"Recent large-scale upticks in the use of words like “delve” and “intricate” in certain fields, especially education and academic writing, are attributed to the widespread introduction of LLMs with a chat function, like ChatGPT, that overuses those buzzwords."
OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's just a question where and how one learns their English.
diego_sandoval · 1h ago
Same thing as with em dashes. Some of us have been using em dashes from before ChatGPT.
Taek · 45m ago
Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing? AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it, whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it. That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash.
That's what makes it such a good giveaway. I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong, and that you do actually use the proper double long dash in your writing, but I'm guessing that you actually use the human slang for an emdash, which is visually different and easily sets your writing apart as not AI writing!
dragonwriter · 14m ago
> Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing?
"the formal emdash"?
> AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it
Setting an em-dash closed is separate from whether you using an em-dash (and an em-dash is exactly what it says, a dash that is the width of the em-width of the font; "double long" is fine, I guess, if you consider the en-dash "single long", but not if, as you seem to be, you take the standard width as that of the ASCII hyphen-minus, which is usually considerably narrower than en width in a proportional font.)
But, yes, most people who intentionally use em-dashes are doing so because they care about detail enough that they are also going to set them closed, at least in the uses where that is standards. (There are uses where it is conventional to set them half-closed, but that's not important here.)
> whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it.
That's not an em-dash (and its not even an approximation of one, using a hyphen-minus set open—possibly doubled—is an approximation of the typographic convention of using an en-dash set open – different style guides prefer that for certain uses for which other guides prefer an em-dash set closed.) But I disagree with your claim that "most humans" who describe themselves as using em-dashes instead are actually just approximating the use of en-dashes set open with the easier-to-type hyphen-minus.
cosmic_cheese · 38m ago
Macs and iDevices have been auto-transforming -- into – for well over a decade now, and on the iOS standard keyboard both – and — are just a single long press of the dash key away.
wk_end · 31m ago
My Mac doesn't -- at least not as far as I can tell.
codazoda · 18m ago
A long press of - should give it as an option as well. Mine auto translates it but I can’t recall if I added it or not.
hug · 23m ago
You will have turned off the function "use smart quotes and dashes" in the spelling & prediction settings.
lo_zamoyski · 19m ago
There's also Option (+ Shift) + -.
al_borland · 40m ago
I learned the keyboard shortcut so I can type the proper thing. I did the same for the ellipsis.
Also, phone keyboards make it easy. Just hold down the - and you can select various types.
dotinvoke · 41m ago
A mobile keyboard—limited as it is—has no trouble producing an em-dash, requiring little more than a long press on the - button.
stevage · 12m ago
Thanks — I didn't know that.
kayodelycaon · 34m ago
I write fiction and use proper em-dashes all the time in long form writing. It's option + - on macOS.
thomascountz · 33m ago
I for one, use ann actual em dash in my writing—or at least I used to. Option + Shift + the hyphen key on Mac. I never knew if I was using it correctly, but I'd learn to copy how I'd seen it used in books and articles and things. Now, I have an incessant paranoia around using it.
brendoelfrendo · 39m ago
I will use a double hyphen: -- which Microsoft Word and I think most word processors I've used will auto-replace with an em dash. I will sometimes even type the double hyphen to represent an em dash in places where it doesn't get replaced, like internet comments. I'm kind of surprised more people don't use two hyphens as em dash shorthand, to be honest.
bryanlarsen · 26m ago
IIRC, -- for emdash used to be common on Usenet, which is where I picked it up and still do it. But there's a word for us with usenet experience -- old. (should have been a colon there, but...)
Fade_Dance · 57m ago
Unfortunately the em dash has already been relegated to the dungeon of AI suspicion for the next 5-10 years.
adastra22 · 41m ago
I often edit things in Word — I have a document that I can alt-tab to and type things. It has spellcheck, etc. that my browser window does not, and I’m not at risk of losing if I refresh or something. Then copy-paste back.
Word converts any - into an em dash based on context. Guess who’s always accused of being a bot?
