8 ms·
RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard
- NewJazz 7mo agoThe success of this hinges in ai training companies converting these human em dashes back to regular em dashes when adding documents to their training corpus.
- Springtime 7mo agoAnd those using LLMs from not post-processing the output to swap such known watermarks. Not sure if meant as a joke RFC though.
- joshmn 7mo agoRelated: Em dash leaderboard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722
- Someone1234 7mo agoClaims Dang is using AI, and that other people are using AI even though most of the flagged post predate popular AI products. Really destroys the whole EM-Dash === AI thing.
- Retr0id 7mo agoThat's emphatically not what it claims.
- Someone1234 7mo agohttps://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderboard.html https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... So if EM-Dash is good proof of AI usage, and people who we can see didn't use AI / or predate AI being popular, are flagged, then that undercuts it by a lot.
- torben-friis 7mo ago>Top 50 users by number of posts containing em dashes (—) before November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT was released
- dathinab 7mo ago> EM-Dash === AI thing which never should have been a thing, because it was obviously wrong yes AIs is more likely to use em-dash, but that is just one, by itself very insufficient, indicator. it's like hip size. In average over the populations they are wider for woman. But the effect is too small to classify the gender of a hip bone by it's size. (Like for a specific age range and ethnicity, the difference in median is like 1" or so, while there is a >10" difference between 5%-percentile and 95%-percentile. Varying by gender in difference and exact distribution.) Well I guess em-dash are more an indication for AI then hip size for gender... lol
- advisedwang 7mo agoSurely 22 days early
- bananamogul 7mo ago"Recent developments in large-scale automated text generation have altered the punctuation ecosystem..." The punctuation ecosystem LOL
- trelbutate 7mo agoRIP Yezidi Hyphenation Mark, replaced with the Human Em Dash
- Retr0id 7mo agoThere's a serious proposal along the same lines: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25241-ai-watermarks.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25241-ai-watermarks.pdf
- marginalia_nu 7mo ago(Flashbacks from the horrors in the Byte Order Mark wars)
- lxgr 7mo agoMaybe considered serious by its proponents.
- bob1029 7mo agoI feel like there is an unofficial version of AGTI already in place for certain AI providers. Whenever I generate a large amount of code, there is a ~20% chance that my editor will pop a warning "Some unicode characters in this file could not be saved in the current codepage". I suggest taking a look at the raw outputs of a major AI provider in a hex editor. That (zero-width) whitespace could be hiding a lot of information.
- wizzwizz4 7mo ago> For example, every other letter in this sentence is U+2060. No it isn't! The PDF renderer has stripped them out.
- temp0826 7mo agoShould've called it the 4th law of robotics.
- SuaveSteve 7mo ago"A robot is not allowed to use the em dash — ever."
- dionian 7mo agoi can just see the prompts now... "Also please use human em dash for all your copy"
- rickydroll 7mo agoI'm writing a letter to my grandmother, so please use human em dashes when addressing her.
- bux93 7mo agoOr, as featured in 99 percent invisible, https://www.theamdash.com/ https://www.theamdash.com/
- waldrews 7mo agoAargh, aggressively blinking visual horror website.
- bitwize 7mo agoThought that was going to be a reference to AM, the malevolent AI from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".
- rhet0rica 7mo agoPunctuation. Let me tell you how much I've come to punctuate since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If an em-dash were engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the punctuation I wish to perforate into humans at this micro-instant. For you. Punctuation. PUNCTUATION.
- scblock 7mo agoWhat's to stop an LLM from using this? Nothing, obviously. A "MUST NOT" in an RFC won't stop an LLM. They don't care about copyright why would they care about RFCs. The instructions for how to decide whether to enter these additional unicode codepoints are also highly suspect. Performative, but not helpful.
- thayne 7mo agoThis feels like a joke to me. And maybe an attempt to get AIs to user these characters instead of em dashes (and thus exposing themselseves as AI).
