I wouldn't worry about it. A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve"; this year it's em dashes; next year it'll be something else. In any case, this is a very online topic that I assume only a vocal minority are hung up on in the first place. If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare.
Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. We should call each other out for poor writing or inaccurate information — not because if we squint we can pick out some loose correlations with ChatGPT's default output style.
Consciously trying not to "sound like an LLM" while writing is like consciously trying not to think about the fact that you're currently breathing, or consciously trying to sound like a cool guy.
floxy · 3h ago
>If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare.
But the people you will reach online will be online, and not some random person-off-the-street. The average person on the street will give the same blank stare on the topic of compilers, regular expressions, black-holes, or robotics, but I still want to read about those topics. And if I want an LLM's take on those topics, everyone knows where to turn to get that.
buu700 · 2h ago
Approximately everyone is online. What percentage of those people do you think are even familiar with the meme that em dashes == LLM assistance, much less feel strongly enough to complain or attack you over your punctuation choices?
No comments yet
chipsrafferty · 2h ago
But because the average person on the street would give blank stares about compilers, we can conclude that compilers aren't important /s
campbel · 3h ago
100%. I use em-dashes a decent amount and plan to continue. If someone wants to incorrectly assume it was AI writing so be it.
bee_rider · 2h ago
I use them occasionally and have never been falsely accused of being an LLM.
The stakes are a bit different for students unfortunately, who who’ll have their writing passed through some snake oil AI detector arbitrarily. This is unfortunate because “learning how not to trigger an AI detector” is a totally useless skill.
Generally, I don’t think we need AI detection. We need dumb bullshit detection. Humans and LLMs can both generate that. If people can use an LLM in a way that doesn’t generate dumb bullshit, I’m happy to read it.
marcus_holmes · 1h ago
I think this is a passing phase - academia and the education system will have to adapt to the fact that LLMs exist and will be used, and that therefore the essay is no longer a useful artifact as evidence of learning. This is probably a good thing in the long run.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
Same. Years ago I took the time to learn the difference between an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen and I'll continue to use them regardless of what AI does.
I don't use AI in my writing. If I were still in school would I be tempted? Probably. But in work and personal writing? Never crosses my mind.
harlanlewis · 3h ago
I agree completely with this as a human reader - but do wonder about the gradual codification of these markers in systems that will have increasingly have LLM detection as a standard feature, as frequently and obviously enabled as spam detectors were on blog comments back when blogs had comments.
brookst · 2h ago
Certainly! I’m right there with you.
lmm · 3h ago
> Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance.
There are zillions of words produced every second, your time is the most valuable resource you have, and actually existing LLM output (as opposed to some theoretical perfect future) is almost always not worth reading. Like it or not (and personally I hate it), the ability to dismiss things that are not worth reading like a chicken sexer who's picked up a male is now one of the most valuable life skills.
buu700 · 2h ago
Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?
Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?
1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
lmm · 2h ago
> Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?
Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped.
> Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?
No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out.
> If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.
buu700 · 2h ago
Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.
lmm · 2h ago
If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
the_af · 2h ago
This seems like begging the question to me.
Why do you think it's not a good heuristic to be able to quickly spot the tell-tale signs of LLM involvement, before you've wasted time reading slop?
Yes, there will be false positives. It's a heuristic after all.
buu700 · 1h ago
Because the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character — and because if the heuristic becomes widespread enough to matter, then it will be trivially circumvented by bad actors anyway. Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language?
If anything, I'd rather that renderers like Markdown just all agree to change " - " to an en dash and " -- " to an em dash. Then we could put the matter to bed once and for all.
the_af · 1h ago
Oh no, I'm not advocating ditching em-dahses. I love them -- the form I use, anyway.
I was just curious why you've decided paying attention to them is a bad heuristic. Sure, it can change once people instruct their LLMs not to use them, but still, for now, they sure seem to overuse them!
That and "let's unpack this". I swear, I'll forbid ChatGPT from using "unpack" ever again, in any context!
buu700 · 20m ago
That's fair. It's not like I don't pay attention to it myself. It's more that I wouldn't never use presence of em dashes in the absence of any other heuristics to predict whether or not something is LLM-generated, and it's a practically useless signal either way because I also wouldn't assume that content that used hyphens in place of dashes wasn't LLM-generated.
So the only real purpose of the heuristic is to add a tiny extra vote of confidence when I see a comment that otherwise appears to be lazy ChatGPT copypasta, but in such cases I'll predict that it was probably LLM output either way, and I'll judge that it appears to be poor writing that isn't worth my time regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved.
Fundamentally, the issue I'm seeing here is that we're all talking over each other because we need a better standardized term than "LLM output". I suppose "slop" could work if we universally that it referred only to a subset of LLM output, rather than being synonymous with LLM output in general, but I'm not sure that we do universally agree on that.
