7 ms·
Prior 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 reall
by mrandish 8mo ago
Prior 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)
- pvtmert 8mo agoHonestly, first paragraph sounds more human and sincere for sure. Also adding better "context" into the discussion, than the usual claims/punchlines of marketing-speak. Maybe it's not exactly the grammar itself but also overall structuring of the idea/thought into the process. The regular output sounds much more like marketing-piece or news-coverage than an individual anyway. I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago> I think, people wanna discuss things with people, not with a news-editor. If I understand you correctly, then Yes I completely agree, but my worry is that this can also be "emulated" as shown by my comment by Models already available to us. My question is, technically there's nothing to stop new accounts from using say Kimi and to have a system prompt meant to not sound AI and I feel like it can be effective. If that's the case, doesn't that raise the question of what we can detect as AI or not (which was my point), the grand parent comment suggests that they use intentionally bad human writing sometimes to not be detected as AI but what I am saying is that AI can do that thing too, so is intentionally bad writing itself a good indicator of being human? And a bigger question is if bad writing isn't an indicator, then what is? Or if there can even be an good indicator (if say the bot is cautious)? If there isn't, can we be sure if the comments we read are AI or not Essentially the dead-internet-theory. I feel like most websites have bots but we know that they are bots and they still don't care but we are also in this misguided trust that if we see some comments which don't feel like obvious bots, then they must be humans. My question is, what if that can be wrong? It feels to me definitely possible with current Tech/Models like say Kimi for example, Doesn't this lead to some big trust issues within the fabric of internet itself? Personally, I don't feel like the whole website's AI but there are chances of some sneaky action happening at distance type of new accounts for sure which can be LLM's and we can be none the wiser. All the same time that real accounts are gonna get questioned if they are LLM or not if they are new (my account is almost 2 years old fwiw and I got questioned by people esentially if this account is AI or not) But what this does do however, is make people definitely lose a bit of trust between each other and definitely a little cautious towards each message that they read. (This comment's a little too conspiratorial for my liking but I can't help but shake this feeling sometimes) It just is all so weird for me sometimes, Idk but I guess that there's still an intuition between whose human and not and actually the HN link/article iteslf shows that most people who deploy AI on HN in newer accounts use standard models without much care which is the reason why em-dashes get detected and maybe are good detector for sometime/some-people and this could make the original OP's comment of intentionally having bad grammar to sound more human make sense too because em-dashes do have more probability of sounding AI than not :/ It's just this very weird situation and I am not sure how to explain where depending on from whatever situation you look at, you can be right. You can try to hurt your grammar to sound more human and that would still be right and you can try to be the way you are because you think that models can already have intentionally bad grammar too/capable of it and to have bad grammar isn't a benchmark itself for AI/not so you are gonna keep using good grammar and you are gonna be right too. It's sort of like a paradox and I don't have any answers :/ Perhaps my suggestion right now feels to me to not overthink about it. Because if both situations are right, then do whatever imo. Just be human yourself and then you can back down this statement with well truth that you are human even if you get called AI. So I guess, TLDR: Speak good grammar or not intentionally, just write human and that's enough or that should be enough I guess.
- goodmythical 8mo agofun fact, grok and kimi are both pretty good at emulating "chat" responses with any number of prompts. "respond like a twitter user", "pretend like we're texting", etc
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago> fun fact, grok and kimi are both pretty good at emulating "chat" responses with any number of prompts. > "respond like a twitter user", "pretend like we're texting", etc +1 to it. I actually had given a response to the above parent comment itself using Kimi and I would've said that its (sort of) a good emulation fwiw.
- xeckr 8mo agoShow HN: A RL suite that teaches LLMs to introduce typos at just the right frequency for the output to appear more human.
- colin_fraizer 8mo ago[dead]
- Razengan 8mo agoI also used — and "proper" quotes which macOS/iOS puts in for you anyway I also like … This is like ruining swastikas and loading rainbows
- mghackerlady 8mo agoThe ellipsis problem is solved by using ... instead of the dedicated unicode character
- Razengan 8mo ago3 characters instead of 1, how can you live with yourself??
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoLots of systems convert … for you automatically.