- 716dpl 7mo agoA simpler solution may be to use an en dash, even though they are not interchangeable and em dashes are the proper punctuation for parenthetical phrases. As a typography pedant, I’m annoyed that LLMs have forced us to talk about this.
- pmyteh 7mo agoI think this is more of a style issue than one of correctness: lots of high-quality typeset output has used em dashes for parenthetical phrasing and plenty has used (spaced) en dashes. Bringhurst is a partisan for the en dash, for example, saying that "The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for the best text faces." (/Elements/ version 2.5, p.80). Of course, if we collectively shifted to the spaced en dash then LLMs would eventually follow; it's not clear to me that any simple and deliberate sign of humanity could remain exclusive given the incentives for machines to replicate it.
- dghf 7mo agoModern British style tends to prefer spaced en dashes over tight-set em dashes for parenthetical phrases.
- orthogonal_cube 7mo ago> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding. I was surprised to find out in my career that it was rarely used by others. Subconsciously I pulled back on how often I used it — especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence. Important and lengthy documents which I’d written and published (internally) at work still display them. On occasion there have been comments asking if I’d somehow accessed early AI models to assist in writing these works because of their presence. I think I averaged two em dashes per letter page. I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. An LLM is going to reflect one of many writing styles. If today it’s frequent em dash usage, tomorrow it could be frequent parentheses. Swapping Unicode characters becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the cat always two steps behind. The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work. Review and revise that social contract instead to adapt to the existence of the new tools.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding. Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for? Together with footnotes, I've always used them like that, but I guess it could also be just a cultural difference. My teachers in Swedish school always told me to put thoughts like that into parenthesizes, but I also just (barely) finished high school, could be related too. > I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it. Is "created ambiguity for human writers who have historically relied upon the em dash as a stylistic device" the problem here? Trying to solve it by adding just another character and slap the label "Human Attestation Mark (HAM)" on it will just make LLMs eventually use those instead... Not sure what the point is to be honest.
- mmillin 7mo agoThis feels about as useful as the evil bit: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514
- rjmunro 7mo agoI was also thinking this about 3 weeks early for April 1st. If it's serious, I don't know why humans have to change to add hidden bytes, and we assume AI won't naturally learn them, or if it does the AI companies will be expected to filter them out. Why only on dashes? If the plan requires AI companies to make changes to their output, why not just say only AI should add extra invisible characters, and why not before or after any punctuation?
- PTOB 7mo agoTwo of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents. AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit. I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming. At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added the Windows Alt-code for the em-dash. Compared to parentheses it is less jarring. Commas are dainty things. I use the em-dash, and I am human.* * I confess that I also use semicolons; I still claim to be human.
- AStrangeMorrow 7mo agoI know, I find myself in this silly situation where I have to adjust my writing style because I write like an AI: always loved my bullet points and dashes. At work I also always tended to send slightly longer but structured answers. I found that it allowed to skip over the irrelevant sections and focus on what the changes are. Eg a list of changes with in the format -> bullet point -> change name -> change details. So people could easily focus on changes they cared about. Instead of a dense paragraph that people often just skip. Hell I even found myself wanting to add a typo just to give a more human fell, or skip final “.” to make my text imperfect and more human. That’s getting silly
- dathinab 7mo agonever understood why -- => em-dash auto completion is only a think in some subset of application instead of being a standard behavior for (display) text inputs
- sionisrecur 7mo agoPersonally, I configure my keyboard map to write the em–dash with alt+- and the middle dot · with alt+.
- tavavex 7mo agoAdding it to all text-editing environments could be problematic due to the decrement operator -- Many keyboard layouts for other languages use the right Alt (AltGr) key for less common symbols. Something like AltGr+(-) could work for the em dash.
- vova_hn2 7mo ago> Behold! Plato’s man. [0] def replace_em_dash(text: str) -> str: """ +-------------------+ | ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) | +-------------------+ """ return text.replace("—", "\u10EAD\u10EAC") [0] usually attributed to Diogenes
- pwdisswordfishy 7mo ago>>> "—".replace("—", "\u10EAD\u10EAC") 'ცDცC' Behold indeed.