If someone types the equivalent of a Google search into ChatGPT, or a spammer has an automated process generically reply to social media posts/comments, that's what qualifies to me as "slop". Most of us here have seen it in the wild by now, and there's obviously a distinctive common style (at least for now), and I think we can all agree that it sucks. That's very different from someone investing time and/or expertise to produce content that just happens to involve an LLM as one of the tools in their arsenal; the attitude it isn't is just the modern equivalent of considering cellular phone calls or typed letters to be "impersonal".
I'm not suggesting that LLM output doesn't tend to have a higher density of em dashes than human output. I'm just pushing back on the idea that presence of em dashes is sufficient evidence to dismiss something as probably-LLM-generated, which is no better than superstition. I mean, I've used em dashes in a number of comments in this thread, and no one has accused me of using an LLM, so it can't be a pattern that anyone puts too much stock in.
lmm · 1h ago
> the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character
Citation needed.
> Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language?
Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies, at least for the moment. We need to be willing to play to our strengths.
Who is it helping if we bully ourselves into ignoring a simple, easy "tell"?
No one said anything about LLM companies. If I were a spammer today, I'd just have my code replace dashes in LLM output with hyphens before posting it. As a human, I'm not going to suddenly stop using dashes because a handful of people are treating a silly meme as if it were a genuinely useful heuristic.
ffin · 1h ago
> this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist.
It seems like you’re just wrong here? Em dashes aside, the ‘style’ of llm generated text is pretty distinct, and is something many people are able to distinguish.
buu700 · 1h ago
No, I'm not wrong. Someone could easily write in the default output style of ChatGPT by hand (which will probably become increasingly common the longer that style remains in place), and someone could easily collaborate with ChatGPT on writing that looks nothing like what you're thinking.
If organizations like schools are going to rely on tools that claim to detect AI-generated text with a useful level of reliability, they better have zero false positives. But of course they can't, because unless the tool involves time travel that isn't possible. At best, such tools can detect non-ASCII punctuation marks and overly cliched/formulaic writing, neither of which is academic dishonesty.
ffin · 1h ago
Okay, you’re right that the LLM writing style isn’t singularly producible by LLM’s. However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I don’t see why people would mimic text that is seen as low quality or associated with academic dishonesty.
Additionally, I do think it is valuable to determine if a piece of text is valuable, or more precisely, what I’m looking for. As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that. Oftentimes I am looking for text written by people though.
buu700 · 51m ago
However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common?
I was basing that on a few factors, off the top of my head:
1. Someone might pick up mannerisms while using LLMs to help learn a new language, similarly to how an old friend of mine from Germany spoke English with an Australian accent because of where she learned English.
2. Lonely or asocial people who spend too much time with LLMs might subconsciously pick up habits from them.
3. Generation Beta will never have known a world without LLMs. It's not that difficult to imagine that ChatGPT will be a major formative influence on many of them.
As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that.
Sure, it's trivial for anyone to look up a simple fact. It's not so trivial for you to spend an hour deep-diving into a subject with an LLM and manually fact-checking information it provides before eventually landing on an LLM-generated blurb that provides exactly the information you were looking for. It's also not trivial for you to reproduce the list of detailed hand-written bullet points that someone might have provided as source material for an LLM to generate a first draft.
the_af · 2h ago
> 1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
I think nobody is upset about reading an LLM's output when they are directly interacting with a tool that produces such output, such as ChatGPT or Copilot.
The problem is when they are reading/watching stuff in the wild and it suddenly becomes clear it was generated by AI rather than by another human being. Again, not in a context of "this pull request contains code generated by an LLM" (expected) but "this article or book was partly or completely generated by an LLM" (unexpected and likely unwanted).
buu700 · 2h ago
Right, that's part of what I'm getting at. There are two primary cases when LLM output tends to be bad:
1. In the context of research/querying, when unverified information from its output is falsely passed off as verified information curated by a human author. There's a big difference between "ChatGPT or some blog claims X" and "the answer is X".
2. In the context of writing/communication, when it's used to stretch a small amount of information into a relatively large amount of text. There's a big difference between using an LLM to help revise or trim down your writing, or to have it put together a first draft based on a list of detailed bullet points, and expecting it to stretch one sentence into a whole essay of greater value than the original sentence.
Those are basic misuses of the tool. It's like watching an old person try to use Google 20 years ago and concluding that search engines are slop and the only reliable way to find information is through the index of Encyclopedia Britannica.
stevenwliao · 1h ago
Provenance matters because LLM writing is cheap compared to actually having to think about what to say.
I only have a limited amount of time to read. Skipping someone's Internet comment because it looks like spam often means I get to engage with something else.
buu700 · 1h ago
No, provenance doesn't matter. LLM-assisted writing isn't cheap; it's only cheaper than producing the same writing without an LLM.
If someone who typically bills $500/hr spends 30 - 60 minutes on a comment or blog post, that's still $250 - 500 worth of their time invested regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved. An LLM is comparatively cheaper than hiring a human editor or research assistant, but it's not negative cost.