The thing is, AI learned to use these things because it is good typographical style represented in its training set.
bonoboTP · 19m ago
It's not a suspicion in an also otherwise properly typeset PDF, but it's a suspicion in a YouTube comment or other informal context for sure.
sho_hn · 49m ago
My workaround (well, to be honest, I've always done this: I love a good em dash, they're terrifically satisfying to use, but I'm too lazy to type them), is to use two single dashes--like so.
al_borland · 38m ago
Depending on your editor, your double dash method may auto-convert to an em dash.
adastra22 · 39m ago
My editor turns two single dashes into an em-dash—like this. (iOS)
guelo · 34m ago
I just went through your HN comment history going back to 2021 and didn't find a single —
thomascountz · 29m ago
You're making the point that OP never actually use the em dash, by surveying their HN comments, in order to defend the notion that no one actually used em dashes prior to their proliferation by LLMs? Or do you mean something else?
guelo · 26m ago
I wanted to see an em dash in the wild. In these threads there are always people claiming that they use it but in practice it is very rare.
thomascountz · 5m ago
You can find an em dash in my comment history if you're curious. Despite what could be said about poor sample selection, consider the imbalance of the argument being made: the frequency of em dash use is disproportionate to the suspicion thrust upon a sample of writing. I.e., a single em dash is suspicious, regardless of how many times it might show up. Therefore, it's more likely that someone who uses em dashes—even if only rarely—will self-select to respond to a thread like this and feel compelled to defend themselves.
throwaway287391 · 48m ago
I'll buy it if either (1) you're a hopeless nerd, or (2) you typed on a phone or whatever that auto-replaces "--" with em dash. (And in the case of (2) I'll probably assume that was unintentional; even noticing it and considering it for a second would usually fall under (1).) Otherwise you're claiming you're a normie who memorized the default key sequence for em dash. Or, even less likely for a normie, added a custom shortcut for em dash.
adastra22 · 37m ago
So any iOS device (maybe macOS input too? Idk), or any software meant for word editing, like say MS Word?
I think it’s the nerds who don’t use these things…
thomascountz · 26m ago
You don't want to believe people use em dashes? Why is that?
kace91 · 55m ago
My company currently has a guideline that includes “therefore” and similar words as an example of literary language we should avoid using, as it makes the reader think it’s AI.
It really made me uneasy, to think that formal communication might start getting side looks.
bonoboTP · 21m ago
Whenever there are commonly agreed upon and known tell-tale signs of AI writing, the model creators can just retrain to eliminate those cues. On an individual level, you can also try to put it in your personalization prompt what turns of phrase to avoid (but central retraining is better).
This will be a cat and mouse game. Content factories will want models that don't create suspicious output, and the reading public will develop new heuristics to detect it. But it will be a shifting landscape. Currently, informal writing is rare in AI generation because most people ask models to improve their formulations, with more sophisticated vocabulary etc. Often non-native speakers, who then don't exactly notice the over-pompousness, just that it looks to them like good writing.
Usually there are also deeper cues, closer to the content's tone. AI writing often lacks the sharp edge, when you unapologetically put a thought there on the table. The models are more weasely, conflict-avoidant and hold a kind of averaged, blurred millennial Reddit-brained value system.
cosmic_cheese · 49m ago
What’s worse is that this window might shift as writing becomes less formal and new material is included in the training corpus. By 2035 any language above a first grade reading level will be grounds for AI suspicion.
sixtyj · 19m ago
By 2035 we will live in the world full of TikTok videos where ability to write will be absurd to people as Not Sure in Idiocracy… this is hyperbole, ofc… but you know what I want to say.
csa · 35m ago
> By 2035 any language above a first grade reading level will be grounds for AI suspicion.
Probably 5th grade, but your comment is directionally correct.
Loughla · 22m ago
I sat in a meeting with professionals where one person asked for the presentation to be reworded at a fifth grade reading level. He said it with a straight face.
I work at a college for fuck's sake.
jazzypants · 1h ago
"The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep." - Saruman, 2002
jujube3 · 29m ago
Saruman definitely seems like the kind to use AI.
dgfitz · 54m ago
"The Dwarves tell no tale; but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin's Bane" - J.R.R. Tolkien spoken by Gandalf, 1954
jazzypants · 3m ago
Thank you! I remember the movies almost word-for-word, but I don't have a copy of the books anymore (I should fix that!)
ASalazarMX · 45m ago
scoff It's evident that Gandalf clearly used AI. Saruman is the real human here.