- colechristensen 8mo agoMy rage–induced habit of ignoring typos caused by the iPhone autocorrect and general abuse of English is suddenly authentic and not lazy and slightly obnoxious (ok maybe it's still those things too) >I put the em dash on modifier+dash This is the default on Macs
- chirayuk 8mo agoIt's Option Shift "-" for the em-dash. Option "-" is the en-dash.
- marssaxman 8mo agoMy teenager recently asked me why I write like a chatbot, apparently unaware that some human beings prefer to write in complete sentences with attention to details like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, and that LLMs were trained on this sort of writing. This makes me think of the fad where people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame, because it somehow connotes authenticity. I'm sure some people are already embracing a bit of sloppiness in their writing as a signal of humanity; I'm equally sure that future chatbots will learn to do the same.
- pvtmert 8mo agoI started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context. Not like I have a perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :) This applies not only work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters.
- mghackerlady 8mo agounrelated but I've never understood how to put a smiley at the end of parenthetical sentences (which comes up surprisingly often for me since I use smileys a lot and also like using parentheses). Just the smiley as an end parentheses (like this :) feels off but adding another parentheses (like this :) ) makes it look like it should be nested which causes problems since I also tend to nest parenthetical sentences (like (this)). Yes I enjoy lisp, how could you tell
- tuckerman 8mo agoPost C++11 you can just do (like this:)), no extra space needed before the last parenthesis.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoBut then it looks like I'm using a double smiley[0] which I do actually use on occasion [0] :))
- hinkley 8mo agoI use “-“ because I thought the amount of parentheticals I was using was a bit unhinged. In these times of TLDR, I sometimes move the aside to the bottom as an afterthought instead of leaving it inline. I dunno this en versus em dash stuff, I just use the minus sign on my keyboard.
- sodacanner 8mo agoIt really is unfortunate that such a fun piece of punctuation has been effectively gutted. This isn't even really limited to just the em-dash, but I don't know if there's another example of a corporation (or set of them) having such a massive impact on grammar and writing as OpenAI and their ilk have. Entire sentence structures have been effectively blacklisted from use. It's repulsive.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago> It really is unfortunate that such a fun piece of punctuation has been effectively gutted. This isn't even really limited to just the em-dash, but I don't know if there's another example of a corporation (or set of them) having such a massive impact on grammar and writing as OpenAI and their ilk have. Well, to be fair Gen-z slangs also have a massive impact. My generation sometimes point blank said to me that they didn't have the attention span to read my sentence :/ Definitely picked up a few slangs along the way now. I had to somehow toggle a switch between how I write on HN/how I write with my friends the first few times and I write pretty informally in HN, but its that you got to be saying lowk bussin rizz 67 to make sense. My friends who use insta literally had Abbreivations which were of 9 letter words in my own language that the insta community of my nation's gen-z sort of made. Although I would agree that we haven't seen a whole unicode being thrown this way in ALL generations (I feel like universally everyone treats em-dashes as something written by AI or definitely get an AI alert) But I think that 67 is something that atp maybe even most adults might have gotten exposed to which has probably changed the meaning of number.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoThe attention span thing is so real. I'll post a 2 sentence response to a comment and get a "I'm not reading allat"
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo agoSurely AI engine developers will notice patterns in which humans identify them, and change their behavior to avoid detection. You’d think ethically leaving it in would be better. But we’re talking about big tech companies here.
- mattmanser 8mo agoChatGPT evolves, everything grows. In AI speech, tells abound. Comma, emphasis. A new way, a better way.
- danparsonson 8mo ago> Comma, emphasis. > A new way, a better way. The autumn winds blow.
- xdennis 8mo agoI used to do that too… even using the ellipses character instead of three dots. But on the other hand I'm not a native English speaker and have poor spelling (i.e. words pass spell check, but are incorrect). That's one of the signals I use to detect if YouTube videos are AI slop. If it's narrated by a non-native speaker, it's much more likely to be high quality. If it's narrated by a British voice with a deep timber, it's 100% AI.
- azalemeth 8mo agoI have consistently used em-dashes, either in the form of alt+- on MacOS, or in the form of `--` in LaTeX (or `---`), for the last 30 odd years. Now I find myself deliberately making things worse to avoid being accused of not being human! Bah!