Likewise, prompting ChatGPT with "write a blog post about bees" may be cheaper than hiring someone off Fiverr to respond to the exact same prompt, but in either case the resulting content will be low-value (yet still higher-value than the string "write a blog post about bees") because its source material was cheap. The fact that the latter version would have been written by a human is incidental.
fsckboy · 2h ago
>A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve"
"delve" was a red flag 650 years ago!
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? — Fr John Ball's sermon addressing the rebels of the Peasant's Revolt, 1381
chipsrafferty · 2h ago
Your opinion is not necessarily one I agree or disagree with, but I feel that you've dismissed the entire article due to one part of it.
I think there is a very interesting discussion to be had over how LLMs are actively changing the way we write, or even speak.
buu700 · 2h ago
Just to clarify, I didn't dismiss the article. I'm agreeing with one of the author's points that we shouldn't dumb down our writing to please a vocal minority.
dawnerd · 3h ago
It’s not even just em dashes, it’s the same style posts people make that match with how chatgpt talks with simple prompts.
buu700 · 2h ago
Right, but that's bad writing because it's awkward to read and/or overly cliched. The fact that it may have been AI-generated is incidental. It would still be bad writing if someone happened to write in the exact same style by hand.
paulpauper · 2h ago
Just use double single dashes--like this. Instead of a long—dash.
dgfitz · 3h ago
> Eventually, as models and their users both improve
I like how this is presented as a given thing that will happen, that models are going to just improve forever. That there isn’t some plateau on “user skill with LLMs” like it’s fucking calculus mixed with rocket science that only the elite users will ever attain full fluency in using.
This is starting to read like religious cult propaganda, which is probably scarier than whatever else ends up happing with this shit.
buu700 · 2h ago
Are you implying that it's impossible to attain greater proficiency with LLM usage than one would have on their first day opening ChatGPT? The concepts of "Google-fu" and "tech literacy" must also be alien to you.
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
wpollock · 3h ago
> I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)
throw0101c · 3h ago
> In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)
Only if you used a typewriter. I was using (La)TeX in the twentieth (1990s), and it defaulted to a rough equivalent of 1.5 spaces (see \spacefactor).
Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts, and this was generally not used in 'properly' published works with proportional typefaces; see CMoS:
> Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts
I could never agree with this, because monospace fonts are already adding extra space with the dot character, which is much narrower in proportional fonts. That fact alone makes the visual gap already similarly wide as it would be in typeset proportional text. Adding a second space makes it much too wide visually (almost three positions wide). It looks like badly typeset justified text.
(I understand why people are doing it, I just don’t agree on aesthetic grounds.)
mwcz · 1h ago
Thanks for sharing. I'm a double spacer, but have to agree it does look to wide most of the time, while single-spacing looks too narrow. 1.5 sounds like a greatGoldilocks spacing. I only wish it were easier to use.
wpollock · 3h ago
Good to know! I am reminded of using *roff in the 1980s. Punctuation such as periods at the end of lines marked end of sentences, and nroff would insert two spaces in that case.
In HN, you can force two spaces between
sentences. But only in code blocks.
Dwedit · 3h ago
Very annoying how HTML changes your two spaces into one space.
I eventually gave up on this, but I always favored it because a period with two spaces after it very clearly designated the end of a sentence, as opposed to something like an abbreviation. It made parsing English just a little bit easier.
ffin · 1h ago
I think Google Docs does this automatically.
bigstrat2003 · 3h ago
When I was growing up (90s), we were taught that either one or two spaces was acceptable practice.
tjohns · 2h ago
I was thought two spaces was for fixed width (typewriters), whereas one space was for word processors with proportional typesetting.
greesil · 3h ago
I've been called out on this by coworkers in code review. It's mildly infuriating.
positron26 · 3h ago
These are the moments that I need to have a confrontation about not bringing up unimportant things. The person who wrote the comment intended to communicate things about the code. The person who brought up the punctuation could change if if they really wanted to, if it was actually productive work. It's about "catching" someone else and having a reason to nip them on the ear. Review like that is what belongs in the garbage.
bigstrat2003 · 2h ago
I agree. Reminds me of a few years back, when I got a Red Hat baseball cap which is (obviously) red. I had people telling me "oh no you can't wear that, MAGA hats ruined that". To which I say, balderdash and poppycock. I refuse to let others' mistaken assumptions dictate my behavior. If someone sees me wearing a RHEL hat and hates me because they assume I'm a Trump supporter, that's their problem, not mine.
necovek · 1h ago
Would you wear an original swastika[1] on your baseball hat?