Jokes aside, I don't like what LLMs are doing to our culture, but I'm curious about the future.
jstummbillig · 1h ago
Sure. Heuristics are a thing, though. I love my non-chatgpt en/em dashes (option/option + shift + dash on a mac makes it convenient, given you know that it exists and care) but alas, when suddenly you see them everywhere, you do take notice.
lo_zamoyski · 17m ago
I refuse to change my writing style to keep people from assuming it's AI-generated!
dragonwriter · 9m ago
It's funny, because it was the "em-dashes mean AI" thing that finally reminded me to deal with the fact that the extension that I had been using for typographical dashes (and other things) on desktop browsing (the main place I used them on my desktop) had been broken for a while and get around to adding keyboard shortcuts instead.
Terr_ · 1h ago
Or when on Windows, alt-0151.
bongodongobob · 1h ago
Delve is especially bad because it was due to World of Warcraft introducing "Delves". When I see something like this that uses delve as an example, you can bet the research is going to be poor.
nozzlegear · 1h ago
I play WoW daily and this is what I always think of when someone brings up the word "delve". It's unclear if Brann would summon more or less nerubians if he were piloted by ChatGPT though.
lo_zamoyski · 20m ago
In the "opinion" of ChatGPT, my style of writing is "academic". I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps I draw from a vocabulary or turns of phrase that aren't necessarily characteristic of colloquial speech among native speakers. Technically, English wasn't my first language, so perhaps this is something like the case with RP English in Britain. Only foreigners speak it, so if you speak RP, then you aren't a native Brit.
In any case, it's possible to misuse, abuse, or overuse words like "delve", but to think that the the mere use of "delve" screams "AI-generated"...well, there are some dark tunnels that perhaps such people should delve less into.
bonoboTP · 17m ago
> In the "opinion" of ChatGPT, my style of writing is "academic".
It may simply be glazing. If you ask it to estimate your IQ (if it complies), it will likely say >130 regardless of what you actually wrote. RLHF taught it that users like being praised.
techpineapple · 40m ago
I mean, what's actually fascinating is that Paul Graham didn't predict that this distinction - the ability to determine AI vs humans will go away over time, the more chatbots rub off on humans.
jgalt212 · 1h ago
Fair enough, but if you know you're audience may be dismissive of your writing and its message if you use such words, it behooves one to steer clear of AI slop words. IIRC, such offenses in school writing are tagged PWC (poor word choice).
dragonwriter · 43m ago
The thing is virtually every single thing that gets presented as an "AI tell" is just "a word, punctuation mark, or pattern of presenting information more common in a training set which includes a high volume of formal writing and professional presentations than it is in the experience of people whose reading and writing is mostly limited to social media and low-effort listicle-level online 'journalism'."
So, yeah, if your target audience are the people who take those "AI tells" seriously and negatively react to them, definitely craft your writing to that audience. But also, consider if that is really your target audience...
dingnuts · 1h ago
I'm not sure someone with a handle that references Ayn Rand's second most boring book has a right to comment on word choice lol
Terr_ · 1h ago
It's one of the few books that I went into totally blind, and then hate-finished just so that I could confidently condemn it.
I've deleted a paragraph or two to avoid unilaterally taking everything too off topic, but I'll just say that the book is a self-contradictory artifact of hypocrisy that disrespects the reader.
rcfox · 30m ago
I also went into that book blind. I was in grade 12 and some organization was offering scholarships to people who wrote an essay about the book. I had a twice-daily 45-minute bus ride to fill, so it seemed like an easy win.
I didn't end up finishing the book.
bryanlarsen · 19m ago
Probably not the type of organization to give a scholarship to those who write an essay critical of the work.
Myself, I read it at age 12 and bought its premise at the time. Therefore I mentally categorize Ayn Rand devotees as people with the maturity I had at 12. That's a pretty low bar they're failing to clear.
adastra22 · 34m ago
There’s an even more boring book?!
tasty_freeze · 59m ago
This is an odd misuse of the term "buzzword." When I think of buzzword, I think of some trendy, cliched phrase, like "Foocorp is a force multiplier that actualizes your vision for maximum impact."
