, because whatever you have inside it has commas in the phrase. square and rectangle situation. a supercomma is a subset of semicolon.
- chasd00 7mo agono it's always been semicolon, the "super-comma" comes from describing how to use it. "It's similar to a comma but like a super comma."
- xdennis 7mo ago> super-comma I would have assumed it's a synonym for apostrophe. super-comma <-> upper-comma, with super meaning upper, like in superscript.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoPeople will accuse of all types of stuff, regardless if you use em-dashes or not. The way I write apparently is familiar to some as LLM-jargon they've told me, I'm guessing because I've spewed my views and writings on the internet for decades, the LLMs were trained on the way I write, so actually the LLMs are copying me! And others like me. But anyways, you can't really control how people see your stuff, if you're human I think the humanness will come through anyways, even if you have some particular structure or happen to use em-dashes sometimes. They're so easy to prompt around anyways, that the real tricky LLM stuff to detect by sense and reading is the stuff where the prompter been trying to sneakily make them more human.
- wgm 7mo agoI totally agree. When I use em-dashes in my /family iMessage thread/ I get accused of having used ChatGPT to write my reply—my one-sentence reply about dinner plans. Dear Lord.
- Aachen 7mo agoI wish my family knew what an em dash is. That's gotta count for something!
- anematode 7mo agoI've sometimes taken to using spaced en dashes, which I haven't seen in many AI comments: https://anemato.de/blog/emdash https://anemato.de/blog/emdash
- elevation 7mo agoLLM fatigue is real. It's not just em-dash — it's the overall tone of the writing that clues people in. But if your viewpoints and approach are unique, your typesetting won't raise suspicion of machine-generation, except in the most dull of readers. Just be you and it will be fine. If you'd like more tips on writing I'd be happy to help.
- rout39574 7mo agoYou, sir, are evil. I mean that in the most complementary of manners.
- natpalmer1776 7mo agoThis is art. If it weren't so difficult to capture the full context I would literally print and frame this comment. Edit: I take that back. I'm going to print and frame this comment. It stands on its own well enough, and I'm the only one who's going to see it. Second Edit: Took a bit to get it formatted in a way I liked, but I have officially placed an order for my local Walmart photo center https://ibb.co/0NpVMgh https://ibb.co/0NpVMgh https://ibb.co/F9N9tJM https://ibb.co/F9N9tJM
- escapeteam 7mo agoYou‘re absolutely correct!
- fsckboy 7mo agoon HN, the problem is not LLMs, it's everybody talking about LLMs incessantly
- rcarmo 7mo agoIt’s not even the key combo, iOS and autocorrect will do it for you.
- adamsilkey 7mo agoI feel the same way. I've used em-dashes in my writing forever, and I was always particular about making sure they were used properly (from a typography standpoint with no surrounding spaces). But now, I have to be so picky about when I use them, even when I think it's the perfect punctuation mark. I'll often just resort to a single hyphen with spaces around. It's wrong, but it doesn't signal someone to go "AI AI AI!!"
- alt227 7mo agoDont worry, soon LLMs will be trained to avoid using em dashes and then all will be right in your world again!
- stmw 7mo agothe destruction of the em-dash is really a shame; and "--" is under suspicion..
- vanschelven 7mo agoI read a text from the 60s by my grandfather this week and seeing an emdash made the LLM alarm in my head go off... Had to really stop myself before I went all "and you" on him
- epistasis 7mo agoMy thoughts exactly. As somebody who has always loved to use em-dashes and bulleted lists to organize my thoughts, this is heartbreaking. It's like being named Michael Bolton and watching a singer rise in fame named Michael Bolton. Why should I change my style?
- latexr 7mo ago> It's like being named Michael Bolton and watching a singer rise in fame named Michael Bolton. For those who don’t know the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI1NfFExOSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI1NfFExOSo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space
- dredmorbius 7mo agoOr an exceedingly principled and well-respected award-winning journalist named "Alex Jones": <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_S._Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_S._Jones> (No, not that one.)
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago> Why should I change my style? Office Space jokes aside, you shouldn't. I think it's very important to be yourself and refuse to let people pressure you into changing for no good reason. I am not an em dash user myself, as it's a pain to generate when there's no key on the keyboard for it. But if I were, you best believe I wouldn't change my style one bit. People can accuse me of being an LLM if they wish, but that's no skin off my back.
- jug 7mo agoI switched to semicolons... They look similar enough in use to string things together. I'm sure AI is coming for those too though, and that will be a grim day because those are my last stand.
- pianom4n 7mo agoThere are times when an em dash can be used in place of a semicolon, but I don't think that's the usual LLM usage. Instead it's replacing a replacing a comma, colon, or period. Unless you're talking about restructuring your sentences to allow for a semicolon; that's fine. For example that semicolon could have been an em dash, but I don't think it's the type that LLMs over favor.
- CuriouslyC 7mo agoMy interpretation of LLM em-dash use is that it's like an aside, which is pretty much always going to be weird if converted to a comma since the punctuation was providing un-relatedness information.
- vldx 7mo agoI did as well; funny though, I see uptick in its usage along the board.
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago> I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. I've typeset books (back in the QuarkXPress days, before Adobe's InDesign ruled the typesetting world) and never bothered with em-dashes. Writing online is, to me, a subset of ASCII. YMMW. But the one thing I don't understand is this: how comes people using LLM outputs are so fucking dumb as to not be able to pass it through a filter (which could even be another LLM prompt) that just says: "remove em-dashes, don't use emojis, don't look like a dumb fuck". Why oh why are those lazy assholes who ruin our world so dumb that they can't even fix that? It's facepalming.
- Terretta 7mo ago> good typographical conventions Here since 2010 in this account, I use em-dashes. It's easy—and effective—to type using “Opt Shift -” on a Mac. Oh yeah, left and right “curly quotes” as well, and the occasional … > It's so sad Don’t forget «’» — but ain’t nobody got time for that! A few more to reclaim typography: https://howtotypeanything.com/alt-codes-on-mac/ https://howtotypeanything.com/alt-codes-on-mac/
- ceroxylon 7mo agoThat was my reaction when LLMs first started getting "good" I turned to my friend and said "They've co-opted the structure of effective language!"
- selridge 7mo agoI mean, LLMs aren’t making people sniff around for typography as though that’s a reliable proxy for humanity. Em dashes, semicolons, deftly delving. It’s all just so…facile. We might as well tell ourselves we can tell it’s shopped from the pixels, having seen some shops in our day.
- alienbaby 7mo agoI continue to write like I always have done, and if people think it's AI I really couldn't care less.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoBased. (I know it's a bit low effort, but if ever something called for "based" it's this.)
- OrangeMusic 7mo agoI would add a disclaimer to the end of all my posts. (Disclaimer: the use of em-dashes doesn't prove this was AI-generated — I can assure you I wrote this myself.)
- krapp 7mo agoFor all anyone knows, you just prompted the LLM to include that, or had a script append it.
- BrandoElFollito 7mo agoExactly. I got that habit from LaTeX and like it because it brings us closer to real typography. And I will still use them -- fully aware that some people will complain about AI and whatnot.