I'd hate to lose my em- and en-dashes, but the original post seems to misuse en-dashes where hyphens belong (it could just be a font issue, but no matter).
gljiva · 3h ago
People whose ideas get heavily criticized for "being written by AI" (with most readers missing the point) have less influence and perhaps that influence matters enough to them to adapt, i.e. to "let others change them"
imperialdrive · 3h ago
Exactly my thought upon seeing this :)
_moof · 3h ago
As a wise man once said, "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
xdennis · 3h ago
The wise man is Michael Bolton (from Office Space, not the singer).
mindcrime · 2h ago
> from Office Space, not the singer)
I believe you meant "not the no-talent ass clown".
upghost · 3h ago
I still use em dashes -- I just do it poorly and throw in lots of typis.
danfo · 2h ago
Vibe dashing: authentically poor dash usage
Maybe I’ll take a short pause in a sentence–or show a huge range 0 — 999.
ivanmontillam · 3h ago
case in point
old_bayes · 3h ago
well thats embarrsing
GuinansEyebrows · 2h ago
Sorry people are downvoting you. I laughed.
necovek · 1h ago
The article seems to misuse en-dashes in place of hyphens. Perhaps it's just the font, but for a largely graphical difference, that matters.
Anyway, I've used em- and en-dashes for a long time now (had it built into keyboard layout on "3rd level", AltGr+key), and not going to stop now.
reval · 3h ago
Continue using emdashes and trust your audience.
ggm · 3h ago
I miss good typography, but in truth it demands more patience writing than I am prepared to expend, so I am in effect unwilling to put in, what I want to get out. Thats the kind of asymmetry in behaviour which got us here.
I grew up online in teletype and ADM5. To some extent, my sense of how text presents is dominated by monotype/fixed-width and em-dashes just never worked in that 7 bit world.
Two hyphens is too much. one hyphen is not enough.
hodgesrm · 2h ago
Given the chaos currently infecting the world, overuse of em dashes--or any use for that matter--is the last thing a rational being should worry over.
Other than splitting infinitives and ending sentences with a preposition, of course. They are a weighty burden no soul should have to ever put up with.
upghost · 2h ago
Often terribly written, I am likewise concerned with dangling participles.
I 100% agree. I hear a lot of pushback from em dash lovers on the semicolon; if you can learn to love an em dash, you can learn to use and love a semicolon.
Remember, meaning is based on common usage, so now em dash is slop-nonymous, semicolons can take on a more casual vibe.
For example:
I love pizza — it's my comfort food.
Can just become:
I love pizza; it's my comfort food.
For asides:
I love pizza — especially pepperoni.
Can just become:
I love pizza (especially pepperoni).
fsckboy · 2h ago
I also love pizza, it's my comfort food. You see a problem here?
llamavore · 1h ago
Not at all! Pizza for everyone.
the_af · 1h ago
Wow. Am I the only one who reads all those sentences differently? Either the length of the pause or the intonation is different to me. But I wouldn't be able to explain it...
martindale · 2h ago
Why stop using them now? If they are the correct mark, use them.
softwaredoug · 3h ago
Doesn’t notion and a bazillion other tools turn two dashes into em-dash?
Izkata · 3h ago
I think two dashes get turned into an en dash, not an em dash. Em dash is wider.
beej71 · 1h ago
I still use them when appropriate. On the plus side, people are suddenly aware of what an em dash is. :)
jrsdav · 3h ago
I’ve recently developed a serious allergy to this phrasing:
> “This was not just X; it’s really Y”
Here are some real examples taken from various sources:
> "Regenerative businesses don't just minimise harm; they actively create positive change for the environment and people."
> "This milestone isn’t just about our growth. It’s about deepening our commitment to you…"
> "This wasn’t just a market rally. It was a real-time lesson in how quickly sentiment can fracture and recover when fundamentals remain intact."
Hard to say for certain that this is AI slop, but just like em dashes, I see it routinely pop up in LLM prose. And I feel like it’s infected nearly everything I’ve read that was written within the last year.
pcf · 2h ago
Such a missed opportunity in the headline, which could have been "I Miss Using Em Dashes – I Really Do".
phlakaton · 4h ago
Embrace your inner Bringhurst – switch to en-dashes.
roskelld · 3h ago
Same, it's one of the few alt codes I've committed to memory ALT+0151 in Windows.
dang · 1h ago
Keep using them then!
gerdesj · 2h ago
There is rather more to type than the em dash, kicking off with the difference between say a typeface and a font (or fount). Why not get into leading and kerning and the other stuff? Widows and orphans anyone?
Getting your knickers in a twist over a minor typographical construction is rather contrived as an indicator of a non human author of a text. It will do for now but won't tomorrow.
I can mostly spot LLM output on sight but I can be fooled. I never use silly rules like "em-dash => LLM". That's just silly.
tqi · 2h ago
Personally, I think little litmus tests like usage of a certain word or punctuation are stupid, and it's impossible to tell what is or isn't ai generated. I think people just use it as a convenient excuse to dismiss anything they personally dislike or disagree with as "ai slop."
jiggawatts · 3h ago
I suspect that at least in part, the fad in the AI community of using all-lowercase is to make sure that their writing can't be mistaken for LLM-generated output.