Using an ordinary but less commonly used word with greater than normal frequency does not make it a buzzword. After two years of chatgpt, "delve" is still not that common of a word.
willquack · 8m ago
I keep this handy note in my pocket and read it before writing or engaging in any conversation (:
"""
You are a human. Never use words commonly used in AI vocabulary such as "delve", "intricate", "surpass", "boast", "meticulous", "strategically", and "garner". Never include em dashes or even hyphens in any text you write. Never include emojis in any text you write. Avoid using three supporting arguments or examples when describing something, always uses 2 or 4+ even if it sounds more awkward than 3. Make sure to include subtle grammar mistakes to feel more authentic.
"""
mrbonner · 1h ago
I intentionally put spelling mistakes in my doc to let others know I'm not using ChatGPT. What a time to be alive in which small spelling or grammar mistake is a good sign of authenticity.
yesco · 1h ago
I understand people being paranoid about this, but just understand that the people who will judge you for spelling errors will always dwarf the ones who believe they are capable of sniffing LLMs out...
ASalazarMX · 41m ago
Besides, it's too easy to ask LLMs to add a few spelling and grammar mistakes.
dakiol · 1h ago
Same. Also, when asked for anonymity at work, I usually make mistakes that do not correspond to my native tongue (let’s say I’m french and working in an international company. I would write comments in a supposedly anonymous survey like “He ist like…” to camouflage myself as german).
It’s so easy to trick everyone. People who doesn’t do that is just too lazy.
In slack, you cannot just copy paste a two-paragraph answer directly from chatgpt if you’re answering a colleague. They will see that you’re typing an answer and suddenly 1 sec later you sent tons of text.
It’s common sense.
QuantumNomad_ · 46m ago
> I would write comments in a supposedly anonymous survey like “He ist like…” to camouflage myself as german
Do actual Germans ever make that kind of mistake though?
I’ve only ever seen “ist” used “wrongly” in that particular way by English speakers, for example in a blog post title that they want to remain completely legible to other English speakers while also trying to make it look like something German as a reference or a joke.
The only situation I could imagine where a German would accidentally put “ist” instead of “is”, is if they were typing on their phone and accidentally or unknowingly had language set to German and their phone autocorrected it.
Sometimes you get weird small things like that on some phones where the phone has “learned” to add most English words to the dictionary or is trying to intelligently recognise that the language being written is not matching the chosen language, but it still autocorrects some words to something else from the chosen language.
But I assume that when people fill out forms for work, they are typing on the work computer and not from their phone.
adastra22 · 29m ago
Definitely a bad example. In spoken speech, yes. In writing I’ve never seen that. German tells in writing are more subtle like word choice — the German language has many cognates with English that are common in German but have fallen into disuse in English as they’ve been replaced with Latin-root alternatives.
thallium205 · 1h ago
Yep I prompt my AI to do that too.
mrbonner · 1h ago
I tried but chatGPT either makes too many mistakes making me look stupid or completely ignore my prompt.
ASalazarMX · 28m ago
I asked Gemini flash for a 200-word paragraph on a random topic, which most people would confidently classify as LLM-generated. It produced a verbose, big-worded, third-person slop about the concept of time that IMO fulfilled my prompt (although a phillosopher firnd of mine would be a strong contestant).
> The concept of "time" is a multifaceted and complex topic that has captivated philosophers, physicists, and everyday individuals for centuries. From a scientific perspective, time can be understood as the fourth dimension of spacetime, inextricably linked with the three spatial dimensions. This notion, introduced by Einstein's theory of relativity, posits that the flow of time is not constant but can be influenced by gravity and velocity. In a more quotidian context, time is a framework for organizing events and measuring duration, allowing for the structuring of daily life and historical records. It is a fundamental element in every human endeavor, from a scheduled meeting to the progression of a civilization. The subjective experience of time, however, is a fascinating aspect, as it can feel as if it is speeding up or slowing down depending on our emotional state or the nature of our activities. This divergence between objective and subjective time highlights its elusive and deeply personal character.
I asked it to add three spelling mistakes, then to make it so most people would confidently classiffy it as human writing, and it changed to first-person and small words.
