Comment by lxgr
Or just by somebody that knows how to use English punctuation properly.
Is it so hard to believe that there are some people in the world capable of hitting option + “-“ on their keyboard (or simply let their editor do it for them)?
Or just by somebody that knows how to use English punctuation properly.
Is it so hard to believe that there are some people in the world capable of hitting option + “-“ on their keyboard (or simply let their editor do it for them)?
Yes, it’s become a tired trope of a particular kind of LLM luddite to me.
Especially given that there are so many linguistic tics one could pick on instead! “Not x, but y”, the bullseye emoji etc., but instead they get hung up on a typographic character actually widely used, presumably because they assume it only occurs on professionals’ keyboards and nobody would take enough care to use it in casual contexts.
In my experience the em dash is still correctly used, the modern style has just evolved to put a space around it.
So:
* fragment a—fragment b (em dash, no space) = traditional
* fragment a — fragment B (em dash with spaces) = modern
* fragment a -- fragment b (two hyphens) = acceptable sub when you can’t get a proper em to render
But en-dashes are for numeric ranges…
> The emojis at the start of each row in the table are also a dead giveaway.
What's up with the green checks, red Xs, rockets, and other stupid emoji in AI slop? Is it an artifact from the cheapest place to do RLHF?
Imagine if we spent a trillion dollars to turn the internet into infinite degraded copies of LinkedIn. Business influencer spam generated by robots for other robots, with occasional corrections by the cheapest English speakers in the world. That's dark.
I said em dash _and_ the word comprehensive. If you work with LLM generated text enough it gets very easy to see the telltale signs. The emojis at the start of each row in the table are also a dead giveaway.
I am guessing you are one of those people who used em dashes before LLMs came out and are now bitter they are an indicator of LLMs. If that's the case, I am sorry for the situation you find yourself in.