Why em dashes specifically? Why is THAT what we blame on AI?
No, I’m not afraid. I’ve been using me-dashes for decades now, and I won’t stop just because some idiots flood the streets with worthless AI junk that happens to copy long-established practices in text formatting.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: My somatic reaction tells me to fear the accusation. But I choose not to. My brain tells me I shouldn’t be. One - AI or not, em dashes are very helpful in comprehension. Two - why should I change myself just for internet points? Should I purposefully worsen my grammar to satisfy the anti-AI reader?
I don’t worry about that. There are other markers of AI that are much more reliable:
- Extreme verbosity.
- Low S/N - i.e. lots of words to say not much at all.
- Perfect grammar.
- If you drill down into the subject, often completely incorrect - but you don’t know without having to read a whole bunch of tedious text.
And here’s how you recognize AI:
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High-schoolers turning a paper on a subject they know nothing about often fluff up their paper - at least when students still wrote their papers themselves - and hit 1. and 2., but rarely 3.
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Good writers always hit 3. They can be terse or verbose, and they may or may not hit 1., but never 2. or 4.
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Internet writers don’t write like journalists. Only journalists writing for a journal that happens to also publish on the internet write like journalists. Internet writers don’t quite hit 3, knowledgeable ones don’t hit 2., and almost none of them ever hit 1. Or said another way, when you read something about Linux networking that looks like an Atlantic op-ed, it’s AI.
Only AI hits 1., 2. and 3. AI almost always writes in a tone and form that doesn’t befit the venue.
As for 4., if you want an example of this, try to search “NFC unlock” on DDG or Bing (same AI-laden Microsoft trash search engine): you will find scores of perfectly-written article that explain in painful details how you should buy NFC tags (they don’t say which), program them (they don’t say how), then present the tags to your device (they don’t say what devices) to program them to unlock upon presenting the tags. If you know anything about NFC, you know this is all shades of wrong. But amazingly, each article on the subject is many pages long, perfectly written, and there are countless such articles.
I thoroughly enjoyed what you did with the formatting there.
Wow you explained AIs tone and writing very well.
I find it interesting that AI writes very high level, which is a trait that seems to be valued by upper management (VP, CEO level).
I find it interesting that AI writes very high level, which is a trait that seems to be valued by upper management (VP, CEO level).
I think at some point someone will figure out that AI would sound more natural if it didn’t write so perfectly, and they’ll try to make AI sound hip and casual, and I’m almost certain AI will still fail to be convincingly casual.
I think, part of the “problem” is that most of their training data is formal language. They’ll have much less data from private chats and such.
Meta has their own AI Llama. I’d imagine meta would have private chat data.
To be honest I thought AI was already used to flood popular message boards with user content trying to sound natural to show user engagement.
First it was trolls, then it was trolls using AI. I understand why many users are abandoning social networks.
you forgot the oligarchs trying to make it the new Volksempfänger
Trolls arguing AI bots would be a whole new level lol
Yeah for sure, but there’s always something off that screams fake.
That’s why I prefer lemmy! Real users.
until it doesn’t anymore …
explanation: 10% it looks fake so you think you can recognize it easily meanwhile 90% avoids detection that way.
You can write in the prompt to the AI to write in hip and casual tone, but you will get something that will give you “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” meme vibes.
I haven’t really tried but I think if you were trying to use LLM generated text deceptively the model could probably do exactly as you describe already so long as you prompt it to do so clearly enough.
I don’t just use em dashes, I also use en dashes. Take that, robots!
Nope – but do please kill me if I excessively ram emojis into everything.
💀👍
Commas aren’t enough on their own, basically. Sometimes you make a sentence which has a comma, but also needs to be divided up in a separate way and place - and an em dash represents one possible way to do that. More structure is usually better for readability.
I just use the normal ASCII hyphen for it, though. To date nobody has accused me of being AI, and I’ve been a very light user of AI myself.
I use em all the time, for no particular reason either. I just like how they look. I didn’t realise this was a AI detection metric until recently.
🤔
My word processor automatically replaces hyphens with em dashes. Doesn’t yours?
Sometimes they’ll do it, sometimes they won’t. Im not actually sure what the difference is - im hella sure nobody im talking with does either. Screw it.
People have told me for most of my life to talk and write “more normal” so that they wouldn’t have to use a dictionary or think for more than a second about what they’re reading — this is just the latest instance of them looking for a shortcut to disregard anything they don’t immediately understand.
Fuck ‘em.
First I’ve heard of em dashes being an “AI” thing. Aren’t LLMs trained on human-generated text? They wouldn’t be outputting em dashes if humans didn’t also output em dashes.
I heard of it from this video
It’s just one of several tells. Although you can’t really rely on anything. Just like “badly-drawn hands” is less likely to show up now.
Once I heard this, I had to learn how to type them, btw!
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Yes, but most human em dashes are from writing going through relatively professional processes, not, say, writing a comment online. Of course, there are many — like myself — who know how to type them quickly, and choose to use them, but LLMs are definitely a lot more eager to use them than the average person.
no way why should i change they’re the one that sucks
Found Michael Bolton.
No, but it pisses me off as an indie author. I adore em-dashes. Not my fault stupid people who don’t read have never seen them before outside of their crappy AI.
I’ve started using them to mess with people.
AI really loves to steal from fanfiction on sites likeAo3 and blog/forum posts— All places where em-dashes are common. AI uses them because people use them. I’m not going to change how I write because someone else built a plagiarism machine.
I did get accused of using ChatGPT to write something once, based on my use of em-dashes. Kinda just had to laugh though because it was something I’d published in 2014.