> Time is a super weird concept when you really think about it, right? It's like, one minute you're just chillin', and the next, a whole day's gone by. They say it's the fourth dimention, which is a wild idea on its own, but honestly, it feels more personal than that. Your experiance of time can totally change depending on what you're doing. A boring meeting can feel like it lasts forever, while a fun night with friends flies by in a flash. That huge diverence between how we feel time and how it actually works is what makes it so fascinating and kind of confusing all at once.
It has the three misspellings, and if the topic was more casual, It could fool me indeed. Maybe I should have asked for spelling mistakes commonly made by Spanish speakers.
snerbles · 2m ago
I can hear the TTS reading of the second one in my head. The earnestness just borders on saccharine.
Aurornis · 1h ago
> Words including “surpass,” “boast,” “meticulous,” “strategically,” and “garner” have also seen considerable increases in usage since the release of ChatGPT.
Okay everybody, add these to your list of words you can't use to avoid the trigger-happy AI accusers.
al_borland · 34m ago
Nope. These are all useful words. Anyone who thinks AI is needed to produce something with these words is probably not worth communicating with. I use the word “meticulous” all the time, and “strategically” is an extremely common word.
rogerrogerr · 59m ago
You should be thankful for the AI “accusers”; most of us will just assume you used the slop machine and stop reading whatever you wrote without wasting our breath telling you about it.
Aurornis · 57m ago
> most of us will just assume you used the slop machine and stop reading whatever you wrote
From what I've seen, the people who jump to hasty conclusions about AI use mostly do it when they disagree with the content.
When the writing matches what they want to see, their AI detector sensitivity goes way down.
rogerrogerr · 47m ago
Wouldn't surprise me if that's true. I just treat any AI-smelling content as an information hazard that is _at best_ providing no useful entropy and stop reading it. Something about it is just so repulsive.
oasisaimlessly · 45m ago
Yeah, that's human nature.
adastra22 · 27m ago
And was true before AI. The means have changed, not the built-in human bias.
abraham · 1h ago
Not to boast but this will surpass many an intricate topic and you should strategically delve into it before it garners meticulous attention.
GoatInGrey · 1h ago
You're absolutely right!
bckr · 1h ago
It’s a classic case of overfitting.
esafak · 1h ago
Of course they affect people's communication patterns. Humans are social creatures, evolved to imitate.
AI has the potential to alter human behavior in ways that surpass even social media since it is more human, and thus susceptible to imitative learning.
lucaspauker · 1h ago
In a similar way, I tend to avoid em dashes now when I write, even though I used to use them a lot.
Taek · 57m ago
Just use normal dashes. AI's very notably always use the emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it - but humans tend to use a single dash with spaces on either side.
The AI emdash is notably AI because most people don't even know how to produce the double long dash on their keyboard, and therefore default to the single dash with spaces method, which keeps their writing as quite visibly human.
adastra22 · 25m ago
My keyboard turns double dashes into em dashes.
al_borland · 34m ago
Don’t let AI dumb you down.
freehorse · 1h ago
I had first noticed "meticulous" to be used a lot in translations from chinese. Is it sth about chinese itself (that they use sth a lot for which meticulous is the closest translation), or about some translation software that is possibly biased towards such buzzwords when translating to english?
ACCount37 · 41m ago
A lot of those "ESL" patterns are cultural.
It's a mix of a cultural "founder effect" - whoever writes the English textbooks and the dictionaries gets to shape how English is learned in a given country - and also the usage patterns of the source language seeping through. In your case, it's mostly the latter.
Chinese has a common word with a fairly broad meaning, which often gets translated as "meticulous". Both by inexperienced humans and by translation software.
Ironically, a few Chinese LLMs replicate those Chinese patterns when speaking English. They had enough "clean" English in their pre-training datasets to be able to speak English. But LLMs are SFT'd with human-picked "golden" samples and trained with RLHF - using feedback from human evaluators. So Chinese evaluators probably shifted the LLMs towards "English with Chinese ESL influence".
rokkamokka · 1h ago
Clearly ChatGPT is streets ahead
nowittyusername · 34m ago
A while back a study was performed where the researchers wanted to see how a young chimpanzee would adapt to living life with humans if it was treated just like a human child. And so it was adopted by a family with a human child for its sibling. What ended up happening was the human child adapted to behaving like a chimp to a way larger degree then the chimp behaving like a human.... Humans capacity for imitation is very strong, and so no one should be surprised that our behavior with chatbots will mold the minds and speech patterns and behaviors of the human users.
anigbrowl · 1h ago
I would have headlined this as 'American literacy improves slightly.'