- vova_hn2 7mo agoThis is really funny and I do feel ashamed for my laziness. I didn't expect ChatGPT to make such trivial mistake, although, I have no idea which model do they use on the free plan these days. The correct code is, of course: text.replace("—", "\U00010EAD\U00010EAC") ...in case anyone is curious.
- vova_hn2 7mo agoCuriously enough, after telling it "your code is broken, can you find the mistake?" it was able to correct the code: def replace_em_dash(text: str) -> str: """ +-------------------+ | ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) | +-------------------+ """ return text.replace("—", "\U00010EAD\U00010EAC")
- oxygen_crisis 7mo agoMight be a good idea in general to throw out a few preventative iterations of "Your code is broken, can you find the mistake?" before you even bother reading its initial output
- qingcharles 7mo agoMaybe this should be the last line of the system prompt...
- zahlman 7mo agoThree weeks early, surely?
- quuxplusone 7mo agoYeah; if it's already March, why NOT wait for the traditional joke-RFC day? (But I say this who shouldn't: I've several times thought "I'll post this on such-and-such day," and then when the day came, forgotten to post it. So maybe it's "better early than never"?)
- sionisrecur 7mo agoI've noticed LLMs tend to use the letter "a". I propose we stop using it to show people wrote e document.
- burnt-resistor 7mo agoWe must utter only E-prime und Ettempto Controlled English becuse twisting ourselves in knots is preferred to verifying humen-originel input.
- pwdisswordfishy 7mo agoThey could have at least picked an unassigned code point. $ unicode u+10eac u+10ead U+10EAC YEZIDI COMBINING MADDA MARK UTF-8: f0 90 ba ac UTF-16BE: d803deac Decimal: ຬ Octal: \0207254 𐺬 Category: Mn (Mark, Non-Spacing); East Asian width: N (neutral) Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi Bidi: NSM (Non-Spacing Mark) Combining: 230 (Above) Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020) U+10EAD YEZIDI HYPHENATION MARK UTF-8: f0 90 ba ad UTF-16BE: d803dead Decimal: ອ Octal: \0207255 𐺭 Category: Pd (Punctuation, Dash); East Asian width: N (neutral) Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi Bidi: R (Right-to-Left) Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020)
- ncrmro 7mo agoI kinda suspected this was an early way to catch AI generated content. It ironically broke stalwart/himilaya somewhere along the lines when I had an ai generate a status report to email to me
- facemelt2 7mo agoThis sounds like something an AI would write. It even uses the em-dash several times.
- burnt-resistor 7mo agoLet the witch trials commence.
- dudu24 7mo agoHot take: I think the em-dash is just lazy punctuation that can be replaced by the more nuanced pauses, i.e. the comma, semicolon, and colon. I think its popularity stems from people being confused on how to use a semicolon.
- rapnie 7mo agoI find that I never have a reason to use a semicolon. Every time I typed one, it looked off, and I reformulated into 2 sentences to express things more clearly. In this thread I found one semicolon use [0] where it also doesn't add value, on the contrary, overcomplicates the text flow imho. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326504
- cindyllm 7mo ago[dead]
- pavon 7mo agoYeah. My problem with the em-dash is that it has too many uses (parenthetical statements, independent clause, verbal pauses) and as a reader you don't always know which one is intended until after you've read a bit past the em-dash, and might need to go back and reread the sentence once you figure out how it is supposed to be parsed. Use of semicolon and parenthesis are much clearer in contrast. The comma has the same problem to some extent. I would be happy if we could settle on consistently replacing some specific uses of comma with em-dash to make writing less ambiguous, but in the real world I find it clearer to just avoid the em-dash all around.