- rnxrx 8mo agoI'm also increasingly aware that my own writing style and punctuation seem to line up with what might be associated with an AI, but some of the tells (em-dashes, spaces after periods, etc) seem like artifacts of when in history we learned to write. I wonder how much crossover there would be between a trained text analysis model looking for Gen-X authors and another looking for LLM's.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoPeople don't put spaces after periods? Do people really write.like.this?
- _puk 8mo agoOn the Gboard keyboard. Without fail. But that's a different issue.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoHappens to me all the time trying to type a search phrase in Safari in iPhone for some reason.
- plausibility 8mo agoWhen you’re trying to type a URL there’s a period next to the space bar where your right thumb usually hits space, but if you’re just texting iOS won’t show that. That’s my theory, just muscle memory.
- ibejoeb 8mo agoI worked on something like this in 2000-1. We were attempting to identify the native language and origin region of authors based on aberrant modes in second languages (as a simple case, a french person writing english might say "we are tuesday.") It was accurate and fast with the sota back then; I think you could one-shot a general purpose LLM today.
- altairprime 8mo agoHow dire the literacy crisis, that chatbots are their only exposure to composition.
- heresie-dabord 8mo agoThe future of education is LLMs representing educational standards to a population of innumerates and illiterates.
- AlyssaRowan 8mo agoI do a similar thing — also with AHK! — and I don’t intend to stop. I think probably the AI/LLM bubble will pop before I consider changing my habits there. Tip: Patterns like “It’s not just X, it’s Y” are a more telltale sign of LLM slop. I assume they probably trained on too much marketing blurb at some point and now it’s stuck.
- mike_hearn 8mo agoHave the same problem but with bullet points, which I learned to type years ago and have used on HN for a long time: • Like • This (option-8 on a Mac US keyboard layout). Now it looks like something only an LLM would do.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoHell I've been accused simply for using markdown. Granted, excessive formatting in markdown (especially when I'm telling a bad faith wikipedia contributor to cut it out since wikipedia doesn't even use markdown) is one of the biggest suspects for me but theres a difference between italicising something for emphasis and and *bolding* every statement *to an excessive degree*
- ale42 8mo agoFor those who are interested, that one is Alt-7 (numeric keypad) on Windows. This works because in the "OEM" codepage (e.g. 437), char 7 corresponds to a symbol that is mapped into Unicode to • (← I just typed this using Alt-7, and the arrow using Alt-27). In a similar way I type the infamous ones—the ones that give you away as an LLM even if you aren't one. It's Alt-0151, this time with no OEM codepage conversion because of the zero in front (anyway that codepage had no em-dashes, the closest one would be Alt-196, which is ─, i.e. a line drawing character).
- dylan604 8mo agoI love using ° with is the opt-shift-8 when posting temps to indicate I'm on a real keyboard and not some device. Plus, it's just faster than typing degrees
- rzzzt 8mo ago℃ and ℉ to the rescue! https://graphemica.com/%E2%84%83 https://graphemica.com/%E2%84%83
- aendruk 8mo ago> this is a compatibility character provided for roundtrip compatibility with legacy encodings. […] The Unicode standard explicitly discourages the use of this character (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Unicode_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Unicode_character)
- AlecSchueler 8mo agoFwiw your comment has lots of human tells and doesn't seem AI generated at all.
- mrandish 8mo agoSadly, I think the same is true for my two posts accused of being LLM generated. It's become a bit of a reflexive witch-hunt when just being more than five sentences and basically decent grammar / vocabulary is enough to garner some drive-by accusations. Hopefully, it's a short-term over reaction that will subside.
- jeremy151 8mo agoYou're absolutely right! I kid. I'm also a former avid user of the em-dash, but have mostly stopped using it. I've even started replacing em-dash usage with commas, which often results in a slightly awkward, perhaps incorrect, but quaintly artisanal sentence with a LaCroix-like spritz of authenticity. My double-space-after-a-period though, I will keep that until the end. Even if it often doesn't even render in HTML output, I feel a nostalgic connection to my 1993 high school typing teacher's insistence that a sentence must be allowed to breathe.
- CuriouslyC 8mo agoSadly, the comma is not a good em-dash replacement. IME, periods and semicolons do the job best. I still use em-dashes in place of parentheses though because they're so much more readable.