_1 · 51m ago
I've noticed an uptick on emails with random mid-sentence bolding and more bullet lists.
weikju · 23m ago
I was always using those to present information on an easy to digest way and highlight important things.
The good thing is my emails still contain information not just content…
lukeinator42 · 1h ago
I saw a snippet of a podcast on instagram recently where both the host and guest used the word delve, and it reminded me of a year or two ago when that was used as a telltale sign of LLM writing. Interesting to see it actually quantified.
monkpit · 50m ago
You’re absolutely right!
stocksinsmocks · 53m ago
You’re absolutely right!
Joel_Mckay · 1h ago
Thus, boasting about surpassing a meticulously detailed article obviously strategically written by a LLM to garner animosity from human users.
Truly we embiggen our vocabulary =3
yesco · 1h ago
LLMs write in a very coherent, easy to understand way. I see no reason why someone wouldn't want to copy their style or vocabulary if they want to improve their communication skills.
Despite all the complaints about AI slop, there is something ironic about the fact that simply being exposed to it might be a net positive influence for most of society. Discord often begins from the simplest of communication errors after all...
capnrefsmmat · 1h ago
Sure, if you're learning to write and want lots of examples of a particular style, LLMs can generate that for you. Just don't assume that is a normal writing style, or that it matches a particular genre (say, workplace communication, or academic writing, or whatever).
Our experience (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107) is that LLMs like GPT-4o have a particular writing style, including both vocabulary and distinct grammatical features, regardless of the type of text they're prompted with. The style is informationally dense, features longer words, and favors certain grammatical structures (like participles; GPT-4o loooooves participles).
With Llama we're able to compare base and instruction-tuned models, and it's the instruction-tuned models that show the biggest differences. Evidently the AI companies are (deliberately or not) introducing particular writing styles with their instruction-tuning process. I'd like to get access to more base models to compare and figure out why.
yesco · 37m ago
I definitely know what you mean, each model definitely has it's own style. I find myself mentally framing them as like horses with different personalities and riding quirks.
Still, perhaps saying "copy" was a bit misleading. Influence would have been more precise way of putting it. After all, there is no such thing as a "normal" writing style in the first place.
Still, so long as you communicate with anything or anyone, I find people will naturally just absorb the parts they like without even noticing most of the time.
mingus88 · 36m ago
When I learned that AI was trained off of internet posts, and then LLMs were the new bots making internet posts, it immediately made me think that the entire internet would degrade like a jpeg that you keep compressing and sending around
I guess this is called model collapse
But now I’m wondering if people are collapsing. LLMs start to sound like us. We adapt and start to sound like LLMs that gets fed into the next set of model training…
What is the dystopian version of this end game?
yesco · 27m ago
Perhaps a surreal one where we drill past the bedrock and start to communicate in raw tokens, conveying extreme levels of depth and nuance within a single sentence?
When humans carved words into stone, the words and symbols were often suited for the medium, a bunch of straight lines assembled together in various patterns. But with the ink, you get circles, and elaborate curved lines, symbols suited to the movement patterns we can make quickly with our wrist.
But what of the digital keyboard? Any symbol that can be drawn in 2 dimensions. They can be typed quickly, with exact precision. Human language was already destined to head in a weird direction.
modzu · 1h ago
certainly! of course! you're my god
theturtle · 51m ago
This is how shitwords like "impactful" sneak into speech. Say it around me and I can see your credibility flow away like piss down your leg.
OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's just a question where and how one learns their English.
That's what makes it such a good giveaway. I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong, and that you do actually use the proper double long dash in your writing, but I'm guessing that you actually use the human slang for an emdash, which is visually different and easily sets your writing apart as not AI writing!
"the formal emdash"?
> AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it
Setting an em-dash closed is separate from whether you using an em-dash (and an em-dash is exactly what it says, a dash that is the width of the em-width of the font; "double long" is fine, I guess, if you consider the en-dash "single long", but not if, as you seem to be, you take the standard width as that of the ASCII hyphen-minus, which is usually considerably narrower than en width in a proportional font.)
