Comment by flatline 15 hours ago
Ironically, this is one the part of the document that jumped out at me as having been written by AI. The em-dash and "this isn't...but" pattern are louder than the text at this point. It seriously calls into question who is authoring what, and what their actual motives are.
What matters is not who writes the words. The source of slop is competition for scarce attention between creatives, and retention drive for platforms. They optimize for slop, humans conform, AI is just a tool here. We are trying to solve an authenticity problem when the actual problem is structural.
Every time I see the em-dash call out on here I get defensive because I’ve been writing like that forever! Where do people think that came from anyway? It’s obviously massively represented in the training data!
The AIs aren't using emdashes because they're "massively represented in the training data". I don't understand why people think everything in a model output is strictly related to its frequency in pretraining.
They're emdashing because the style guide for posttraining makes it emdash. Just like the post-training for GPT 3.5 made it speak African English and the post-training for 4o makes it say stuff like "it's giving wild energy when the vibes are on peak" plus a bunch of random emoji.
Where's the emdash key on your keyboard?
There isn't one?
Oh, maybe that's why people who didn't already know or care about emdashes are very alert to their presence.
If you have to do something very exotic with keypresses or copypaste from a tool or build your own macro to get something like an emdash, or , it's going to stand out, even if it's an integral part of standard operating systems.
Right, just saying things like that -- aren't immediately apparent unless they're pointed out to you. The extended palette of alt+123 keycodes, unicode characters, stuff like that requires "exotic" macros or keypresses to type out. Despite decades of extensive experience with writing, writing software, programming, etc, I never crossed paths with em-dashes. They were a niche thing prior to AI making them a thing. I basically thought they were a font or style choice prior to ChatGPT. Most people wouldn't have a clue unless they went through classes that specifically trained on the use of emdashes.
I like them as an AI shibboleth, though -- the antennae go up, and I pay more attention to what I'm reading when I see it, so it raises the bar for the humans that ostensibly ought to be better at writing than the rest of us.
Edit: Interesting. I tried using -- and it doesn't work for me. I'd have to go change settings somewhere, or switch the browser I'm using to elicit an em-dash. I don't think I've ever actually written one, at least intentionally, and it wasn't until today that I was even aware of hyphen-hyphen.
Edit again: I had to go into system settings and assign a compose key — after that, I can now do em-dashes. Having degrees° will be nice, too, I guess.
My German keyboard has umlaut keys: üäö. I use them daily. I was told that in other parts of the World, people don't have umlaut keys, and have to use combos like ⌥U + a/o/u.
Boy, I sure hope they don't think me an AI.
Just because many people have no idea how to use type certain characters on their devices shouldn't mean we all have to go along with their superstitions.
> Where's the emdash key on your keyboard?
> There isn't one?
Mac, alt-minus. Did by accident once, causing confusion because Xcode uses monospace font where -, – and — look identical, and an m-dash where a minus should be gets a compiler error.
iOS, long-press on the "-" key.
> Mac, alt-minus.
I've been using Macs for decades; it's called the Option key; no seasoned Mac user calls it "Alt".
I know when a PC-style keyboard is attached to a Mac, the Alt key functions as the Option key. [1]
- Option-minus creates an en dash
- Option-Shift-minus creates an em dash
[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/intro-to-mac-keyboa...
[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
standby for the masses to drop the nerd-equivalent of "before it was cool" comments in 3...2...
hyphen + space in microsoft word will often (depends on your settings) produce an em dash. It’s not some crazy hidden feature.
These days word is less popular though, with google docs, pages, and other editors taking pieces of the pie. Maybe that’s where the skepticism comes from.
> There isn't one?
I've used em-dash since I got my first MacBook in 2008.
- Option + minus gives you en-dash
- Option + Shift + minus gives you em-dash
It quickly becomes automatic (as are a bunch of other shortcuts). Here's a question about this from 2006: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/377843
...which are two more characters I bet have a higher rate of occurance in AI generated content too!
People who work the most with these bots are going to be the researchers whose job it is to churn out this stuff, so they're going to become acclimated to the style, stop noticing the things that stick out, and they'll also be the most likely to accept an AI revision as "yes, that means what I originally wrote and looks good."
Those turns of phrase and the structure underneath the text become tell-tales for AI authorship. I see all sorts of politicians and pundits thinking they're getting away with AI writing, or ghost-writing at best, but it's not even really that hard to see the difference. Just like I can read a page and tell it's Brandon Sanderson, or Patrick Rothfuss, or Douglas Adams, or the "style" of those writers.
Hopefully the AI employees are being diligent about making sure their ideas remain intact. If their training processes start allowing unwanted transformations of source ideas as a side-effect, then the whole rewriting/editing pipeline use case becomes a lot more iffy.