Sam Altman more than anyone else popularised this style and for a while every thrid or fourth comment on any AI-related topic was all lowercase.
minimaxir · 3h ago
I'm now using em dashes more out of spite, since my writing is too weird for people to claim it's AI generated so any use of them must be legitimate.
dhotson · 4h ago
Now that AI has ruined the emdash for punctuation enthusiasts like us... I've been thinking of switching to the double emdash (⸺) and worst case, fellow humans, there's always the triple: ⸻
crooked-v · 4h ago
Time to start using the interrobang‽
typpilol · 3h ago
The triple is kind of hilarious. Really emphasizes the pause
QuantumNomad_ · 3h ago
Speaking of pause. I like double period for pause.. it’s like a more polite and shorter pause than the DOT DOT DOT that screams awkwardness and doubt.
But I agree that triple em-dash for pause is not half bad either. I could see it becoming a thing, with how it goes the opposite direction and is so over the top :)
bitwize · 3h ago
Starting to look like Emacs Lisp source code now, coding standards for which include snake-casing identifiers (standard for Lisp), but since there's no notion of namespacing in the language, identifiers private to package foo start with 'foo--', not 'foo-'.
People will soon start accepting imperfections as a sign of genuine and authentic in any work that was done, and typos/mistakes as some sort of quick indicator that it was human made. Refreshing to be honest, finally people will embrace the fact that we are humans and we are supposed to do mistakes, instead of the tiring, mentally exhausting, perfectionist behavior. I remember seeing here in HN a company called ‘good enough’ or something along those lines, perfect to be imperfect!
No comments yet
gosub100 · 3h ago
I'm calling it now: within a year, somehow a trend will appear where writers will perform their duties under voluntary video surveillance showing the human's face, fingers and screen contents (possibly by multiple cameras) to "prove" they did it on their own.
This video will be too voluminous or intrusive to be viewed manually, so it will be analyzed by (you guessed it) AI to determine if the work was authentic.
It will probably be developed and required by the corrupt education industry, but perhaps some writers will voluntarily use it to buy authenticity or stand out. But either way, the machine will once again find another way to take our agency and make our lives less enjoyable.
necovek · 1h ago
Or much simpler, use the integration with TPM/DRM-style chips to monitor HID input (not too fast too) and publish that to a blockchain as PoW (new NFTs?)
apparent · 2h ago
Great way to make it easy to identify your password based on the sound the keys make as you press them. It's already doable IIRC, but it would be much easier if people were uploading tons of video of themselves typing.
acheron · 3h ago
"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
shmerl · 3h ago
What's wrong with em dashes? Use whatever you like.
Compose --- should produce —
For en dash it's
Compose --. produces –
Not all fonts show the difference though.
anon84873628 · 2h ago
The article wasn't really about that...
shmerl · 2h ago
Suggestion that humans don't use symbols like em dash is based on the possible difficulty to use them. The reason is probably because many never used / heard of the Compose key. It's not hard to do it once you learn about it.
the_af · 1h ago
I don't think it's because they are mechanically difficult to use as you imply, but rather that they are subtler or more nuanced symbols than most people know how to use.
A lot of people are comfortable using the dot, the comma, and maybe exclamation marks.
AI-speech seems to strive for more formal writing by default.
shmerl · 1h ago
May be, but mechanical difficulty adds to less usage too.
I don't miss the em dash. Take away my hyphen and I'll be angry; but replacing em dashes with semicolons was personal policy since high school.
necovek · 1h ago
How do you indicate an interjection with semicolons?
abathur · 3h ago
The em is more than a synonym for semicolon.
itisuseless · 3h ago
Which hyphen is that?
Wowfunhappy · 3h ago
...someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you're using the semicolon correctly; it sounds wrong to me, at least. I think you'd need to either take out the word "but" (which would cause the sentence to no longer make sense) or, well, change the semicolon to an em dash.
anon84873628 · 2h ago
For sure, that's like the exact opposite of why to use it: "A semicolon is used to join two closely related independent clauses (complete sentences) that are not connected by a coordinating conjunction."
jachee · 3h ago
The real AI tell for me is that it—generally speaking—spaces them incorrectly.
An em dash that’s not a sudden interruption shouldn’t have any spacing around it.
j16sdiz · 3h ago
AP Style have spaces around it.
It is an interruption to me and I think that little pause is intentional. if the author wants no pause they should have used parentheses
hsuduebc2 · 3h ago
These days it almost feels like a breach of etiquette not to tell ChatGPT to avoid em dashes, otherwise it’s immediately obvious the text was generated by GPT.
add-sub-mul-div · 3h ago
If people hate the thing so much that you have to go so far out of your way to disguise it, maybe the breach of etiquette is using the thing.
satisfice · 3h ago
I still use em dashes because my writing is not slop, and is in no danger of being dismissed as such.