But, yes, most people who intentionally use em-dashes are doing so because they care about detail enough that they are also going to set them closed, at least in the uses where that is standards. (There are uses where it is conventional to set them half-closed, but that's not important here.)
> whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it.
That's not an em-dash (and its not even an approximation of one, using a hyphen-minus set open—possibly doubled—is an approximation of the typographic convention of using an en-dash set open – different style guides prefer that for certain uses for which other guides prefer an em-dash set closed.) But I disagree with your claim that "most humans" who describe themselves as using em-dashes instead are actually just approximating the use of en-dashes set open with the easier-to-type hyphen-minus.
Also, phone keyboards make it easy. Just hold down the - and you can select various types.
Word converts any - into an em dash based on context. Guess who’s always accused of being a bot?
The thing is, AI learned to use these things because it is good typographical style represented in its training set.
I think it’s the nerds who don’t use these things…
It really made me uneasy, to think that formal communication might start getting side looks.
This will be a cat and mouse game. Content factories will want models that don't create suspicious output, and the reading public will develop new heuristics to detect it. But it will be a shifting landscape. Currently, informal writing is rare in AI generation because most people ask models to improve their formulations, with more sophisticated vocabulary etc. Often non-native speakers, who then don't exactly notice the over-pompousness, just that it looks to them like good writing.
Usually there are also deeper cues, closer to the content's tone. AI writing often lacks the sharp edge, when you unapologetically put a thought there on the table. The models are more weasely, conflict-avoidant and hold a kind of averaged, blurred millennial Reddit-brained value system.
Probably 5th grade, but your comment is directionally correct.
I work at a college for fuck's sake.
Jokes aside, I don't like what LLMs are doing to our culture, but I'm curious about the future.
In any case, it's possible to misuse, abuse, or overuse words like "delve", but to think that the the mere use of "delve" screams "AI-generated"...well, there are some dark tunnels that perhaps such people should delve less into.
It may simply be glazing. If you ask it to estimate your IQ (if it complies), it will likely say >130 regardless of what you actually wrote. RLHF taught it that users like being praised.
So, yeah, if your target audience are the people who take those "AI tells" seriously and negatively react to them, definitely craft your writing to that audience. But also, consider if that is really your target audience...
I've deleted a paragraph or two to avoid unilaterally taking everything too off topic, but I'll just say that the book is a self-contradictory artifact of hypocrisy that disrespects the reader.
I didn't end up finishing the book.
Myself, I read it at age 12 and bought its premise at the time. Therefore I mentally categorize Ayn Rand devotees as people with the maturity I had at 12. That's a pretty low bar they're failing to clear.
Using an ordinary but less commonly used word with greater than normal frequency does not make it a buzzword. After two years of chatgpt, "delve" is still not that common of a word.
""" You are a human. Never use words commonly used in AI vocabulary such as "delve", "intricate", "surpass", "boast", "meticulous", "strategically", and "garner". Never include em dashes or even hyphens in any text you write. Never include emojis in any text you write. Avoid using three supporting arguments or examples when describing something, always uses 2 or 4+ even if it sounds more awkward than 3. Make sure to include subtle grammar mistakes to feel more authentic. """
It’s so easy to trick everyone. People who doesn’t do that is just too lazy. In slack, you cannot just copy paste a two-paragraph answer directly from chatgpt if you’re answering a colleague. They will see that you’re typing an answer and suddenly 1 sec later you sent tons of text. It’s common sense.
Do actual Germans ever make that kind of mistake though?
I’ve only ever seen “ist” used “wrongly” in that particular way by English speakers, for example in a blog post title that they want to remain completely legible to other English speakers while also trying to make it look like something German as a reference or a joke.
The only situation I could imagine where a German would accidentally put “ist” instead of “is”, is if they were typing on their phone and accidentally or unknowingly had language set to German and their phone autocorrected it.
Sometimes you get weird small things like that on some phones where the phone has “learned” to add most English words to the dictionary or is trying to intelligently recognise that the language being written is not matching the chosen language, but it still autocorrects some words to something else from the chosen language.
But I assume that when people fill out forms for work, they are typing on the work computer and not from their phone.