- bhk 8mo agoAnd by the way, what the Hell is up with all these people claiming that two spaces is an obsolete typewriter-era pre-proportional-font thing? Narrow proportional spaces make two spaces after a period MORE important for visually separating sentences. Is it old fashioned to think logically?
- fn-mote 8mo agoIt’s old fashioned to think that space in the input relates to space in the output.
- jeremy151 8mo agoYes, I find it useful while editing regardless of the final rendering. Maybe it's a quirk of how I process information visually, or a holdover from learning to type on an avocado green Selectric.
- skue 8mo agoYou know the only reason we used double spaces between sentences in the typewriter days was because everything was monospaced, right? Modern variable width fonts provide additional space automatically.
- dmos62 8mo agoExactly what an LLM would say, haha.
- kandros 8mo agoNice try
- mainframed 8mo agoI also used em-dash before LLMs, though I would not call myself a typography geek. But yesterday I wrote a birthday message to someone and replaced my em-dashes with minus signs, because I did not want them to think that my message is LLM generated..
- cwnyth 8mo agoEx-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.
- BenjiWiebe 8mo agoAre you familiar with the 'Compose' key/xcompose?
- blooalien 8mo agoIndeed, the compose key is how I've always handled easy access to additional (proper? complete?) punctuation (and several other useful characters) capabilities on desktop Linux for many years now. I usually set the Caps-Lock key to my compose key because I literally never use Caps-Lock anyhow, so it's nice to turn it into a useful key. :)
- calf 8mo agoAs an em-dash abuser I have decided that it is a crutch to not think through what I am saying--I can lazily connect a stream of thoughts rather than think clearly and explicitly form sentence transitions and so on
- Yizahi 8mo agoWere you using them as a replacement for a comma--without spaces on both sides of the em-dash--like how I did just now? If no, you are safe from being mistaken for an LLM program. Honestly, while it is a legitimate punctuation rule, I've never seen a human on the internet to write like that. But LLMs do it constantly, whenever they generate long enough sentences.
- dylan604 8mo agoI've used the -- with no spaces in posts to HN multiple times.
- 98codes 8mo agoI'm a human who writes like that, because mobile and desktop OSs have made it easy—so easy—to include things like em-dashes and other formerly uncommon punctuation. I also come from an age where people were taught things like proper grammar and punctuation, so go figure.
- WesolyKubeczek 8mo ago> Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM. I use em dashes, and I don't care whether or not someone assumes I'm an LLM. Typography exists for a reason.
- MerrimanInd 8mo ago> default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar If leaving out the Oxford comma here was an intentional joke I both commend and curse you!
- zeristor 8mo agoWhen every breath is a Turing test, AmIBotOrNot? I’m waiting for a Philip K. Dick bot to declare me non-human. Am I the only one who in a Captcha test sometimes wants a different option for the “I am Human” check box? Ironically really since to prove we’re human we have to check the boxes with a crossing in them, no account to be made of people who call them zebra crossings.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- abustamam 8mo agoI use double hyphens instead of em-dashes when I'm on my computer. I think some programs will combine them into an em-dash but most of the time they're just double dashes. My phone lets me long-press the hyphen key to get an em-dash so sometimes I'll use it. Probably the biggest tell that I'm not AI is that I'm probably not using it in the appropriate circumstances!
- anotherevan 8mo ago> assume I'm an LLM I've noticed a habit of late of people accusing a comment of being LLM generated if they disagree with it. It was getting quite tiresome a few weeks ago but seems to have died down. I suppose it is possible that they are actually LLMs making the accusations? :-) (I'm one of those weirdos that try to use proper grammar and complete sentences in text messages and instant messages.)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- nextaccountic 8mo agoI used to use a minus dash "-" often on my comments. Not em dash, but, still, it might be confused for AI, so I stopped doing that.l
- hojinkoh 8mo agoI still have em-dash pinned at the top of my clipboard manager. Though nowadays I'm training myself to use some more definitely incorrect punctuations ((like this)) in informal scenarios;; hopefully LLMs won't catch up to such strange usage anytime soon. Broken sentences. Also useful. Like in some literature works.
- tempaccountabgd 8mo ago[dead]