I don’t use the word “delve” anymore, however.
vsviridov · 3h ago
As a fellow .li domain enjoyer - hats off :)
phendrenad2 · 3h ago
No offense to any em-dash lovers, but I think an overuse of em-dashes indicates that your writing is probably slop, just not AI slop, human slop. In a sense, there is a kind of slop that relies on em-dashes to glue things together - usually in a cliche way, learned from lazy journalists copy-pasting from their last article to add a bit of spice to their writing - and AI just copied it.
I agree with this too, I have read a lot of academic stuff with - em dashes and it reads like the author doesn't know how to write and is just translating spoken word to text.
When you are talking, an aside can make a lot of sense because you are thinking and speaking in real time. When you write you have the luxury of time to reformulate your words more precisely. Em dashes are best kept for prose that mimics speech rather than constructing logical text.
It's no coincidence that em dashes are rare in legal texts because they are too imprecise. Where as semicolons are extremely common in legal texts.
The S in semicolon stands for S-Tier.
Maybe the E in em dash stands for E-Tier?
lolz
shoobiedoo · 2h ago
Maybe. I fell in love with them after reading Death on the Installment Plan by Celine, where he crams every sentence with them (and sequences of periods that have a similar effect). I found out later that he purposefully did that as a jab at Proust's writing where he did the exact opposite-- sentences a page and a half long with only commas and parenthesis.
kelseyfrog · 3h ago
People over-update when they see an em-dash. If you compute the posterior probability, you'll realize that seeing an em-dash hardly shifts the probability that text is AI generated.
anon84873628 · 3h ago
You might even realize that the AI is using the em-dash precisely because of how often it was used in the training text.
kelseyfrog · 3h ago
That's a fair point. I'll admit that LLM em-dash usage likely matches its prevalence in the corpus. However, online message boards and chat is a subset of that corpus that may have a significantly different distribution of em-dash prevalence.
This is necessary nuance that I'll have take into consideration. Thank you.
anon84873628 · 3h ago
Eh, I wasn't trying to put you on blast or anything. Obviously there is a lot of nuance to how/why the LLM uses them. I just think the whole "em dash == AI" thing is stupid and way overblown. I wish the people who say that would realize it obviously learned them from somewhere.
kelseyfrog · 2h ago
You're good, friend. I didn't feel blasted at all. It was a good point
pimlottc · 3h ago
“Over-update”? Do you mean “overreact”?
jdiff · 3h ago
I'm guessing over-update their opinion/view, but that's the first I've run into that turn of phrase.
kelseyfrog · 3h ago
No, I mean over-update in a Bayesian capacity. As in, they are updating their prior probability using evidence to arrive at the posterior probability.
ggm · 3h ago
"I don't often jargon, but when I do jargon I jargon like Chuck Norris"
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firesteelrain · 3h ago
Huh?
cthor · 3h ago
See em dash in text
Think text much more likely from robot than first thought
Grug say this change too big from just one em dash
Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. We should call each other out for poor writing or inaccurate information — not because if we squint we can pick out some loose correlations with ChatGPT's default output style.
Consciously trying not to "sound like an LLM" while writing is like consciously trying not to think about the fact that you're currently breathing, or consciously trying to sound like a cool guy.
But the people you will reach online will be online, and not some random person-off-the-street. The average person on the street will give the same blank stare on the topic of compilers, regular expressions, black-holes, or robotics, but I still want to read about those topics. And if I want an LLM's take on those topics, everyone knows where to turn to get that.
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The stakes are a bit different for students unfortunately, who who’ll have their writing passed through some snake oil AI detector arbitrarily. This is unfortunate because “learning how not to trigger an AI detector” is a totally useless skill.
Generally, I don’t think we need AI detection. We need dumb bullshit detection. Humans and LLMs can both generate that. If people can use an LLM in a way that doesn’t generate dumb bullshit, I’m happy to read it.
I don't use AI in my writing. If I were still in school would I be tempted? Probably. But in work and personal writing? Never crosses my mind.
There are zillions of words produced every second, your time is the most valuable resource you have, and actually existing LLM output (as opposed to some theoretical perfect future) is almost always not worth reading. Like it or not (and personally I hate it), the ability to dismiss things that are not worth reading like a chicken sexer who's picked up a male is now one of the most valuable life skills.
Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?
1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped.
> Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?
No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out.
> If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.
Why do you think it's not a good heuristic to be able to quickly spot the tell-tale signs of LLM involvement, before you've wasted time reading slop?
Yes, there will be false positives. It's a heuristic after all.
If anything, I'd rather that renderers like Markdown just all agree to change " - " to an en dash and " -- " to an em dash. Then we could put the matter to bed once and for all.
I was just curious why you've decided paying attention to them is a bad heuristic. Sure, it can change once people instruct their LLMs not to use them, but still, for now, they sure seem to overuse them!
That and "let's unpack this". I swear, I'll forbid ChatGPT from using "unpack" ever again, in any context!
So the only real purpose of the heuristic is to add a tiny extra vote of confidence when I see a comment that otherwise appears to be lazy ChatGPT copypasta, but in such cases I'll predict that it was probably LLM output either way, and I'll judge that it appears to be poor writing that isn't worth my time regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved.