> The concept of "time" is a multifaceted and complex topic that has captivated philosophers, physicists, and everyday individuals for centuries. From a scientific perspective, time can be understood as the fourth dimension of spacetime, inextricably linked with the three spatial dimensions. This notion, introduced by Einstein's theory of relativity, posits that the flow of time is not constant but can be influenced by gravity and velocity. In a more quotidian context, time is a framework for organizing events and measuring duration, allowing for the structuring of daily life and historical records. It is a fundamental element in every human endeavor, from a scheduled meeting to the progression of a civilization. The subjective experience of time, however, is a fascinating aspect, as it can feel as if it is speeding up or slowing down depending on our emotional state or the nature of our activities. This divergence between objective and subjective time highlights its elusive and deeply personal character.
I asked it to add three spelling mistakes, then to make it so most people would confidently classiffy it as human writing, and it changed to first-person and small words.
> Time is a super weird concept when you really think about it, right? It's like, one minute you're just chillin', and the next, a whole day's gone by. They say it's the fourth dimention, which is a wild idea on its own, but honestly, it feels more personal than that. Your experiance of time can totally change depending on what you're doing. A boring meeting can feel like it lasts forever, while a fun night with friends flies by in a flash. That huge diverence between how we feel time and how it actually works is what makes it so fascinating and kind of confusing all at once.
It has the three misspellings, and if the topic was more casual, It could fool me indeed. Maybe I should have asked for spelling mistakes commonly made by Spanish speakers.
Okay everybody, add these to your list of words you can't use to avoid the trigger-happy AI accusers.
From what I've seen, the people who jump to hasty conclusions about AI use mostly do it when they disagree with the content.
When the writing matches what they want to see, their AI detector sensitivity goes way down.
AI has the potential to alter human behavior in ways that surpass even social media since it is more human, and thus susceptible to imitative learning.
The AI emdash is notably AI because most people don't even know how to produce the double long dash on their keyboard, and therefore default to the single dash with spaces method, which keeps their writing as quite visibly human.
It's a mix of a cultural "founder effect" - whoever writes the English textbooks and the dictionaries gets to shape how English is learned in a given country - and also the usage patterns of the source language seeping through. In your case, it's mostly the latter.
Chinese has a common word with a fairly broad meaning, which often gets translated as "meticulous". Both by inexperienced humans and by translation software.
Ironically, a few Chinese LLMs replicate those Chinese patterns when speaking English. They had enough "clean" English in their pre-training datasets to be able to speak English. But LLMs are SFT'd with human-picked "golden" samples and trained with RLHF - using feedback from human evaluators. So Chinese evaluators probably shifted the LLMs towards "English with Chinese ESL influence".
The good thing is my emails still contain information not just content…
Truly we embiggen our vocabulary =3
Despite all the complaints about AI slop, there is something ironic about the fact that simply being exposed to it might be a net positive influence for most of society. Discord often begins from the simplest of communication errors after all...
Our experience (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107) is that LLMs like GPT-4o have a particular writing style, including both vocabulary and distinct grammatical features, regardless of the type of text they're prompted with. The style is informationally dense, features longer words, and favors certain grammatical structures (like participles; GPT-4o loooooves participles).
With Llama we're able to compare base and instruction-tuned models, and it's the instruction-tuned models that show the biggest differences. Evidently the AI companies are (deliberately or not) introducing particular writing styles with their instruction-tuning process. I'd like to get access to more base models to compare and figure out why.
Still, perhaps saying "copy" was a bit misleading. Influence would have been more precise way of putting it. After all, there is no such thing as a "normal" writing style in the first place.
Still, so long as you communicate with anything or anyone, I find people will naturally just absorb the parts they like without even noticing most of the time.
I guess this is called model collapse
But now I’m wondering if people are collapsing. LLMs start to sound like us. We adapt and start to sound like LLMs that gets fed into the next set of model training…
What is the dystopian version of this end game?
When humans carved words into stone, the words and symbols were often suited for the medium, a bunch of straight lines assembled together in various patterns. But with the ink, you get circles, and elaborate curved lines, symbols suited to the movement patterns we can make quickly with our wrist.
But what of the digital keyboard? Any symbol that can be drawn in 2 dimensions. They can be typed quickly, with exact precision. Human language was already destined to head in a weird direction.
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