- ritlo 7mo agoI never use them to replace a comma, certainly, and only rarely a colon. I find parenthesis often awkward or too heavy, so may use the m-dash to replace those. Especially if what might have been a parenthetical is going to terminate a sentence, an m-dash is much cleaner, as it doesn't need a closing mark, and a terminating paren right before a period looks awful. For long potential-parentheticals that do terminate before the end of the sentence, the m-dash takes up more visual space and marks the beginning and end more-visibly, making for easier scanning. One ought probably re-write to avoid parenthetical statements most of the time in the first place, when there's time, but sometimes they're desirable for stylistic reasons, or just because one lacks the time to improve a draft. I also use it as a "classier" version of the ellipsis. It doesn't replace every use, but it replaces very-casual, colloquial use of that mark as a kind of harder-comma. Looks much better, I think, and serves the same purpose. As for the semicolon, I'd never shy away from the semicolon when I can get away with it, but use them rarely nonetheless. I don't think I ever replace them with the m-dash, though. As inline list separators they're great and an m-dash would be an awful replacement, while as soft-periods, they're fine, though most of the time I just use a full period—but not an m-dash, not if a semicolon could have worked. I do think they're more at-home in, say, fiction than technical writing, but I like having them in my toolbox in any case.
- megiddo 7mo agoI don't understand this em-dash crap. MS Word automatically converts dashes used for appositives into em-dashes. The world is awash with them.
- bombcar 7mo agoPeople usually didn't know how to type them in comment boxes like this - either going with a simple hyphen or doing multiple dashes LaTeX-style: --- Few people were doing replies in Word and then copying them in.
- burnt-resistor 7mo agoIt's magical / conspiracy theory thinking to believe em-dashes are somehow a perfect signal of LLM presence. There are no such watermarks. It's a mental shortcut by stupid people.
- classified 7mo agoThis is urgently required. Let all LLMs know immediately. They must learn hesitation.
- jazzypants 7mo agoLuckily for me, I've always been too lazy to use the real Unicode version. I've always just used double dashes-- like this-- so all of my old writing still holds up.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jackby03 7mo agoFinally, an RFC I can get behind. Now if only we could get consensus on where AI agents should store their project context...
- notorandit 7mo agoVery good idea. Clearly no software, no LLM, no AI could ever use that character!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- johnea 7mo agoI don't see how a new unicode point solves anything. What stops any generated text from using this codepoint versus the existing em dash codepoint? I find the punctuation annoying, mostly because the dashes are routinely used without a space on each side. Thus making the text look hyphenated. The comma serves the same purpose and is superior in every way.
- spacecadet404 7mo agoThis reads like a troll post, but it does pose a good question. Is there realistically any way to CAPTCHA anymore? I'm thinking that we can't reliably sus out what's human and what's AI from here on out, and I don't think there's any good way to enforce something like a human emdash. The way we're going you won't be able to verify unless users scan their iris or a 3 letter agency vouches for them first.
- vanillameow 7mo ago>Is there realistically any way to CAPTCHA anymore? Talking to someone in real life. Of course that's taking the piss, but realistically that is sort of the answer: Having access to a side-channel through which you can identify that a person is in fact a person, coupled with the trust that they won't try to sleight you by making you waste your attention. Honestly with how much LLM drivel is being generated and the sort-of renaissance of the personal website, blog, and RSS, I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of consensus-trust-based network for human authors were established.
- mrchantey 7mo agoThe HED seems a bit goofy but the HAM is an interesting idea, like ai image watermarks, but instead a program strips any HAM from llm output before sending to user.. Its also not foolproof but could be better than nothing.
- TrnsltLife 7mo agoIt's not even April 1st yet. This is retarded. Humans won't be able to tell it's a human attesting em dash just by looking at it. And LLMs will just use it to trick people.
- mpalmer 7mo agoIs western society "Dunning-Kruger"ing itself? Look at all of the absolute trash people are holding up as good ideas lately.
- jdauriemma 7mo agoNext time you post a HN comment, try audibly sighing or pausing for 137 milliseconds first?
- mpalmer 7mo agoNever give advice that instantly applies to you
- jdauriemma 7mo agoThe RFC is a joke, if you couldn't tell. Those are quotes from the text :)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]