Fundamentally, the issue I'm seeing here is that we're all talking over each other because we need a better standardized term than "LLM output". I suppose "slop" could work if we universally that it referred only to a subset of LLM output, rather than being synonymous with LLM output in general, but I'm not sure that we do universally agree on that.
If someone types the equivalent of a Google search into ChatGPT, or a spammer has an automated process generically reply to social media posts/comments, that's what qualifies to me as "slop". Most of us here have seen it in the wild by now, and there's obviously a distinctive common style (at least for now), and I think we can all agree that it sucks. That's very different from someone investing time and/or expertise to produce content that just happens to involve an LLM as one of the tools in their arsenal; the attitude it isn't is just the modern equivalent of considering cellular phone calls or typed letters to be "impersonal".
I'm not suggesting that LLM output doesn't tend to have a higher density of em dashes than human output. I'm just pushing back on the idea that presence of em dashes is sufficient evidence to dismiss something as probably-LLM-generated, which is no better than superstition. I mean, I've used em dashes in a number of comments in this thread, and no one has accused me of using an LLM, so it can't be a pattern that anyone puts too much stock in.
Citation needed.
> Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language?
Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies, at least for the moment. We need to be willing to play to our strengths.
Who is it helping if we bully ourselves into ignoring a simple, easy "tell"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies
No one said anything about LLM companies. If I were a spammer today, I'd just have my code replace dashes in LLM output with hyphens before posting it. As a human, I'm not going to suddenly stop using dashes because a handful of people are treating a silly meme as if it were a genuinely useful heuristic.
It seems like you’re just wrong here? Em dashes aside, the ‘style’ of llm generated text is pretty distinct, and is something many people are able to distinguish.
If organizations like schools are going to rely on tools that claim to detect AI-generated text with a useful level of reliability, they better have zero false positives. But of course they can't, because unless the tool involves time travel that isn't possible. At best, such tools can detect non-ASCII punctuation marks and overly cliched/formulaic writing, neither of which is academic dishonesty.
Additionally, I do think it is valuable to determine if a piece of text is valuable, or more precisely, what I’m looking for. As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that. Oftentimes I am looking for text written by people though.
I was basing that on a few factors, off the top of my head:
1. Someone might pick up mannerisms while using LLMs to help learn a new language, similarly to how an old friend of mine from Germany spoke English with an Australian accent because of where she learned English.
2. Lonely or asocial people who spend too much time with LLMs might subconsciously pick up habits from them.
3. Generation Beta will never have known a world without LLMs. It's not that difficult to imagine that ChatGPT will be a major formative influence on many of them.
As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that.
Sure, it's trivial for anyone to look up a simple fact. It's not so trivial for you to spend an hour deep-diving into a subject with an LLM and manually fact-checking information it provides before eventually landing on an LLM-generated blurb that provides exactly the information you were looking for. It's also not trivial for you to reproduce the list of detailed hand-written bullet points that someone might have provided as source material for an LLM to generate a first draft.
I think nobody is upset about reading an LLM's output when they are directly interacting with a tool that produces such output, such as ChatGPT or Copilot.
The problem is when they are reading/watching stuff in the wild and it suddenly becomes clear it was generated by AI rather than by another human being. Again, not in a context of "this pull request contains code generated by an LLM" (expected) but "this article or book was partly or completely generated by an LLM" (unexpected and likely unwanted).
1. In the context of research/querying, when unverified information from its output is falsely passed off as verified information curated by a human author. There's a big difference between "ChatGPT or some blog claims X" and "the answer is X".
2. In the context of writing/communication, when it's used to stretch a small amount of information into a relatively large amount of text. There's a big difference between using an LLM to help revise or trim down your writing, or to have it put together a first draft based on a list of detailed bullet points, and expecting it to stretch one sentence into a whole essay of greater value than the original sentence.
Those are basic misuses of the tool. It's like watching an old person try to use Google 20 years ago and concluding that search engines are slop and the only reliable way to find information is through the index of Encyclopedia Britannica.
I only have a limited amount of time to read. Skipping someone's Internet comment because it looks like spam often means I get to engage with something else.
If someone who typically bills $500/hr spends 30 - 60 minutes on a comment or blog post, that's still $250 - 500 worth of their time invested regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved. An LLM is comparatively cheaper than hiring a human editor or research assistant, but it's not negative cost.
Likewise, prompting ChatGPT with "write a blog post about bees" may be cheaper than hiring someone off Fiverr to respond to the exact same prompt, but in either case the resulting content will be low-value (yet still higher-value than the string "write a blog post about bees") because its source material was cheap. The fact that the latter version would have been written by a human is incidental.
"delve" was a red flag 650 years ago!
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? — Fr John Ball's sermon addressing the rebels of the Peasant's Revolt, 1381
I think there is a very interesting discussion to be had over how LLMs are actively changing the way we write, or even speak.
I like how this is presented as a given thing that will happen, that models are going to just improve forever. That there isn’t some plateau on “user skill with LLMs” like it’s fucking calculus mixed with rocket science that only the elite users will ever attain full fluency in using.
This is starting to read like religious cult propaganda, which is probably scarier than whatever else ends up happing with this shit.
In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)
Only if you used a typewriter. I was using (La)TeX in the twentieth (1990s), and it defaulted to a rough equivalent of 1.5 spaces (see \spacefactor).
Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts, and this was generally not used in 'properly' published works with proportional typefaces; see CMoS:
* https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/O...
Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style (§2.1.4) concurs:
* https://readings.design/PDF/the_elements_of_typographic_styl...
* https://webtypography.net/2.1.4
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St...
I could never agree with this, because monospace fonts are already adding extra space with the dot character, which is much narrower in proportional fonts. That fact alone makes the visual gap already similarly wide as it would be in typeset proportional text. Adding a second space makes it much too wide visually (almost three positions wide). It looks like badly typeset justified text.
(I understand why people are doing it, I just don’t agree on aesthetic grounds.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space (see specifically the example section)
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
Which is to say, we all compromise.
I'd hate to lose my em- and en-dashes, but the original post seems to misuse en-dashes where hyphens belong (it could just be a font issue, but no matter).
I believe you meant "not the no-talent ass clown".
Maybe I’ll take a short pause in a sentence–or show a huge range 0 — 999.
Anyway, I've used em- and en-dashes for a long time now (had it built into keyboard layout on "3rd level", AltGr+key), and not going to stop now.
I grew up online in teletype and ADM5. To some extent, my sense of how text presents is dominated by monotype/fixed-width and em-dashes just never worked in that 7 bit world.
Two hyphens is too much. one hyphen is not enough.
Other than splitting infinitives and ending sentences with a preposition, of course. They are a weighty burden no soul should have to ever put up with.
The key to do it without the LLM stigma is surrounding it with spaces which still doesn't violate typical writing rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves
Remember, meaning is based on common usage, so now em dash is slop-nonymous, semicolons can take on a more casual vibe.
For example: I love pizza — it's my comfort food.
Can just become: I love pizza; it's my comfort food.
For asides: I love pizza — especially pepperoni.
Can just become: I love pizza (especially pepperoni).
> “This was not just X; it’s really Y”
Here are some real examples taken from various sources:
> "Regenerative businesses don't just minimise harm; they actively create positive change for the environment and people."
> "This milestone isn’t just about our growth. It’s about deepening our commitment to you…"
> "This wasn’t just a market rally. It was a real-time lesson in how quickly sentiment can fracture and recover when fundamentals remain intact."
Hard to say for certain that this is AI slop, but just like em dashes, I see it routinely pop up in LLM prose. And I feel like it’s infected nearly everything I’ve read that was written within the last year.
Getting your knickers in a twist over a minor typographical construction is rather contrived as an indicator of a non human author of a text. It will do for now but won't tomorrow.
I can mostly spot LLM output on sight but I can be fooled. I never use silly rules like "em-dash => LLM". That's just silly.
Sam Altman more than anyone else popularised this style and for a while every thrid or fourth comment on any AI-related topic was all lowercase.
But I agree that triple em-dash for pause is not half bad either. I could see it becoming a thing, with how it goes the opposite direction and is so over the top :)
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This video will be too voluminous or intrusive to be viewed manually, so it will be analyzed by (you guessed it) AI to determine if the work was authentic.
It will probably be developed and required by the corrupt education industry, but perhaps some writers will voluntarily use it to buy authenticity or stand out. But either way, the machine will once again find another way to take our agency and make our lives less enjoyable.
Compose --- should produce —
For en dash it's
Compose --. produces –
Not all fonts show the difference though.
A lot of people are comfortable using the dot, the comma, and maybe exclamation marks.
AI-speech seems to strive for more formal writing by default.
> not chatgpt output—i'm just like this.
> https://xkcd.com/3126/ — Disclaimer
An em dash that’s not a sudden interruption shouldn’t have any spacing around it.
It is an interruption to me and I think that little pause is intentional. if the author wants no pause they should have used parentheses
I don’t use the word “delve” anymore, however.
(On the other hand, maybe it's just low-paid writers in South Africa: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape... )
When you are talking, an aside can make a lot of sense because you are thinking and speaking in real time. When you write you have the luxury of time to reformulate your words more precisely. Em dashes are best kept for prose that mimics speech rather than constructing logical text.
It's no coincidence that em dashes are rare in legal texts because they are too imprecise. Where as semicolons are extremely common in legal texts.
The S in semicolon stands for S-Tier. Maybe the E in em dash stands for E-Tier?
lolz
This is necessary nuance that I'll have take into consideration. Thank you.
No comments yet
Think text much more likely from robot than first thought
Grug say this change too big from just one em dash